In today's video I am back in Vehicle Simulator checking out the HMHS Britannic, plus its sinking mode! Join this channel to get access to perks: / @jessegillett
I think the people that were making the Britannic (2000) Movie thought that the ship capsized because one of the survivors said something like "The baker dropped the bread, and leapt into the sea. With mere *seconds* to spare, before the vessel had disappeared" I think that guy was talking about the baker that went into the ship for the entire sinking to get some bread to stock up the lifeboats. I think you can find this in the 2016 real time animation by THG right before the first funnel falls, or the survivor testimony before that.
Hey Jesse, first I just want to say my son is a big fan of your videos. He's always showing them to me. Over the years he has become a walking encyclopedia of info on the 3 big White Star ships as well as a bunch of others. He's 11 and also fluent with rockets, specifically Saturn V rockets. If he sees an edit of a Saturn V liftoff, he can tell you from which launches the clips were taken, lol. He's actually edits his own stuff and he's been doing that for probably 4 years already. I think he got is interest in the White Star ships because of me. I actually worked on the Britannic movie. All the digital effects were done by myself and one other person. I did all the modeling, animation, texturing, lighting, rigging, rendering, shot composition etc, etc. The only thing I didn't really do was compositing. That was the other guy's job that I mentioned. It was a ton of work. However, after this project, I also began to composite my own shots which I still do to this day. This was in 1999. After Effects was still pretty young and at the time we didn't even know how were going to do green screen keying. The only thing around was a plugin called Primatte so that's what we used. We got the job by sheer luck. I was a fan of all things Titanic and also a big James Cameron fan. After Titanic came out I started to build a Titanic model in Lightwave just because. I went out and bought a fairly large scale Titanic model kit and got to work measuring all the parts. My late father-in-law, who was originally my boss(hired me at the age of 20 in 1988), had a chance meeting with the director of Britannic (Brian Trenchard-Smith) where he mentioned he began working on a script for a movie about the Britannic. My father-in-law happened to have some still frames on his laptop that I rendered of my Titanic model. The rest is history. So I began turning my Titanic into a Britannic. At first we were only going to do a handful of shots of the Britannic. That eventually became over 200 shots (if I remember correctly). Anyway, the script is loosely based on reality. In the movie it was sunk by sabotage but in real life it was a mine. I believe they found the actual anchor chain from the mine. Yeah, I know the animation isn't that accurate but I did what I could given the time constraints and info we had. At the time you couldn't just go on RU-vid and watch everybody and their uncle's animation of the Britannic sinking. RU-vid was still 6 years away. Simon Mills told me I didn't get it quite right, lol. Google Simon Mills if you aren't sure who that is. When you're involved with making a movie, at some point they "lock the picture" that means that the timing can no longer be changed so it doesn't interfere with the sound and music. We were given X number of blank holes to fill with our effects shots for the sinking. I basically had to sink the Britannic in 8 shots. So you have to move it along. I knew that the Britannic wound up on it's side but, looking back, I rolled it way more dramatically than in real life. My father-in-law and I went to England to oversee the green screen filming. Simon Mills dropped by while we were there. He asked if we needed to see blueprints of the Britannic so he literally ran home and came back 20 minutes later. This was at Bray Studios. We got to hang out with John Rhys-Davies, Jacqueline Bisset, Edward Atterton. We got to have dinner with John Rhys-Davies one night which was freakin amazing. Just him, my father-in-law and I. The other cool thing was we worked with Terry Forrestal on how to go about shooting the lifeboat green screen shots. He is a stunt coordinator and was the in-between guy to help us communicate with the crew. He mentioned he was in Titanic. He played the chief engineer Joseph Bell down in the engine room. There's a great scene of him turning the valve handle when they reverse engines right before they hit the iceberg. And here he was working with us on the Britannic movie(Damn, I just read that he passed away from a base jumping accident in June 2000, he was the nicest guy). One thing about the lighting, at the time it still wasn't a good idea to have 3D animation in bright broad daylight so we made a conscience decision to keep it dark(ish). Things like environmental lighting and radiosity did even exist yet in 3D rendering. The DP decided to light the actors with a warm side light to make it feel a bit like sunrise. I used that as a guide for the sinking lighting. This was a movie after all and not a documentary on how the Britannic sank. I should note that most of the clouds in the backgrounds were hand painted in Photoshop (by Brian Dean) for the sinking scenes and some other shots. In 1999 there really weren't digital cameras to grab sky backgrounds with. If there were they were really low resolution. I've read comments on other videos that say the model looks low res. The Britannic model was just over a million polygons (in 1999). The movie was on Fox Family Channel so it was only ever standard definition (720x486). It is still one of the highlights of my animation career but man was it a lot of work. Anyway, keep up the good work on your videos and vessels you build on Storm Works. I play that with my son. Glad to see young people showing an interest in this kind of stuff. Also, glad to see that you take it seriously as well. Cheers.
Hello! Just finished reading your comment and I am honored to be replying to the person who helped to bring the Britannic’s story to light over the last 20 years. If you look up Britannic on RU-vid your model is plastered everywhere through film rips, and had to be one of the fore fathers of Britannic models/modeling to come! I do have to apologize however, may have gone a bit overboard with the criticism in this video with the process of the sinking you generated, it was 1999 after all, and RU-vid was 6 years away. Now I do find it very interesting how this all came together for the film. And there seems to be a lack of documentation for the Behind The Scenes of that film, so to hear it from one of the producers is fantastic. I don’t blame you for coming up with the conclusion at the time that the ship violently rolled, as A upright, and B capsized, was all you had to go off of. I am also very happy to hear your son is interested in my content!
That's so cool. I remember being a young child and watching the Britannic movie and just being amazed at how beautiful she was. When my teacher taught the class about Titanic I was immediately hooked. I read books about it, researched on my father's computer and asked people about it non-stop for an entire school term. Everyone in my class would be drawing the breakup like the 1997 James Cameron theory and 10 year old me was drawing my own theories about the breakup and my teacher was impressed. The drawings are gone unfortunately, I think my teacher might have them still but I examined the wreck and concluded that a large chunk of the stern was ripped off while she broke apart so I started drawing and came up with a theory that she broke just aft of the compass tower at a 20 to 25 degree angle and as the stern went under it was ripped apart and a large section got ripped apart and blasted away. Anyways, while my class was researching Titanic I was researching Lusitania, Aquitania, Mauretania, Oceanic, SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse and a bunch of other ships against my teachers orders and she was genuinely amazed at how much maritime knowledge I had. It was like a tree, Titanic sprouted to Britannic and Olympic and then they sprouted to the German Kaiserklasse ships and the Cunard ships and so on. I can't even imagine what my life would be like if my teacher didn't decide to teach us about Titanic. I've probably come up with or inspired major Titanic breakup theories without even knowing it. I'm now studying to be a marine engineer and naval architect so my interest in ships survives to this day. This side rant is going nowhere so I'll stop talking so you and I don't have a complete mental breakdown, haha. Great job on the move by the way, it's cool to be able to talk to someone who pretty much made me who I am today
2:50 Wait a min how would the last lifeboat be lowerd on Britannic if everybody escaped? That must mean that some people were stILL ON THE BRITANNIC AND WENT DO-
When I'm in the game, my telegraphs don't have handles...so if I change to "full ahead" for example it doesn't show the handles at all or show them moving. Can anyone help me on how to get them to display? I'm not finding directions online so far. Thank you in advance for any guidance!
I looked at the stern of olympic no sign at the back same with britannic no sign the only ship that has a sign on the back of the ship is TITANIC SO IT'S HALF TITANIC HALF OLYMPIC!
Lol the "S.S Olympic" in the Britannics lifeboat got me Titanic switch theory supporters be like oMg TiTaNiC swiTcHeD wiTh oLymPic aNd laTer sWitChed wiTh bRitAnNic
It's mistake that some of britannics lifeboats uad the name olympic because olympics lifeboats were stored to britannic so she would have many lifeboats
