IMAX Film Crew on Undersea Explorer

A team from IMAX spent three weeks filming the Great Barrier Reef on Undersea Explorer recently.  They have now completed four of five filming expeditions for “Under the Sea 3D” and it was a great success according to Howard and Michelle Hall from IMAX.  See below for a full account of the expedition.

Port Douglas Reef Futures Festival

As I am sure you are already aware, 2008 has been designated as the 2^nd International Year of the Reef (IYOR), following on from the very successful first IYOR in 1997, which has over 225 organisations in 50 countries and territories participating.  There are many community-driven events going on around the world to highlight the importance of coral reefs, and also to educate the public about ways to halt the decline of coral reefs and associated ecosystems.

Undersea Explorer is working in partnership the Low Isles Preservation Society, the Douglas Shire Sustainability Group, Art House, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, other Port Douglas dive and tourist companies and community organisations to organise the Port Douglas International Year of the Reef Festival on October 24 and 25 2008. 

The festival will incorporate a variety of events aimed at capturing the attention of audiences both young and old.  Our goals are not only to raise awareness of the value of the Great Barrier Reef to our community and the environmental threats that it is facing, but also to inspire broad scale changes in attitude and behaviour to help to protect and conserve our resource.  In short, we aim to make a real difference. 

Attached is a Schedule of Events with brief descriptions.  If you are in Port Douglas during this period, please come along and support our event!  Alternatively, keep an eye out for any events that may be held in your area.

IMAX ON UNDERSEA EXPLORER

Blog by Howard from IMAX:

As I write this, our underwater crew is now on it’s way home after three weeks filming on the Great Barrier Reef.  We have now completed four of our five filming expeditions for Under the Sea 3D and this most recent expedition has been a great success with all but one of the main targeted behavioral sequences captured.

Our expedition boat, the Undersea Explorer, proved an excellent working vessel.  The boat was comfortable, her crew was wonderful, and the food was great.  I want to take this opportunity to thank the Undersea Explorer, her management, and her crew for making this successful expedition possible.  I also want to thank our Barrier Reef marine life consultant, John Rumney, for his invaluable contribution.

The trip started especially well with literally perfect weather.  Our first day was spent filming dwarf minke whales on a mirror-calm sea.  That these conditions were unusual for the Great Barrier Reef in winter is understatement.  We were all aware that the placid conditions were temporary and we did our best to take advantage of our good fortune while it lasted.  Of course, trying to film whales underwater with a 1,300-pound camera is not very practical.  Fortunately, as with all good underwater whale encounters, the minke whales proved curious and came to us, or at least to the boat.  John Rumney and the Undersea Explorer crew took us to several good sites where, in the Austral winter, the dwarf minke whales seem to enjoy swimming near the boat, often approaching divers to within a few feet.  With the big IMAX camera, all we had to do was wait and the whales would occasionally glide by within camera range.  After five hours underwater on our first day we managed to expose two braces of film capturing several excellent shots of the whales.  In one shot four whales can be seen in a single frame.  I hope I got that shot in focus!

The next day the wind returned.  By mid-morning it was blowing a moderate 20 knots or so and it more or less stayed that way for most of the following ten days.  Fortunately the Undersea Explorer mitigates the effect of wind by mooring from the starboard side of the boat rather than the bow.  This greatly minimizes the roll one would normally expect on most boats in a 20-knot wind.  The reef itself also affords considerable protection depending upon the tide and the boat’s distance from the reef.

On our second day filming whales we saw a few large jellyfish drifting by the boat.  Jeff Wildermuth actually saw a green sea turtle eating one as he drifted down current while the camera was being reloaded.  He reported it over the OTS underwater comm, but with the IMAX camera on the deck being serviced there was nothing we could do about it.  A shot of a turtle eating a jellyfish would have been spectacular and I have long dreamed of getting this shot in any format, but with the IMAX 3D camera I would have been very happy to just get a good shot of a large jellyfish.  At first that proved tough enough.

The next day Peter Kragh, Mark Thurlow, and I went to quite heroic efforts to retrieve a large jellyfish we saw drifting by in the current by engulfing it in a large plastic garbage bag and then attempting to drag it back to the boat against the current.  When that proved hopeless, we used our invaluable OTS comms to call Michele on the Undersea Explorer asking that they send out their inflatable to help tow us back.  Undersea Explorer marine biologist Qamar Schuyler and Hostess Nicole Szalak came to our rescue, but towing three divers and a huge jellyfish through the current and wind-chop proved too much even for the inflatable.  After an hour or more of hard work (fifteen minutes or so of that spent as three “dopes on a rope” behind the inflatable boat) we only lost ground against the current.  So we abandoned our efforts, released the jellyfish and climbed into the inflatable.  Qamar and Nicole returned us to the boat.

Beneath the Undersea Explorer we found Dave Forsyth holding a second garbage bag with two captured jellyfish.  What’s more, we began seeing numerous jellyfish simply drifting by.  We called the camera in and captured several excellent shots.

One of the Undersea Explorer’s divemasters, Brendan Robinson, told us that during the last few weeks he had seen turtles eating jellyfish several times at Lighthouse Bommie where the turtles were especially tame.  This is the same site where we filmed whales our first day.  We went back there the next day.

During the following days we not only captured great shots of jellyfish at Lighthouse Bommie, but we filmed green sea turtles enthusiastically feeding on them from three feet away.  In all the years I have been diving, I have only seen a turtle eat a jellyfish (tiny thimble jellyfish in that case) one other time, and I only managed to capture a brief shot of it from a distance of fifteen feet.  Not only did we capture spectacular shots of a green turtle eating this large spectacular jellyfish, but while the camera was being loaded I saw three different turtles feed on the large medusas.  By the time we were finished we had exposed three braces of film of turtles eating jellyfish.  I believe this will be one of the best sequences in the film.

After filming minke whales, turtles, and jellyfish, we steamed out to Osprey Reef in the Coral Sea.  There we filmed one of the most colorful reef walls I have ever seen.  During the several days we spent at Osprey, we also filmed three species of sharks and a chambered nautilus.

Once our work was completed at Osprey Reef we visited the famous Cod Hole near Lizard Island where we filmed potato cod.  These are large fish weighing up to 200 pounds.  In many shots their enormous rubbery lips kiss the IMAX 3D port, which should produce a rather startling effect for future UTS3D audiences.  We also captured scenes of cleaner wrasse servicing the big cod.

After the Cod Hole we went to a site called Steve’s Bommie where we found stonefish, the world’s most venomous, and perhaps homeliest, fish.  Our goal was to capture a scene of a stonefish feeding, a shot we knew would be difficult at best.  We did eventually get the shot and it looked great through the camera’s video viewfinder, but it wasn’t easy.  We shattered all our previous single dive duration records while waiting for the stonefish to feed.  We were down just over six hours on that one single dive!  We went into the water after breakfast and came out at dusk.  Water temperature was 75 degrees F.  That may sound warm to non-divers, but after six hours our team was nearly hypothermic.   Still, all of us thought the shot was well worth the effort.

After two weeks of shooting, we intended to return to Lighthouse Bommie to film olive sea snakes. While filming the turtles and jellyfish there, sea snakes were literally swimming between our legs.  Nothing should have been easier.  Unfortunately, our early luck with the weather completely ran dry during our last week at sea.  Wind conditions rose from a modest 20-knots to between 30 and 35-knots, with gusts to 40.  We went out to Lighthouse Bommie and the Undersea Explorer crew courageously moored the boat.  Then my crew and I stood by as Captain Jon Marsden and John Rumney watched the waves crashing against the stern.  All of us wanted to dive but we were more concerned that the potential impact of the huge camera dropping on the winch cable between crashing waves was just too dangerous.  So we released the mooring and returned to the shelter of the reef.

We spent our last several days filming the absolutely beautiful coral gardens on the Great Barrier Reef.  In many places the living coral cover is 100% and the variety is stunning.  The wind, however, never abated.  In the end, we returned to Port Douglas two days early, which gave us much needed time for gear maintenance and the tedious job of packing our 103 cases of gear for shipment to Bali.  Michele was tasked with inventorying every single item that was packed and, as it turned out, we needed every minute of the extra days in port to get the job done.

I want to again thank Undersea Explorer and her crew for a wonderful and productive trip  I also want to thank Mark Spencer who joined us for our Barrier Reef Expedition and ably served as part of our launch and recovery crew.  Mark’s diving skills, and the underwater images he captured of our crew in action are much appreciated.  I want to also thank Mark for recommending the Undersea Explorer in the first place when I began communicating with him about a Barrier Reef portion of the film nearly two years ago.

Next up is Indonesia aboard the M/S Seven Seas.  In just five weeks our team will be off to Bali to begin the last of our Under the Sea 3D adventures.  In a week or so I will post my journal on the howardhall.com website for those interested in all the details of our recent trip, accompanied by the still images Michele and our other crew members captured.

For more information and reservations, please visit:
http://www.diveguide.com/underseaexplorer