Titanic....

As a creative person, I sometimes see things differently that others. I am a visual person and the fascination of things as to how they do that, or how they recreate that part of history with such accuracy.
I bought the Making of the Titanic book at a Christian Book Sale for a couple of bucks. I have been buying these types of books as they tell you behind the scenes of how a movie is physically made. I know that the movie Titanic got mixed reviews because of the love story that was used to unify the whole story. That particular story was creatively written to bring us into the social norms of the time with class systems that were unfair and with the differences of standards of living of real people and the workings of a huge ship such as the Titanic.



Rather than to go on forever about what is in the book, I am going to share some things that fascinated me in the making of the film.




In the beginning of the movie, with the opening scene of people arriving to get onto the boat, this is an actual recreation of the boat, actual size, built on a metal frame. Everything is created to exact size except the steam towers.

The actual size model is only one sided and it is built on top of a large water tank. When they needed to film the other side, they filmed their only side, had people wear hats with the lettering reversed and they reverse all of the film to make it seem you are on the other side of the boat.

The rooms of a lot of the interior shots are inside that life size boat that you see above from basement, to dining rooms, actual staircase and skylight.




Clothing historians were amazed at the authenticity of the clothing. The parade of the rich going down for dinner were all bedecked in finery that came from authentic photos of the clothing of the time.

The food was authentically recreated for the scenes of the dining room.

In the scene where Molly Brown asks Cal, " are you going to cut her meat for her too?", as he was controlling her so much she wasn't going to be allowed to order her own meal. Humorously in that scene, the dozen or so people around that table had each, an individual makeup artist to touch them up between ever break in the takes. It showed that when the said cut, all of them hit there person with brush or make up or whatever. What a crowd that made.





The very large ship was sacrificed when they did the sinking. All of the woodwork, windows, doors, furniture, everything was lost as they sank that set into the tank of water.

There was another smaller, to scale, of the boat that was used in water to depict it's sinking, with the lights reflecting on the water.

There were many different individual sets that raised the bow up in the air, and there were different tanks that were used, shallow ones, to depict the rescuing of survivors. Those that looked like they were struggling in the water actually had their footing on the bottom of the tank.

The story of Rose in this movie, is a refined story of showing how a woman whose fate was destined to marry a controlling, mean man to help finance herself and her mother. Instead, Rose chose to escape that class system and is shown that after her survival of the sinking, she went out and lived life to the fullest. She didn't allow anyone close to her know that she had survived. It showed she had been in a traveling rodeo, flew airplanes, traveled all over the world, and live all of life to the fullest, as she believed she had been given a second chance. At the beginning of the movie, she is showing throwing pots on a potter's wheel living in California as an elderly modern American citizen.

Many old photos were use intentionally to make the story the most accurate as possible. Kids did play with the ice on the deck. Quotes from the people recreated were inserted where they could.

I will conclude this review hoping I didn't get too carried away. Ok, I did get too carried away. There was so much info in the book that made me appreciate this movie more. If you haven't seen it, it is a long movie, and you need to see it from start to end, uninterrupted. It can't have commercials in it or you are wasting your time. Thanks for reading......