James Cameron's Best Special Effects

Titanic, 1997
As with the making of The Abyss, special-effects technology lagged behind his vision, so to make this Oscar-winning epic, Cameron turned to a more tried-and-true method to sink a boat: he sunk one. The entire seagoing set was constructed in a 5-million-gal. tank that could be flooded and tilted to re-create the sinking of the famed ocean liner. For the chaotic scene where the ship finally sinks into the water, a nearly full-scale replica of the ill-fated Titanic was re-created as a tilting set just so stuntmen could fall to their watery cinematic demise. The more dangerous falls in the scene, however, were rendered through the use of computer graphics.

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