American Cinematographer - December 1997 - 76

asked Scott Salsa, who heads DD's
machine shop, to engineer it. In
order to scale up those sweeping
motion-control "helicopter" moves

the 45' Titanic miniature, Salsa's
real-time equipment had to move

on

quickly. "This thing had to
up and down the track,
sometimes moving 10 feet per sec¬
ond, and be steady as a rock," Nash
says. "Otherwise, we couldn't have
pulled this shot off. Scott's rig
worked like a champ."
Using Kuper motion-con¬

very

scream

trol

software, which has "an in¬

credible array of tools
trick into doing just

Captain E. J.
(Bernard
Hill) peers out

Smith
at the

the

horizon;

skipper was

to retire soon

after the
Titanic's

distant view of the liner

leaving the
European continent forever. In
tackling this sweeping move, Nash
decided to shoot the miniature first
once he figured out how to do it.
"Part of the problem was where to

-

for such wide

lay the motion-control track, and
how to configure it on stage so we
could hit all of these key frames
along the way that Jim felt were
really important," Nash recalls. "In
the end, we put the camera on a

vistas, while

crane-arm

the full-size

It

ship set was
primarily used

programming the shot and getting
it to have that smooth helicopter

crossing of the
Atlantic.
Various

ship

miniatures
were

utilized

for medium and

close-up shots.
5245

was

generally used

was a

feel. It's the first time you get a

really good look at the whole ship
close-up and in long shot."

work to match

established by
the main unit.

(built to match the miniature
Titanic's bow) against greenscreen.
"Once I figured out the geometry
of it, it only took a trivial conver¬
sion of the east-west and northsouth motion-control data to con¬

9,000 frames of film for all of the

move.

various

west

pieces - and that was just

the miniature portion."
Nash then had to come up
with a way to shoot the talent and
lock them onto the bow of the

ship
during this incredibly intricate con¬
tinuous shot. "That

was one

of the

a north-south camera
Then I extracted the big east-

vert it into

move

going around them,

and translated that into the move¬
ment of the turntable. When we
shot the live-action part, we used
the miniature shot as a playback
source on-set so we could
preview
the composite and see how the ac¬

sticking to the ship. It
remarkably well. There's
going to be a little bit of 2-D recon¬
ciliation in terms of really nailing

tors

lously close to the model, but after

out.' He had

their feet to the deck, but it was in¬

shot a test, Cameron said, 'Get
closer!' Our model crew chief,

doing something

credibly close."

big translational camera move. The
problem Rob laid on me was to fig¬

challenge to overcome before
Cameron, Legato and Nash could
convince audiences that DiCaprio
and Nucci were actually standing

As far

cerned, the
start

Nash

as

camera

of the

was con¬

position at the

move came

"ridicu¬

we

George Stevens, and his team did
their finest paint job. They begged
us not to get any closer, but the
model held up amazingly well."
which
-

The finished shot -
later optically flopped

was

was over

couldn't
pass

in

1,000 frames long. "We
shoot the beauty
piece because it re¬

even

one

quired different lighting and flag¬
ging setups for different portions,"
Nash says.

"We actually had two

shifts

shooting that shot, and we
had to choreograph overlaps as we
transitioned from
next,

being

shadows not
not

72

till we were finished - 2 Vi
days, with a 10-man crew at all
times. No individual pass lasted
more than a
couple of hours, and
most of the work was changing set¬
ups and mattes. When it was all
said and done, they had to scan

pass

big challenges that Rob hit me with
early on," Nash admits. "I said,
'How are we gonna do that, Rob?'
and he said, 'Oh, you'll figure it

both in

for such effects
the look

motion-control system.
fairly involved process just

grammed and approved, it took 60
hours of continuous shooting from
the time we started rolling the first

that we can
about any¬
thing," Nash figured out the rota¬
tion of the camera around a point
on the bow, and then
applied that
circling motion to a revolving
green turntable, where DiCaprio
and Nucci stood at a green railing

setup to the
careful about
changing and flags
one

very

crossing. Once it was pro¬

American

Cinematographer

a

broad idea about

we played with
when we were both working on
Star Trek: The Next Generation, using
rotation in the subject to replace a

ure

out the math to translate this

huge sweeping motion-control he¬
licopter move into something that
could shoot full-scale on the
talent in real time - knowing
that there wasn't a motion-con¬

we

trol machine in the world that

were

worked

There

on

was

still

one more

the bow of that miniature boat:

lighting the actors on the rotating
turntable. "They weren't supposed
to be rotating relative to the world
that they were in," Nash explains,
"so we had to rotate the keylight
with them. We hung the keylight
this horizontal

could do this move as it was done
on the miniature, at full size and

on

24 frames per second."
DD didn't even have

mounted

this

arm

connected to

big dinosaur vertical tower
on

the actors' turntable."

Nash ended up

a

shooting

fast, steady real-time motion-con¬

five of these elaborate motion-con¬

trol rig, so Nash worked out the
broad strokes of the design, then

trol greenscreen

December 1997

talent

on

setups to put the

the miniature Titanic's
American Cinematographer - December 1997

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