this is the story about an unsinkable ship that ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic it inspired the greatest movie ever made about one of the worst tragedies the world has ever seen so how do they make this Epic film and was the iceberg the real reason it sank let's find out welcome to explained the RMS Titanic was the ship of Dreams it was built for luxury travel between Europe and North America and cost a whopping 7.5 million dollars at the time that's the equivalent of 200 million dollars or more today it was also
one of the largest cruise liners of its time measuring 28.2 meters in width 53 meters in height and 269 meters in length to put that into perspective that's almost as long as three football fields and as tall as a 17-story building on April 14 1912 four days after left Southampton for New York tragedy struck the Titanic hidden iceberg from the 2240 people on board only 866 survived while the others drowned in the icy Atlantic this tragedy is surrounded by controversy because the ship was said to be Unsinkable so was the iceberg the only reason the
Titanic ended up at the bottom of the ocean and how factual is the movie let's look at six mistakes that sank the Titanic to start with [Music] number one the design the Titanic had new safety features like 16 compartments that were designed to prevent the hole from flooding in an emergency and its sister ship the Olympic was designed with similar safety features just seven months before the Titanic set sail the Olympic suffered a collision with a royal Naval warship that was racing alongside it and despite the massive hole it left in the ship's side the
Olympics survived I think the spectacular survival of the Olympic from the hawk Collision planted a dangerous idea in people's minds if a warship can take you on and you can just sail home again and get fixed then it's giving people the wrong idea so people naturally believe the Titanic was Unsinkable too number two lifeboats the confidence in the ship's safety features LED them to focus more on the ship's looks so to make it look more spacious the number of lifeboats were cut down from 64 required for an emergency to just 20. number three fire on
board a fire broke out in the cold bunker in Boiler Room five it actually started in Belfast before it had even arrived in Southampton the bunker steel rear wall was part of a watertight bulkhead designed to stop the Titanic from flooding if it got a hole in the hole but since the bunker was burning for days before it was properly put out the rear wall was weakened moreover the bulkheads weren't tall enough to reach the passenger deck level so once water spilled over them there was no stopping the flooding number four the captain messages from
other ships warning of icebergs were sent to Captain Smith throughout the day but he decided to keep the Titanic on course for a little longer before turning West towards New York at 9 52 PM the Titanic received another ice warming from a ship heading to New York a few hours ahead of it and an hour later an even more urgent warning of an ice field came from the Californian just 10 miles ahead but this last alert was never sent to Captain Smith number five binoculars believe it or not the two Lookouts on the ship's Crow's
Nest didn't even have binoculars with them to add to it the still cold Waters the Titanic was passing through coupled with the difference in air temperature created an optical illusion called a miraging haze if you look at this glass of water here as the pencil is behind it what you can start to see is the different shapes that are being made and that's simply because light is bending according to the density of the water behind it and this was the same the night the Titanic sank because the air was different densities and therefore the light
was bending everyone has heard of a Desert Mirage well this actually created what we call a miraging haze at the Horizon behind the iceberg so in effect the haze on the distant Horizon actually camouflaged the iceberg in the near ground once the ship hit the iceberg it ripped holes into its side below the water line and it began to take on water number six safety drills it's almost hard to believe but the ship had no safety drills in place in case of an emergency so passengers didn't know where to go what to do or which
lifeboats to board and the crew never ensured the lifeboats were filled to their capacity and because of that hundreds of lives were tragically lost this is what one of the survivors Frank Prentiss had to say about that night in a BBC interview chaotic in the end everybody was crying praying and trying to get into the very few lifeboats that were left it was very sad sometimes I think a lot about it when asked if he thought he was gonna die he said I didn't give it a second thought when I was on the ship or
when I dropped into the water but I gave it a long thought when I was on my own and everyone else seemed to be dead around me that's that's when I thought I was going to die now here's a little fun fact the very first movie about the tragedy was actually saved from the Titanic it was only 10 minutes long and it came out four weeks after it sank but Jim Cameron's 1997 Blockbuster is the one that's lived on for decades making a movie about the world's worst tragedy at Sea was no easy task so
Cameron decided on a hybrid approach and used practical effects mixed with digital effects to tell the story first off they built a life-size replica of the Titanic that was 236.2 meters long that's almost as big as the actual ship it was built in a tank that held 17 million gallons of water at a specially constructed facility at Fox Studios in Baja Mexico and all this cost a whopping 40 million dollars in fact this film set was so large people kept getting lost on board cameras team also had to factor in the filming of the sinking
scene during the construction phase of the ship they knew they couldn't sink the entire thing at once so while building the replica they had small portions from the middle section and the bow removed this gave them the flexibility to angle certain sections while filming far into the set but see I want to keep some sense of a beach up there let's drop the far end of the set like four or five inches so how did they actually film the sinking of the Titanic to sell the illusion they had to make the ship's angle in the
water look dramatic the ship they built could only be angled at six degrees to tilt it further they used a camera technique called a Dutch angle and corrected the water line with CGI Additionally the excluded sections of the ship allowed them to drop the front more into the water when needed and the rear the ship could detach and tilt 90 degrees next key elements were the stun performers to show a highly populated chaotic deck 100 stuntmen and women were hired some of them wore special vests fitted with wheels this let them safely roll down the
deck but on camera it looked like they were falling with the angle of the ship additionally hundreds of other extras were hired and fastened to the railings and fixed objects so it looked like they were Clinging On for gear life they also had a number of rubber props installed to avoid real injuries so as they were falling you can literally see the rubber props cushioning their fall a number of miniature ships were also built and these were used to shoot scenes like the cracking of the deck and the dropping of the ship in the water
this trick photography combined with shots of hundreds of people splashing around in the water created the most dramatic last moments before we wrap up let's take a quick look at how many of these characters were on board the real Titanic number one Jack Dawson he was a fictional character but there was actually a Joseph Dawson on board who was part of the ship's crew and that turned out to be a pure coincidence number two Rose she was also a fictional character but she was based on an American artist named Beatrice wood that Cameron was reading
about in a book and fun fact the hand sketching image in the film is actually James Cameron's hand number three Margaret Brown she was real Margaret was an American socialite and philanthropist who was on board the ship she really did help passengers into lifeboats before getting on one herself an account showed that she did insist on sending lifeboats back to save more people number four the elderly couple they were real too it was Macy's owner isider Strauss and his wife Ida Isidore refused to board the lifeboats till all the women and children were safe and
his wife Ada refused to leave him behind do you know any other interesting facts about the real Titanic versus how they showed it in the movie do you think Rose could have shared the floating door and saved Jack tell us about it in the comments and don't forget to subscribe to explained
