How the Titanic Sank: James Cameron’s New CGI Animation

It was 100 years ago next Sun­day that the lux­u­ry lin­er Titan­ic struck an ice­berg and sank in the North Atlantic Ocean with 1,514 souls aboard. It was one of the dead­liest mar­itime dis­as­ters in his­to­ry.

Last night, the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Chan­nel broad­cast the pre­mier of The Titan­ic: The Final Word With James Cameron, in which the famed under­sea explor­er and direc­tor of the 1997 block­buster movie about the dis­as­ter presents the lat­est foren­sic evi­dence of what hap­pened that night a cen­tu­ry ago. At one point in the show, Cameron, fresh off of his dive to the bot­tom of the Mar­i­ana Trench, gives a sort of “play-by-play” analy­sis of the mechan­ics of the dis­as­ter (see above) using Com­put­er Graph­ic Imag­ing (CGI) soft­ware. The trag­ic ele­ment is com­plete­ly abstract­ed out of the pic­ture.

For more on the Titan­ic cen­te­nary, includ­ing inter­ac­tive fea­tures and a 46-minute doc­u­men­tary film on the dis­as­ter, vis­it the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic “Adven­ture on the Titan­ic” Web page.