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Titanic was one of the most expensive films ever made at the time it came out. With a reported budget of over $200 million, you can partially blame the special effects for that, as a behind-the-scenes fact revealed its release date was pushed back to finalize the film’s visuals. That includes the scene when Jack and Rose watch a man fall to his death into the path of a propeller. In fact, there’s an interesting visual effects story behind the infamous Propeller Guy’s death scene.
In one of the best disaster movies of all time, Titanic featured a high-anxiety scene of when Jack and Rose move themselves onto the stern of the luxury ship. As many people lose their grips and fall to their deaths as the ship rotates, one ill-fated passenger is “Propeller Guy.” We see him from a distance descending into the path of a propeller, where he then spins into the water towards his death.
While there were about 18,000 extras used in Titanic, there were also digital humans used for complicated stunts through the use of motion capture, specifically “roto-capture,” where actors are used as a reference and then animated and keyframed by hand, like Propeller Guy. According to VFX Blog, animator Andy Jones, who later worked on The Jungle Book and Avatar, said at the Imagining the Future symposium at NIFFF back in 2016 that director James Cameron originally did not like how the shot looked until Jones came up with a little trick:
I remember visual effects supervisor Rob Legato calling me into the review suite – this was my first time meeting Jim – and Jim was quite disappointed that the fall did not feel far enough. He wanted me to double check the math on it. I assured him that the distance and rate of speed the figure was falling was correct. He then asked me to double the distance he falls from after hitting the propeller to the water. It would have been difficult to push the water plane away without breaking other parts of the shot, so I ended up animating the scale of the figure down to about 60 per cent his size from the propeller to the water, giving the illusion that the figure was falling farther than he really was. The trick worked and Jim approved the shot.
That’s actually a really impressive trick, as it really did look like a long fall until he hit the water. Another interesting fact about Propeller Guy is that you wouldn’t find him among the star-studded cast of Titanic considering he’s not a real person. Through the use of Cyberware scans, digital doubles’ faces were achieved capturing an actor’s likeness. But visual effects supervisor Rob Legato leaked which person’s likeness was used for Propeller Guy, and the answer is hilarious:
The memorable thing about propeller guy was that I decided to put the producer’s face on him. So a scan of Jon [Landau] was used as the basis of propeller guy. All in good fun, but a bit on the dark side of humour since he falls to a brutal end.
I would say that’s an incredibly dark way to feature a cameo of your producer! Fortunately for Jon Landau, you wouldn’t even be able to tell it’s his face if you watched the movie closely. Still, I guess the R.S.S. Titanic passenger couldn’t be faceless and needed some inspiration to draw on.
Believe it or not, Propeller Guy ended up being as legendary as the high-grossing movie. The digital character would be remembered by audiences through multiple viewings, and was also referenced on Late Show with David Letterman. Billy Crystal also pointed out Propeller Guy when he hosted the 70th Academy Awards in his song intro, and in that ceremony, Titanic became a Best Picture winner and won 10 other awards.
The VFX team definitely didn’t predict there would be so much attention on Propeller Guy considering compositor Rachel Dunn felt that shot was so quick and simple to complete. Sometimes even the quickest shot can still come off as the most memorable to audiences.
The infamous Propeller Guy was a digital character with the face likeness of producer Jon Landau hitting into the path of a propeller spinning into a CGI sea. You’d never think a few seconds of a fake character’s death would get so much attention, but the VFX team clearly did a great job in making this moment unforgettable for audiences. You can watch that shot and many others in Titanic available with your Peacock subscription.