Mark Lasoff, who won an Academy Award for his work on the visual effects for the 1997 movie Titanic, spoke to a full house in the University’s MBNA America Hall on Monday, Feb. 4. More than 75 faculty, staff, and students came to hear the talk, which was part of the Distinguished Lecturer Series offered jointly by UD’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Computer and Information Sciences.

Lasoff was introduced by his friend and former professor, Gonzalo Arce, chairperson of electrical and computer engineering. “He was one of our top students,” Arce said, “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.”

The job of Lasoff and the team of some 150 people who worked with him on the visual effects for Titanic can literally involve “smoke and mirrors.”

“We did some shots on a smoky stage to give the illusion that we were underwater,” Lasoff said. “Then we added computer graphics bubbles, fish and other elements to make the ‘composite’ that the audience saw as a typical underwater scene.”

Similarly, 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.

The real and the fake are constantly blended in a movie like Titanic where visual effects are essential because the real thing, according to Lasoff, is either too dangerous, too expensive or impossible to film. “The real thing is always better,” Lasoff pointed out, “but we’re constantly considering the tradeoffs between the cost and the end result.”

A floating ship, for example, would have been prohibitively expensive to build for Titanic, so a deck on a scaffold was built and then blended 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 said.

Lasoff’s lecture mixed trivia with technical details for an informative presentation. He pointed out, for example, that it’s actually simpler to fool 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, we’re more critical of anything that seems less than totally realistic, Lasoff said. 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.

Lasoff gave full credit to his UD education for enabling his success. “It all started here,” he said. “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.”

For the students in the audience interested in Lasoff’s career path, he provided information about organizational systems, the major companies in the business, and the type of background needed for the various jobs involved in creating visual effects. In addition to his talk, Lasoff later held a student forum to explore these issues in more depth.

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.

He received bachelor’s degrees from UD in electrical engineering in 1984 and in computer information systems in 1985.

Feb. 1, 2002

Article by Diane Kukich

Photograph by Eric Crossan