10 "how deep" video ideas
Tap one to put it in the box above.
The short answer
The ocean is about 3,688 meters (12,100 feet) deep on average. Its deepest known point is the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific, about 10,935 meters (35,876 feet) down. Mount Everest is 8,849 meters tall, so it would fit inside the Challenger Deep with more than two kilometers of water above its peak.
The ocean, zone by zone
| Zone | Depth | What it is like |
|---|---|---|
| Sunlight zone (epipelagic) | 0 to 200 m | Enough light for plants and algae; most sea life you know lives here. |
| Twilight zone (mesopelagic) | 200 to 1,000 m | Faint blue light fades out; many animals glow (bioluminescence). |
| Midnight zone (bathypelagic) | 1,000 to 4,000 m | No sunlight at all; cold, crushing pressure; anglerfish and giant squid. |
| Abyss (abyssopelagic) | 4,000 to 6,000 m | Near-freezing water over flat plains of sediment covering most of the sea floor. |
| Hadal zone (hadopelagic) | 6,000 m to the trench floors | The deep trenches; pressure over 1,000 times what you feel at the surface. |
Depth landmarks
- 332 m: the deepest scuba dive on record (Ahmed Gabr, 2014).
- About 2,000 m and more: sperm whales hunt squid this deep; Cuvier's beaked whales have been tracked near 3,000 m.
- About 3,800 m: the wreck of the Titanic.
- About 3,688 m: the average depth of the whole ocean.
- 8,849 m: the height of Mount Everest, for scale.
- About 10,935 m: the Challenger Deep. People first reached it in 1960 in the bathyscaphe Trieste (Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh); James Cameron dove it alone in 2012, and Victor Vescovo made repeated dives from 2019.
Make your own ocean depth video
The depth descent is one of the most watched formats on Shorts: the water darkens from bright cyan to black as you sink, a ruler on the side counts the meters, and at every stop a creature or a landmark fills the frame. Videos in this format have passed 100 million views (credited embeds on this page).
- Start on this page. The ocean-depth style is picked.
- Write the descent in one sentence. "From the surface to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, one landmark at a time", or a lake, a trench or a famous wreck.
- Set 30 to 60 seconds. Six to ten depth stops.
- Preview the script for free and check each depth against a source (NOAA is a good one).
- Press Generate. You get the 3D underwater pictures, the depth ruler, a deep voice, captions and a low drone score, ending with "how far down would you go?"
What it costs
A 15 second Ocean depth reel costs 930 credits on Basic. A 30 second one costs 1,430 on Basic, 4,780 on Premium and 11,550 on Ultra. New accounts get 400 free credits, no card. The Reel Factory plan gives 10,000 credits a month (see pricing).
Your first 15 second reel is free
New accounts get 400 free credits, no card. The exact price of every run is on the Generate button before anything runs.
The look, from the style
Ocean depth at a glance
- Look
- Vertical 3D CG water that darkens from bright cyan to black as you sink, a thin ruler or depth counter at the edge (meters, Burj Khalifa and sub markers), one creature or object fills the frame at eac
- Kind of video
- Scale
- Voice
- Brian, a narrator voice
- Music
- Horror drone
- Pace
- a new picture about every 3.7 seconds