Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron Page #4

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She splits, right down to the keel.

The bow section planes away,

landing about a half a mile away,

going 20, 3O knots

when it hits the ocean floor.

(IMITATES EXPLOSIONS)

Pretty cool, huh?

Thank you for that fine forensic analysis,

Mr. Bodine.

Of course, the experience of it...

was somewhat different.

CAMERON:
Okay, this '95 animation tells

a good story,

but some of the forensic details

aren't quite right.

So with what we're learning now

in our current investigation,

we're going to get to update this.

It's pulling the whole ship down.

It now breaks. There's a relaxation.

It's pulling it down, it rips away,

and then natural flooding.

This is a big deal for me.

I've wanted to do this for a long time.

A detailed and thoroughly accurate

visualization of Titanic sinking

does not exist.

Working with animator Casey Schatz

and naval system engineer,

Parks Stephenson by remote,

I'm gonna improve

what we did 15 years ago.

This looks great.

This is the sum total of everything

that you and Parks have been working on

over the last few weeks.

- Yeah.

- I think it looks awesome.

All right, let's go to the bow section.

It's nice when you see it in scale like this,

isn't it?

Oh, yeah. Oh, totally!

It just makes sense. When you see it

in scale, it all makes sense.

And this is accurate, the ship is to scale

to the water column, right?

Absolutely, I've been OCD

about everything.

- Okay.

-(CHUCKLING)

Not shocked by that.

See? That's it, man.

That's exactly the way I always pictured it.

So the stern is actually

only a few lengths behind.

Yeah, it was surprising,

but it follows down fairly closely.

CAMERON". Yeah, see,

everybody always talks about

how it's planing forward.

Yeah, it's planing forward, but if you looked

at this, you'd just say it was falling.

Yes, it's planing forward,

and that accounts for its displacement.

But it's one forward and six down,

so it's basically just falling.

It dives and stalls.

And when it stalls, it moves forward.

And then it dives and goes down,

and then it stalls and moves forward.

We can't complete our update

of the animation

till we answer some more questions.

Let's keep working backwards

from the wreck.

We've analyzed the force of impact

with the bottom,

but that doesn't explain

all the observable damage.

What could have possibly happened

as the bow plummeted

two-and-a-half miles

down to the ocean floor?

To me, one of the fun parts of this

is looking at what happened to the bow

To me, one of the fun parts of this

is looking at what happened to the bow

right when it departed the surface.

And looking at the evidence

for that high flow rate,

that high longitudinal flow rate.

Weighing at least 20, 000 tons,

Titanic's bow tore away from the stern

and plunged downward at a speed

of 40 to 50 kilometers per hour.

This is the forward well deck of Titanic.

And you can see there,

that kind of tubular object is the mast.

You see the mast?

We are up on the top of the deckhouse

right now, I think, aren't we?

Yes! Just hold right on this. This is good.

Do we have any pictures

of that area handy?

Maybe one of Ken's paintings

is a betterjumping off point.

STEPHENSON:
Yeah, that's

the wreck section there.

CAMERON:

Ken feels very connected to Titanic.

And quite honestly,

the movie was pitched using his paintings.

I just opened up the big double-truck

spread of his glorious painting

of the ship going down

with its lights blazing

and the rockets being fired off,

showed it to the studio executives

and said,

"This ship, Romeo and Juliet. "

And that's it.

It was probably the shortest pitch

relative to the amount of money it raised

in the history of movies.

Well, yeah, you can actually

see it pretty well in this painting.

This is a good image.

Let's keep this image up.

Oh.

So, let's see what we've got.

We got a mast that's knocked aft.

So what force knocked the mast aft,

and then kept it there?

Even though the ship hit the bottom

with a slight forward vector.

All of the B deck, forward-facing windows,

broken, broken, broken,

and that one's broken.

So, to me, that all adds up to

a very strong longitudinal flow

over the ship,

sufficient not only to break the mast,

but to get that mast into position,

and then allow it to shelter these windows

from a peak hydrodynamic pressure,

which subsequently broke those windows.

(STAMMERING)

And when the bow broke away

and started speeding up,

that's also what tore the crane off

and the jib on this crane

went down behind it there.

Where we find the mast today on the wreck

is clearly a result of the bow section

breaking away from the stern

and diving toward the bottom.

And that initial speed,

which could have gotten up to as high

as maybe 40 knots or something like that.

That pressure of sea water pushing back,

it's too much for the mast.

lt just bent back, and probably

bashed around a little bit for a few seconds,

destroyed the wheelhouse,

which was made of wood,

and ended up right in that position.

CAMERON:
Hydrodynamic flow,

or the force of the racing water,

caused considerable damage.

So, this was our attempt to show

the mast doing that, in the '95 animation.

So here is the mast coming back,

hits the wheelhouse,

wheelhouse starts to peel off.

Mast is kind of bouncing around

in that area,

and then the wheelhouse

disintegrates in the flow.

And I think it was more dramatic than that.

I think it was like a house in a hurricane.

I think it just went in one.

You know how,

when the house will start to lift,

and then there's a moment

where it just goes

because it gets too much

of an angle of attack.

I don't think it just peeled away like that.

I think it kind of like... (WHOOSHES)

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

CAMERON:
Okay, we'll make sure to get

this right when I update the animation.

But for now, the hydrodynamic flow

can't explain all of this damage.

This deckhouse wall is pushed outward.

Same on the other side, pushed outward.

Why just that? Why not all of it?

- This roof is mushroomed.

- MARSCHALL:
Yeah.

CAMERON:
Mushroomed out

or pancaked down with extreme force,

and the top of the gymnasium

is bent down. The windows are all bent.

That's not sag. It was buckled down.

The roof was found to be sagged in with

a few pieces of funnel shell on that side.

CAMERON". What caused this damage?

Are we missing something?

So you've got this big wreck

coming down through the water column,

it's pulling water down with it

and it's been moving for miles,

literally at 25 miles an hour,

pulling along this wake behind it,

just like the wake behind a race car

that another race car can get into

and kind of draft.

So there's all this moving water,

a big column of water.

Ship hits the bottom, stops suddenly.

The column of water does not stop.

It comes down on top of the ship,

pancakes down the roof,

crushes down the decks,

and then spreads out across the sea floor.

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