Alex Lorman alex@alexlorman.com

My first assignment with Titan Salvage was to work with the bid team for the Costa Concordia project.
This project was the largest salvage in history and presented absolutely unparalleled challenges. Before any of those could be solved, however, Titan needed to secure the contract.
During this project I was involved in two ways. My primary responsibility was to model all the assets involved in our proposed salvage operation and to check rough feasibility of sizes and parts. Since we were not allowed to have a survey of the wreck site performed, we had many questions that required us to approximate answers   My secondary responsibility was to create both a set of still rendered images and a video of our proposed operation.
The process of streamlining all of these objectives into one set of models proved quite challenging since I had to constantly think about how it would work when it came to animate the objects. Ultimately, and due in part to the clear and accurate video, Titan’s bid was accepted and the company was awarded the contract to re-float the ship.

While the still renderings were mainly used internally and with salvage experts for demonstration of concept, the video was widely circulated.
Seen at left is a spread from the New York Times on May 19th showing the video grabs illustrating our salvage plan. The original segments from the video are seen below (in color).
While the video effectively tied together our proposed intervention and the reality of the shipwreck, it also had to be created extremely quickly. I shot the original footage for the video on-site in one day and then produced the first draft of the video in a weekend. The ability to move objects from Rhinoceros into Adobe AfterEffects and Premiere Pro in an easy and clear way was absolutely vital to the success of this project. It also allowed me to make a video that clearly illustrated the concept while also reinforcing just what a huge effort would be required.