Ride the Titanic! (18 page)

The swarm of actors collapse, some laughing, others rubbing their shoulders, while prop masters swarm over the set to fuss with green geometric shapes that will become real objects in the finished, computer-generated, hi-rez video.

Other teams huddle around two jib-mounted, Arriflex
CineUltima
cameras like surgeons at a heart transplant. The third camera, mounted on a Steadicam rig worn by a beefy-looking operator, gets the same treatment as a camera assistant fiddles and fusses with multicolored BNC cables, snaking them from one mysterious connector to another, while another one adjusts the operator’s LCD view screen to a better angle.

‘Captain on the bridge!’

Strong arms hug me from behind, then Ellie spins me around and hugs me again. ‘You’re just in time for the big scene.’

‘They’re all big to me. And drop the ‘Captain’ bit. I’m just the guy who makes the Merry-Go-Round, go round.’

‘Modest too. I like that in a man.’ She grabs my arm ‘C’mon, meet the gang.’

She half-skips as she tows me over to a group techs clustered around a stack of monitors and makes quick introductions. Not a soul older than twenty-five, except a grizzled man sitting on a small stool, hunched over a digital playback monitor like a caveman warming himself by the fire.

Ellie called out, ‘How we looking, Georgie?’

The man’s head settles more deeply into his shoulders, then he gives a slowly-measured thumbs-up.

Ellie whispers, ‘That’s George Koutsoukas, my DP. See his jaw muscle? If I bug him or he doesn’t like how the shot’s playing out, that muscle starts twitching, which means he’s pissed off, and we don’t want that because he’s the best of the best in the green screen world. Without him I’d be just another dumb blonde heiress cooling her jets in Florida. But with him. . . and with you, I’m a
bona fide
film director helming scenes for
Ride the Titanic
.’

George grunts slightly as he stands.

‘Green light, Georgie?’

He twirls his finger in a ‘roll film’ gesture.

Ellie claps her hands, keys her wireless microphone connected to the P.A. system and out booms her breathy voice, ‘Okay, gang, time to sink this sweet sucker.’

The costumed actors playing engineers and stokers take up their starting position in the vast green nothingness of the 80x120 foot virtual soundstage. Prop dressers make final adjustments to their 3D creations, including a gigantic steam valve of some sort, a pile of shovels, a cluster of wooden crates, and overhead piping that runs for a short distance then abruptly stops, as if chopped off by a guillotine.

While they work quickly, makeup artists and lighting techs hustle to complete last minute tasks, until the first assistant director, an older woman with a no-nonsense, seen-it-all look in her eyes shoos them away with an imperious pointing gesture that everyone – and I mean everyone – understands.

By my count, at least thirty actors costumed in grimy, sweat-stained, coal-smudged clothes stand, crouch, and kneel in their pre-arranged spots
.
Their modest number in no way approaches the two hundred engineers, electricians, firemen and stokers who worked in the hot, smoky depths of the real
Titanic
when she crossed the Atlantic in 1912. Those unsung, forgotten men tended their furnaces and boilers to make steam and electricity for the ill-fated ship until her very last moments, then almost to a man, joined her on the bottom of the sea.

Unable to match that many actors in reality, we’ll duplicate the scene with the magic of green screen and VFX in post-production to create the dramatic scene during the ride where the engineers, after struggling in vain to save the ship, try to escape with their lives.

‘Fifteen seconds to the floor!’ the A.D. shouts.

Ellie says, ‘Standby effects. . .aaaaaaand. . . .cue effects!’

A blast of nitrogen, simulating steam, billows down from somewhere high in the lighting grid.

‘Five seconds. . . . and roll cameras.’

‘Rolling. . .Sound up.’

‘Slate!’

A ferret-like man skitters in out of nowhere and holds up the slate with red LED digital time code numbers rippling away. All three cameras swing to face the slate. I get goose bumps when I see, ‘R.T.T.’ written in the “title’ box, with Ellie’s last name as ‘Director’ and mine as ‘Producer.’

The ferret-man shouts, ‘Ride the Titanic. . .Scene G-6. . .take four. . .’ and SLAM go the sticks and he vanishes into the nitrogen steam.

A hand on my elbow – the third assistant director – pulling me as he whispers, ‘This way to the control room, sir.’

I sail through another door and into a video control room not unlike Kennedy Space Center. But instead of rockets taking off, technicians crouch over their production stations like monks in a monastery, not lit by sputtering candles but by multi-colored LED flat screens. A wall-mounted, monster-size monitor displaying a crystal clear image of the
Titanic’s
CGI-generated reciprocating engine room bathes the audio boards, camera controls and lighting panels in a celestial glow as it seamlessly marries itself to the actors on the green screen soundstage. Out there all is green and surreal. Here it’s the real damn thing.

Halfway down the line of consoles another group of technicians flutter over the CGI effects monitor displaying a rivet-perfect reconstruction of her
massive engine room. Fully dimensional, possible to film from every angle - fiery gold light flickers from the boiler furnaces, matching the EFX lighting on the soundstage.

The computer graphic artists in the control room, half of them hired away from their previous gig making Hobbits for
Lord of the Rings
films, have not only created the specific ‘Ride Scenes’ like this one in jaw-dropping detail, but rendered them in such high resolution – I lose track of the pixel-count – that it’s literally impossible to detect real from the graphically real.

Ellie shouts above the din of hissing steam and rushing water sound effects, ‘Cut, cut, CUT. . .Something’s screwy. Effects down. Re-register,’

In a heartbeat, the CGI engine room vanishes, revealing instead the jumbled geometric shapes of the green screen soundstage peopled by engineers, firemen and stokers, standing around chatting like guests at a cocktail party.

‘What’s our fix, guys?’ Ellie says.

No answer.

‘C’mon, Captain Sullivan is on the bridge, or haven’t you ladies and gentlemen noticed?’

One of the technicians drawls into his headset, ‘Move stoker number five a couple feet to his right and we’re ready to roll.’

On the wall monitor, the floor director re-positions one of the actors.

‘He was standing inside one of the boilers,’ the technician adds.

Another tech says, ‘Perfect place. Dude’s stiff as wood.’

The control room snickers, but Ellie croons, ‘If you can’t say something nice about a person don’t say anything at all.’ She keys her headset, her voice once again sharp; all business. ‘Roll cameras. . .roll sound. . .Ready effects. . .Ready action. . . .wait one.’

She twirls around. ‘3D hot?’

A young man at a faraway console bank practically jumps out of his skin. ‘You mean
Ultra3D
, don’t you ma’am?’

‘Forget brand placement, honey, all set with your proprietorial magic?’

He half-raises out of his chair and peers at a smaller video screen mounted directly above the main control room monitor. It’s a duplicate of the larger screen, but has the breathtaking depth of three dimensions, a feature of all our ride scenes.

‘Yes, ma’am, you can roll for record.’

‘Already are, darlin’ Fasten your seatbelts, everybody.’

The control room playfulness vanishes as if throwing a switch. Hands poised, faces alert, shoulders tensed, waiting.

Ellie shouts, ‘ACTION!’

The massive steam engine cranks stand frozen like giant redwoods in the forest, their task forever finished. Flickering lights, alternately dimming and brightening, cast Hitchcock movie-like shadows on the steel plate hull, turning desperate men into demonic creatures fighting their way through the rising waters now gushing into the ship.

In truth, not a drop of water is on the sound stage. But through a brilliant combination of special effects and slightly bobbing and weaving camera motion, the blue-green water looks utterly real as the engineer I saw in rehearsal slogs toward the still-open watertight door leading topside. He looks up, and then turns and splashes back to face the camera. Like before, his face is grimy, his eyes bloodshot, his every feature alive with fear. But this time he’s looking straight into the camera lens . . .and into my soul.

‘How many times I have to tell you to get out? She’s going down and there’s not a bloody thing we can do anymore to stop her. You hear me? Do you?’ He pauses, looks around at his tilting, water-filled world, with men shouting and clambering to escape. ‘She’s done for, and so are you, unless you get moving. NOW!’

‘Ready pan right. . .’ Ellie cautions the camera operator.

The engineer steps even closer and bellows, ‘I said, NOW!’

‘GO!’ Ellie shouts.

The camera snap-pans right and the crystal-clear image of the engine room chaos blurs into a multicolored swirl, and then cuts to black.

‘Cut. That’s a keeper,’ Ellie says to control room applause. ‘Thanks everyone. Full playback to confirm convergence and registration.’

I can barely breathe. Not only because the actor is was so damn convincing, but because the twin-lens 3D cameras digitally captured the scene at a blisteringly, seventy-two frames-per-second, and created the illusion of crystal clear reality.

Ultra3D’s
top-secret, proprietorial technique involves projecting our high-definition footage onto the front AND rear of a screen that’s actually
two
screens sandwiched together but slightly off-axis. In case you’re interested they call this impossibly-expensive-to-make device an ‘intraocular convergence screen.’

So what does this scene actually look like in
Ultra3D
?  

Hard to describe in words, but instead of standing in a control room watching an actor in a flickering, slightly blurred, movie illusion, the
Titanic’s
engineer stands smack in front of me, every eye twitch in sight, every frightened breath hissing from his nostrils, and we’re all going down with the
Titanic
unless we get the hell out NOW.

I call it a miracle because the actors in the projected scene don’t look like cut-out dolls like in most 3D movies. Instead, they have shape and dimension like in real life. And I don’t need special glasses to see it! How wonderful is that? If this invention works on site as good as it does here, their company will be standing at the gates of riches that will swing wide open when
Ride the Titanic
sets sail.
Ultra3D’s
technology will revolutionize the movie projection business and put 3D glasses makers out of business, just like jet airliners knocked out ocean liners.

I do my best to act cool. But I’m too excited. Ellie tells me she’s shot and edited the
On the Bridge
scene, the
Boat Deck
scene the
Forward Storage Hold
scene, and now the
Engine Room and Boiler
scene. No delays here like at Fincantini. We are on a roll.

‘Wireframe’s ready,’ a technician calls out.

Ellie turns to her technical director, whose fingers are poised over a bank of buttons, and says breezily, ‘Carl, honey, punch up Captain Sullivan’s baby on the big screen and let’s scroll through the whole scene as if we’re riding on the lifeboat.’

The bright green wireframe is a skeletal image of what will eventually become one of our EMV’s. The ‘lifeboat’ sails serenely across the massive wall monitor. Even though it’s only an outline of the complicated, multi-axes vehicle that will carry thirty people at a time through the ride, it bobs up and down convincingly as it glides along the ride track.

‘3-D props coming online.’

All the
Engine Room
scene components appear as they will on the ride in Vegas: three-dimensional reciprocating engine cranks mounted in the foreground, along with piping, ladders, staircases, and a catwalk that cantilevers out over the EMV track to create a proscenium-like effect that carefully frames the digital projection screen, blank at the moment.

‘Hold the ride there,’ Ellie says, and the lifeboat stops. ‘Now back it up in real time and let’s roll in sync.’

The boat wireframe dutifully slides backwards and pauses.

‘Ready sound, and video effects playback. . . . GO!’

The EMV glides forward just as the projection screen scene lights up both from behind and in front with the engine room chaos we just filmed. The playback screen is married perfectly with the three-dimensional objects, so that you can’t tell where the film ends and real props begin, especially at this crystal-clear frame rate.

‘Gimme’ point-of-view, please.’

The lifeboat vanishes and the scene shifts into a ‘point of view’ which gives me a chance to see how our riders will experience the blending of real with the magic of high resolution digital recording. Even though I know exactly where the projection screen joins the actual sets, it’s impossible to find any transition lines.

‘Fantastic!’ I say. ‘It works beautifully.’

I stand and salute. ‘Captain Whitney, you have the conn.’

‘Aye, aye, sir!’