titanica / production notes
R.M.S. Titanic Facts
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Expedition Facts
The expedition was a joint project of IMAX Corporation, The Stephen Low Company / Low Films International, the P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, and Undersea Research Limited. The expedition ship was the Akademik Mstislav Keldysh; the Keldysh is 440 feet (134 metres) in length and is the world's largest oceanographic research vessel. The Keldysh is operated by the Moscow-based P.P. Shirshov Insititute of Oceanology (part of the Russian Academy of Sciences).
There were 130 crew members aboard the Akademik Keldysh including participants from Canada and the United States. The expedition lasted 29 days (June-July 1991).
During the expedition there were a total of 17 dives to the Titanic (depth: 12,500 feet or 3,800 metres) in the manned Russian submersibles Mir I and Mir II. The dives lasted an average of 18 hours each. The launch procedure for each dive takes about 30 minutes; recovery time can take from 45 minutes to an hour. It takes about two-and-a-half hours to descend the 12,500 feet to the
Titanic site.
The submersibles weigh 20 tons (18 metric tons) each and each costs approximately 20 million U.S. dollars to build. Each submersible carries a crew of three and has three acrylic plastic portholes, each with a thickness of just over seven inches (181mm). The Mirs are designed to withstand an external pressure of 9,000 pounds per-square-inch, the equivalent of an ocean dive to over 20,000 feet (6,000 metres). The pressure where the Titanic lies is 5,500 pounds per square inch.
To film the Titanic, special retractable camera mounts were installed, allowing the IMAX camera to film from the centre porthole of either submersible. The most powerful lights ever used in the deep ocean were mounted on retractable booms on both submersibles. These systems included specially developed HMI and quartz iodide lights. Powered from the submersibles' batteries, the twin lighting systems were able to generate the equivalent of about 150,000 watts of incandescent light.
The IMAX/Titanic '9l scientific expedition pulled together deep-sea experts from Russia, the United States and Canada. The seeds had been sown some two decades earlier when Dr. Anatoly Sagalevitch, head of manned submersibles at Moscow's P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, stated after he saw the IMAX film “To Fly” at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, "I have to bring these cameras into the sea."
Presaging events to come, marine scientist Dr. Joseph MacInnis and National Geographic photographer Emory Kristof approached Imax Corporation in 1984 to discuss doing a deep ocean project, with the Titanic as the objective. Fascinated by the Titanic, Director Stephen Low initially wanted to film the legendary shipwreck in IMAX on the l986 Ballard expedition but his backing fell through. Recalls Low, "In retrospect it was good that we didn't go at that time and do it poorly. When the l99l expedition came along, it was a lot more exciting. The technology was better; the subs were new; there was a lot more power available and the lighting technology had improved."
In 1990, André Picard, former V.P. Film Imax Corporation, met with Low, MacInnis, Sagalevitch and Director of the Shirshov Institute, Vyacheslav Yastrobov. Titanica was launched. "We had a very short window in which to mount the expedition and had to do a lot of things for the first time," recalls Picard who pulled together the financing and brought the partners to the table.
All the elements came together by June, l99l, and the expedition sailed forth to the site of the Titanic on the largest research vessel in the world, the Akademik Keldysh. The Russian ship, a city block long, carried a total of l30 people and the world's most advanced submersibles, Mir I and Mir II, designed to withstand pressures of 9,000 pounds per-square-inch (psi), more than enough for the two-and-a-half mile (4,000 metres) descent to the Titanic.
