One this one, they wanted a camera fly-through of the interior of a man-made structure. In choosing the Grand Staircase of the Titanic, I felt I had oodles of reference material, having been slightly obsessed with the disaster since I was a wee lad. Digging through my handy dandy copy of James Cameron's Titanic Explorer, I found a QuickTime VR walk through of the set for his movie about the sinking, which had some great views of his version of the stairs. Armed with this and a small mountain of thick, heavy books I got cracking.

Of course, I failed to grasp that what I really needed in order to satisfy my OCD attention to detail was a copy the original construction blueprints, which I found that you can buy. Quickly realizing that I was in college and by definition broke, I nevertheless trudged on. At first the clock was going to be a displacement map made from a good black and white pic I scanned, but I soon found that I'd still be waiting for the render to finish to this very day if I did so.

Settling for a bump map, the rest came together fairly well, except that it strained the 300 MHz, 512 Mb RAM machines we had at the time to the breaking point. The refresh rate while working on it was horribly sluggish and rendering, in the end, took six 300 MHz chips 5 days to finish. Needless to say, I kept a low profile around anyone who needed to use the render farm that week but couldn't due to my monster render job.

The one thing I couldn't make due to the time crunch was the cherub holding a light that was posted on the central railing at the bottom of the stairs. However, it would certainly have blown the poly count through the roof and doubled the render time. No doubt, I'd been burned at the stake by a horde of angry animation students for pulling that little stunt.

The music is from the soundtrack of the Terence Mallick film, "The Thin Red Line", composed by Hans Zimmer and is augmented with the sound of crumbling ice that goes off as the lights flicker when the ship hits the iceberg. Quite inaccurate historically, no one standing there would have heard anything and would only have felt the room shake a bit. I did put the clock's hands at 11:40, which is the time of the collision.

And before you ask, the answer is yes. I have no life.