Six years before explorers found the wrecked Titanic, in 1985, model builder Angelo Delia formed part of a team that assembled a replica of the majestic ship.

The 55-foot-long model was built for the 1980 film Raise the Titanic, shot at the Mediterranean Film Studios in Kalkara, where it still lies.

Battered, beaten and rotting away – much like the real Titanic – the model sits outdoors, beneath the studio’s deep water tank that was built purposely for the film.

“We’ve been planning to restore the model. We need to find the time,” Mr Delia, who has been building models for films for the past 45 years, said.

The Titanic model was brought to Malta from the UK in 1979. “It was dismantled and we had to put it together,” Mr Delia, 61, recalled, adding it took eight workers about three months to complete the job.

According to the website titanic-model.com this was the largest model ever made of the Titanic, costing about €3.8 million today to build. It weighed 10 tons, stood 12 feet high and was 55 feet long.

“It used to light up. It was a beauty,” Mr Delia, known as Ġolu tal-films, recalls.

He explained how after making the model look like the sparkling new ship that set sail in 1912, it was sunk in the studio’s shallow tank to film the sinking scene and recreate the tragedy in which hundreds of people died.

The British passenger liner hit an iceberg during her maiden voyage in the North Atlantic Ocean on April 14, 1912, 100 years ago today.

“First, we had to make it look perfect, then destroy it … that’s what we do here,” Mr Delia smiled nostalgically as he stroked the derelict model.

The sunken model was then removed from the shallow tank and builders made it look battered and beaten, as though it had been underwater for years.

It was then sunk in the nearby deep water tank where the scene where the ship is seen being refloated was filmed.

The model was built in one piece. Although some survivors had said they saw the ship break into two, which, in fact, was the case, this remained a mystery until 1985 when the wreck was discovered two-and-a-half miles below the surface.

Raise the Titanic, an American film, was produced by Pimlico Films Ltd. Based on Clive Cussler’s bes-seller Raise The Titanic, it told the story of the American military that had an experimental defence system that required an extremely rare mineral in order to work.

Investigations found that a miner exported some of the mineral aboard the Titanic. The film revolved around efforts to raise the Titanic from the ocean floor.