Mark Lasoff, EG '84 and AS '85, lists his occupation as "visual effects supervisor," but he's actually a kind of magician. Lasoff's job involves creating illusions on film to fool our eyes. He's so good at it that he won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for the 1997 movie Titanic.

Although the terms are often used interchangeably, Lasoff explains the distinction between visual effects and special effects. "Visual effects are created with a computer," he says, "while special effects are generally done on the set." In a movie like Titanic, the real and the fake are constantly blended using visual effects because the real thing, according to Lasoff, is either too dangerous, too expensive or impossible to film.

"The real thing is always better," he says, "but we're constantly considering the tradeoffs between the cost and the end result."

A floating ship the size of the Titanic, for example, would have been prohibitively expensive to build, so a deck was built on a scaffold and then blended on film with a digital ocean, a virtual hull and computer-graphics actors. Virtual stuntmen were called for when it came time for terrified "passengers" to jump off the ship from a height of 450 feet. It's too dangerous for real stuntmen to jump into water from more than about 50 feet, Lasoff explains.

Lasoff and his team literally used "smoke and mirrors" to create the moods and scenes they needed for Titanic. "We did some shots on a smoky stage to give the illusion that we were underwater," Lasoff says. "Then we added computer graphics bubbles, fish, and other elements to make the 'composite' that the audience saw as a typical underwater scene."

Every shot in the movie is made up in this way from multiple elements as few as five or 10, as many as 100 or more. The sky in a movie may look simple, but the recipe for a synthetic one has to include clouds and seagulls, while a digital ocean needs to be filled in with flags and sailboats, waves and foam. ?

Realism is achieved in many ways. In the sinking sequence of the movie, a combination of model ships and digital images was used to give the viewer the illusion of actually being on the Titanic. To create the wake left by a ship, a small wake can be photographed and then copied and scaled up to be appropriate for a ship the size of the Titanic. A digital iceberg is complemented by real chunks of ice in the water.

The presentation of realistic-looking computer-graphics actors involves the use of a technique called "motion capture" in which real people walk around with markers on their bodies and clothes that send data to a computer. The computer captures their motions and builds a "skeleton," which can then be dressed and adorned with hair, facial features, skin texture, etc., to achieve a realistic look. This enables the movie to be "cast" with a small number of human actors for close-up shots and hundreds of others generated by the computer to depict crowds in the background.

Lasoff admits that creating computer-graphics actors is probably his greatest challenge because "it's hard to fool people with fake people." It's actually simpler, he says, to trick the audience's eye with people doing stunts than with those engaged in such ordinary daily activities as milling around and chatting. Because we're more used to seeing the ordinary, he says, we're more critical of anything that seems less than totally realistic. Stunts, on the other hand, are not something we see everyday, and the movement is so rapid that it's difficult for us to perceive inaccuracies.

Aside from saving money and reducing the danger to human actors, visual effects can also be used to produce some one-of-a-kind looks that enhance realism in a way that would not have been possible without recent advances in technology. In a video he prepared to demonstrate his work, Lasoff shows a close-up shot of Rose, the elderly woman who survived the sinking of the Titanic and whose story is told in the movie. Her part as a young woman is played by Kate Winslett, and to make the aging transition more believable, Lasoff used computer graphics techniques to replace the elderly woman's eyes with Kate Winslett's.

Lasoff gives full credit to his UD education for enabling his success. "It all started here," he says. "My courses in electrical engineering and computer science provided me with the toolset I needed to become a leader and to be successful in a fledgling industry where the rules hadn't yet been written. Without those tools, I would not have excelled."

Lasoff recently returned to campus to give a talk as part of the Distinguished Lecturer Series offered jointly by UD's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Computer and Information Sciences. He also held a student forum to explore career issues in his field.

For the lecture series, Lasoff was introduced by his friend and former professor, Gonzalo Arce, chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "He was one of our top students," Arce says, "so I certainly remembered him. But, I was still amazed when I was watching the Academy Awards on TV about 10 years later and recognized him when he received the Oscar for Best Visual Effects."

Besides Titanic, Lasoff has worked on several other Academy Award-winning or nominated films, including Apollo 13, The Hollow Man, True Lies and Total Recall. He also received an Emmy Award as animation supervisor on NBC's 1992 Summer Olympics worldwide broadcast opening. Lasoff has managed large projects, serving as supervisor of computer graphics, digital effects and visual effects.

-- Diane Kukich, AS '73, '84M