Titanic has become one of the World’s top visited attractions, telling not just the story of the ship, but the people and city who built her.

Whilst at Event Communications, Dan provided design and sound for two of the galleries: 3d design for the Arrol Gantry and immersive shipyard dark ride experience and an eight-minute atmospheric soundtrack for the Wreck Theatre, for Graham English and Co.

The ride is a pulsed, five-minute, multi-level and multi-scene experience, with visitors being transported back in time to the Harland and Wolff shipyard of 1909/10, to see how Titanic was constructed. Dan planned out the theatrical, narrative and practical elements of the ride (with content developer Victoria Kingston) He designed each scene, the ride car choreography, visitor queuing, pulsing and load-in/load out parameters to synchronise with all filmic and special effect interventions.

Fire, emergency, evacuation and maintenance planning was also critical. This was a complex three-dimensional design challenge, but worth the effort as the ride consistently tops the visitors’ poll of most popular gallery of the overall experience. 

Towards the end of the attraction, visitors enter a dark, triple height theatre space, showing at huge scale Dr Bob Ballard’s eerie and very powerful 1986 film of when he discovered the Titanic wreck, laying some 2.5 miles beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

Dan was asked to create a soundtrack that would be sympathetic to the visually arresting film. The audio had to ebb and flow with the rhythm of the edited footage, creating punctuation points for some of the more impactful and emotional scenes (a pair of shoes, a clock and china dinner plates, for example)

The film is projected eight metres wide and Dan’s soundtrack was composed and mixed in Dolby 5.1 surround sound to synchronise with the film and fully complement the immersive effect.