Unseen Titanic...

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GeorgeC

Unseen Titanic...

Post by GeorgeC » March 21st, 2012, 10:00 pm

As the 100th Anniversary of the sinking approaches, let's just put links and video clips here.

Suggestion: DON'T link to footage from the more popular films... Leave that be! Just limit video links to forensics, documentary clips, and dive imagery. I'll follow that suggestion, too.

Here's the start --
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/ ... sides-text

Link to National Geographic's website. There's a new Titanic article up but the big feature is the gallery of interactive Titanic imagery.

Let me explain further... This imagery is compiled from years of expeditions (or a single one -- I sort of glanced over the article) and presents the main pieces of the wreck -- the bow and stern -- in complete profiles from above and the side (starboard both cases). You can scroll over the image and zoom wherever you want. I do recommend a fast computer with broadband connection and plenty of RAM, though.

My only disappointments with the imagery are as follows:
a) It's not the true color of the wreck. It's deep-sea blue. The wreck is predominantly rust-colored with patches of the original black and red hull paint showing through;
b) We don't see port views of the wreckage;
c) There are no do direct frontal and aft views of the wreck. I would have liked to have seen a straight on composite bow view as well as a direct straight-on stern view. I just think those are reasonably expected. Maybe someday there'll be composite created for those views.
d) You can't see the rudder or visible propellers in the view of the stern wreckage. Just seems incomplete...

With greater computer power and assuming someone cares to, we may yet see a three-dimensional version of the wreck before it completely disintegrates into a pile of orange rust. Right now, glimpses of the great ship as it once lived can still be seen... Imperfect as her design proved to be, she was an icon.

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Re: Unseen Titanic...

Post by Ben » March 22nd, 2012, 1:38 pm

Gee...another Titanic thread!? ;)

I seem to remember having a long, non-movie discussion about the might ship sometime before...

GeorgeC

Re: Unseen Titanic...

Post by GeorgeC » March 22nd, 2012, 2:01 pm

All right, already!

I said I'd put it all in here from now on, didn't I???? :cry:


But seriously, the longer this year goes on, the more anniversary material comes out.

Sure, it's capitalizing and making money while they can but there's still a lot of important films FINALLY being released on Blu ray.

I just read that Kino's doing Blu ray releases so there is an outside chance that they will release the 1943 German propaganda Titanic film on Blu ray this year.

The 1953 Fox movie, the 1997 movie, 1958's A Night to Remember, the new mini-series being released this year, AND Ghost of the Abyss 3D are all confirmed for Blu ray so far. Those films alone are a good selection!

On top of that, there are new books being released as well as updates of some old classic like Wynn Craig Wade's Titanic: End of a Dream. He did a revision of that book and it was nearly complete when he passed away. A few books were released last year that had some interesting things in them but the best by far that I've read recently is Titanic: Last Secrets that reveals a lot of information from the Harland and Wolff archives. They knew far more than they revealed at the British Inquiry about the ship's final moments. Their surviving chief engineer, Wilding, KNEW that ship broke up at the surface before the final plunge. Most of his theoretical work and conclusions have been borne out by investigation on the wreck, tests on metal samples recovered from the debris field, and computer simulations gathering all known data of the ship's architecture and metallurgical composition.

Wilding was a brilliant man. That's why he was muzzled by Lord Pirrie and ultimately sacked.
He knew too much and didn't stay shut up enough.

And this is not idle speculation. The gentleman who was in charge of H & W's archives before he was forcibly retired by management, Tom McCluskie, read the H & W meeting notes as well as the extant journals of Thomas Andrews and letters of Wilding and Pirrie. There were serious problems with the naval architecture of the Olympic Class liners from the sea trials of Olympic ("noticeable panting of the hull" and "spider-cracking BEFORE the maiden voyage in the hull") through the loss of Britannic. McCluskie, Simon Mills (the OWNER of the Britannic's hull), and Richard Long probably know more about the strengths and failings of those ships than any other three individuals on the planet...

GeorgeC

Re: Unseen Titanic...

Post by GeorgeC » March 22nd, 2012, 11:33 pm

A serious subject sometimes requires some humor to lighten the air...


GeorgeC

Re: Unseen Titanic...

Post by GeorgeC » March 24th, 2012, 9:26 am

Wait for it... wait for it...





(For the impatient so-and-so's who can't appreciate decent music, fast-forward, drag the video ticker to about 3:50 for the punchline! One of the best set-ups ever!)

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Re: Unseen Titanic...

Post by Ben » March 25th, 2012, 5:01 pm

Just watched part one of the ITV mini-series...

TERRIBLE!

The main problem being that it seems the ship will sink every episode (of four), taking different viewpoints of different passengers each week. Not only do we not then get enough time to get to know the characters, they are one dimensional to begin with, and by the time of the fourth episode we're going to be quite frankly bored with seeing Titanic going down.

Major, major YAWN... :(

GeorgeC

Re: Unseen Titanic...

Post by GeorgeC » March 26th, 2012, 12:12 am

That's too bad to hear about the new mini-series... Sounds an awful lot like that episode of ST:The Next Generation, "Conundrum," where the Enterprise-D blew up 3-4 times before they figured out they were stuck in a time loop! Boring, boring, boring bit of techno-fluff to sit through!

In the meantime, I'm finally watching an A & E special I bought years ago on DVD, Titanic: The Complete Story. (It's being "scalped" online for prices approaching $900. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised --- humanity's always been great on making money off of misery!)
I've got the 2002 edition but it's been re-released for this year but under the History Channel label => http://www.amazon.com/Titanic-The-Compl ... 793&sr=1-1

Again, the History Channel release is IDENTICAL to what I have already but some fools are going to go ahead and try and get the older edition I'm sure! NOT. WORTH. IT. Don't pay the scalpers' prices!

Other than that bad bit of news, it's a refreshing documentary done with survivor audio, video interiews, voiceover, and interspersing of period photographs over 1912 film and so on.

It's not Hollywood at all. One of the more effective documentary series done on any event that I've seen and one of the few that I care to own. (And if that wasn't enough to sway some people, the three specials that make up Titanic: The Complete Story are narrated by actor David McCallum.)

As much as I liked Ghost of the Abyss for the wreck footage, in retrospect the overlay of actors dressed in period costume over the wreck itself is... over the top and perhaps too creepy for my likes.

GeorgeC

Re: Unseen Titanic...

Post by GeorgeC » March 26th, 2012, 4:17 am

Surprise, surprise!

The local paper in my area actually had an article about the Titanic quarter in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Very interesting article. There's a slideshow attached of 17-21 images from the area.

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories ... tanic.html

Darn shame about the Visitor's center... Man is it ugly! I guess mankind lost the ability to design decent public/art/history buildings sometime this past century...

The rest of the pictures are pretty nice although I didn't care for the "hull sculpture" or the smokestack replica on-premises. I don't think bric-a-brac needs to be added like that anymore than putting fascades of the bows of the "Three Sisters" on the Visitor's Center.

Just let the Harland and Wolff site tell the story. The drydock itself is still amazing without even walking through the Drawing Room....

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Re: Unseen Titanic...

Post by EricJ » March 26th, 2012, 4:31 am

GeorgeC wrote:All right, already!
I said I'd put it all in here from now on, didn't I????
Yes, but did you mean "You'd put it ALL here", or "You'd be the only one putting it here for the rest of the thread?"

(And it's YOUR freakin' thread, anyway! How did this all get started in the first place?)

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Re: Unseen Titanic...

Post by Ben » March 26th, 2012, 2:23 pm

The Guardian also had an interesting post on the Belfast center - you might find it online at their website.

GeorgeC

Re: Unseen Titanic...

Post by GeorgeC » March 26th, 2012, 3:53 pm

Yeah, I know but that Visitor Center....! That's supposed to be one of their new centerpiece buildings???

I was more impressed by the drydock and the old Harland and Wolff drawing room. That's what really impressed me not the "newer items" added to that area.

I guess at least one Belfast area resident or councilman is concerned about the Titanic Quarter not being sustainable. He was actually suggesting that Disney should have been in charge of it!

I can just imagine the major players in the Titanic disaster begin reimagined as Disney characters. Goofy as the Captain, Chip and Dale as the lookouts, Donald Duck as Ismay, Mole (Wind in the Willows) as Andrews, and Mickey as Lightoller...

... and even then it's STILL doesn't sound as bad as that Titanic feature that was animated in Italy! They have clips of that disaster of that up on Youtube now...



P.S. -- I noticed something very funny in a Titanic special that I saw on YouTube. It was a while back, maybe a few years ago, and had archival clips of the survivors but that wasn't the interesting part. It seems like this program went out of its way to avoid mentioning Robert Ballard at all...! I mean seriously, I don't think he was mentioned by name! The other thing is that the program erroneously claimed that the French were the first to explore the Titanic wreck with a submersible and ROV (Robin) in 1987 which is completely untrue. Fact is that Ballard and his WHOI associates along with National Geographic and Navy personnel were the first to explore Titanic with the US submersible Alvin and its ROV, Jason Jr.

I just kind of thought it was funny that the program went to an extent to gloss over the facts whether people like Ballard or not... He does have a tendency at self-promotion and has infuriated very many people (Americans, French; especially the submersible pilots --- they HATE him) and shattered the relationship with IFREMER by some really stupid self-serving moves.

GeorgeC

Re: Unseen Titanic...

Post by GeorgeC » April 1st, 2012, 10:25 pm

Well,

I finally took time to watch Titanic (1943), the German propaganda film.
I've had this movie on DVD since it was released but hadn't watched it all the way through until today.

The verdict? Better than I expected -- higher production values than Atlantic, for sure! -- but there was a lot of historical rewriting to serve National Socialist aims and there was one glaring technical mistake with the Titanic model they used... The fourth funnel on the real thing was a dummy/exhaust vent. It was never connected to the boiler system!

Of course, the biggest bit of revisionism was the German first officer... Oh, c'mon! :lol:

I'd rank A Night to Remember (1958) above this film but the '43 Titanic isn't half-bad really once you get past the heavy-handed anti-capitalist, anti-British tone of the film. It's well-acted in spite of the propaganda and I thought most of the ship scenes were good. The model of the ship has a moment or two where it obviously looks like a model but those are brief instances.

I can see that James Cameron obviously saw the film or had notes on the screenplay because there's a scene or two in this film that were lifted for the 1997 Titanic.

The ironic thing about the '43 Titanic is that the director never lived to see the premiere. He ran afoul of the Nazi leadership -- particularly offended Goebbels -- and was given a choice of suicide. He was "found" hanging in his prison cell!

The movie itself luckily survived the war. For as much as he hated the director of the movie, Goebbels felt the film served his purposes well enough and he had the surviving circulation prints and negative safely stored away. The film itself had a brief premiere, the theater it premiered in was bombed, and that particular premiere print of course didn't survive! After the premiere, the film was pretty much locked away and rediscovered after the war...

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Post by Daniel » April 7th, 2012, 7:00 pm

From this weeks The Soup:



Funny! :lol:

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