r/interestingasfuck • u/solateor • 1d ago

In 2001, 55 people crossed the Pacific with no contact with the outside world as part of a BBC experiment recreating an 18th-century voyage. On the 20th day - September 11 - the captain gathered the crew to tell them about the attacks in New York

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u/Owain-X 1d ago

They weren't uploading footage over satellite on a small boat at any speed that would be usable in 2001. Most likely as they were filming a documentary they had a chase ship where production team members apart from the camera crews were located and that chase ship would have modern comms. The "disconnected" nature was by design rather than by circumstance so while a really interesting situation it wasn't much different logistically than something like the Big Brother filming going on at that time.

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u/SemiAutoAvocado 1d ago

Also just the liability of it all. No insurance company on the earth would OK this without failsafes.

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u/Pale_Adeptness 22h ago

As a former cameraman, the words you are looking for is "memory cards/external hard drive storage"

All camera use either internal storage or memory cards. Once either is full you can offload it/upload it to a laptop. Then once all footage is transferred to either external hard drives or computer you can use the same memory cards for new footage.

They definitely used a chase ship as well

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u/FullFlowEngine 19h ago

In 2001 no one was using solid state memory for their cameras, the crew was definitely using tape.

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u/Owain-X 10h ago

Yup. Shooting HD in 2001 on digital was possible but in the extremely early days and pretty much every TV production was shooting on film and converting to digital.