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 Titanic - the Movie |
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The Fox Baja Studios
Among the most
striking moments in "Titanic" are its
transitions from the present to the past
as 101-year-old Rose Calvert begins to
recount her amazing tale. With the video
monitors displaying the shattered hull
of the ship in the background, Rose
paints her own vivid image of a
beautiful April day in 1912. Slowly, the
ruin of Titanic is dramatically restored
on screen to its regal glory at
Southampton -- and the arrival of its
passengers who had no idea of the tragic
voyage ahead. |
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www.titanicmovie.com
With
masterful planning, the extraordinary challenge of readying production of
"Titanic" in Mexico was realized in a remarkably short period of time.
Construction on the Fox Baja Studios began May 30, 1996 on a 40-acre beach
front parcel of land. The state-of-the-art facility featured a
17-million-gallon exterior tank, a 5-million-gallon interior tank housed
in a 32,000-square-foot sound stage and three traditional stages. The
studio also included production offices, set/prop storage, a grip/electric
building, welding/fabrication workshops, dressing rooms and a number of
ancillary support structures.
A scant 100 days after ground-breaking, principal
photography began. And looming majestically against the breathtaking
Mexican coastline was the 775-foot exterior set of Titanic,
standing 45-feet from the water line to the boat deck floor, its four
distinctive funnels towering another 54-feet against a timeless horizon.
Titanic sailed again.
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No less remarkable was the actual ship set
itself. As the Halifax portion of the film progressed, one of the most
complex undertakings in modern filmmaking began to take shape in
Rosarito Beach, located in the state of Baja California in Mexico. It
was here where the filmmakers decided to shoot the 1912 sequences of
"Titanic," which constitute the bulk of the film. The combined efforts
of a massive team of artists, craftsmen and engineers would recreate a
nearly full-size, 775-foot long exterior shooting set of Titanic
as well as the seven-acre, 17-million-gallon seawater tank in which to
sink her. |
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Producer Jon Landau says the decision to build
the largest shooting tank in the world, as well as additional filming
stages in Rosarito, was made after a global search from Poland to the
United Kingdom to Malta to Australia and throughout the U.S. and
Canada..
"No single existing site in the world could
contain the scale of our production and the attendant facilities that
were required to film the scenes that Jim Cameron envisioned," Landau
says. "In order to support the scope of the film and to be able to
facilitate both interior and exterior production, it was more efficient
to custom-build it all in one place."
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