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 calli.