"Titanic" is a disaster film about the sinking of the American-British passenger liner of the same name, filmed in 1997 by director James Cameron. The film set a record for the box office and the number of Oscars received, out of 14 nominations, it received 11.
Preliminary work
According to director Cameron, the script for Titanic was inspired by a National Geographic documentary and a work by his friend Lewis Abernathy, which tells the story of the legendary liner. It took him about 7 years to write the script, the starting amount of $ 3 million in 1995 was allocated by the film company 20th Century Fox.
The Titanic was worth more than the Titanic itself. The construction of the Titanic ship cost £ 4 million, which in modern money is £ 100 million, and the cost of the film is £ 125 million.
The director used this money to shoot a short documentary film, which later became the basis for a full-length feature film. Cameron personally made several dives to the Titanic on the Russian deep-sea bathyscaphes Mir-1 and Mir-2. During the dives, footage was filmed, which was then used in the film. In parallel with the underwater filming, an animated video of the liner crash was created, which was also later included in the film. The presented material convinced the producers to allocate money for the shooting of the epic motion picture. Filming of the future masterpiece began in the fall of 1996.
Previously, back in early 1996, a giant film studio was built on the coast of the Mexican state of Baja California, and an artificial pool with a displacement of 4 million liters was created with the help of several tons of dynamite.
Basic shooting
The largest model of the ship in the history of cinema was created from the surviving copies of the drawings of the Titanic and the diary of Thomas Andrews, the chief designer of the ship. The final model was only 34 meters shorter than the real liner and was almost an exact copy of the Titanic. It was on board this "ship" that all the scenes of the film were filmed. The enormous dimensions of the built model allowed the filmmakers to reduce the use of computer special effects by almost 1000 episodes.
A lot of computer graphics were used in the Titanic film, we can say that most of the film was completely made on a computer.
For the filming of the crowd scenes, in which up to 2,000 passengers of the sunken ship take part, an extra, consisting of only 40 people, was used. Motion sensors were attached to the bodies of these actors, and people performed pre-planned actions in front of the camera. Thus, an extensive library of digitized movements was created, which were subsequently superimposed on computer models of people. For example, in the film, all people falling into the water from the side of the ship are three-dimensional models, but the splashes from the falling bodies were filmed live by throwing heavy objects into the water.
For filming the interior of the ship, 20th Century Fox designed and created sets that closely mimic the interior of the Titanic. The scenery was based on the underwater footage of the ship taken by Cameron, as well as photographs taken before the first and last departure of the Titanic from the port.
In April 2012, Titanic premiered in modern 3D and IMAX 3D formats, timed to coincide with the centenary of the legendary crash.
Filming lasted almost 7 months, but it was not possible to complete it by the scheduled date, because additional financial investments were required. 20th Century Fox, fearing increased costs that might not pay off in the future, went for a trick, and entered into a cooperation agreement with a competitor - the film company Paramount Pictures. As it turned out later, the fears were completely in vain, the film paid off and brought considerable profit, and as a result of the contract concluded, the film now has 2 distributors.
