By Matt Hurwitz, October 4, 2006
In "America's Underwater Treasures," Jean-Michel Cousteau's two-part finale to his PBS series, Ocean Adventures, the son of famed oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau uses state-of-the-art underwater HD video technology to bring viewers to the rarely visited underwater parks that constitute the National Marine Sanctuary System. The younger Cousteau insists, however, "This is not a travelogue. We're not doing documentaries; we're doing adventure shows."
"America's Underwater Treasures," produced by KQED Public Broadcasting in San Francisco and Cousteau's Santa Barbara-based Ocean Futures Society, wraps up the six-part series for the network, which includes "Sharks at Risk," "The Gray Whale Obstacle Course" and the two-part opener, "Voyage to Kure." A White House screening of the latter for President George W. Bush prompted the chief executive to declare the 1,200-mile chain of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands a national monument, the largest protected area in the world.
Much has changed since Cousteau first accompanied his father in producing underwater films. "In the '50s, we would be gone for six months and we had no communication. There was no cell phone, no radio, no satellite," he says. "When you come back, you don't know if you have a wife, if you have a son, if the house burned down, if your kid has been kicked out of school. That's real reality."
Cousteau is now accompanied not only by his own son and daughter, Fabien and Celine, but by a new addition to the family: high-definition video. He first put HD into action three and a half years ago, when production on Ocean Adventures began.
"I refused to use video up to that point because I simply didn't like it," he says. "It was so contrasty and lacked the quality that emulsion offered," but he eventually made the switch as image quality improved. "We now have diving equipment that allows us to stay underwater for extensive periods of time, and we have HD cameras, which have 50 minutes of video inside instead of 11 minutes of film."
"Jean-Michel was very enthusiastic about the new technology," adds longtime Cousteau director of photography Chuck Davis. "HD's come a long way in recent years, and I think he became impressed with the filmic look you can achieve now. Plus, you have the advantage of instant dailies when you come back from a dive."
While "Sharks at Risk," the first of the series to be filmed, was shot in 1080i, the production eventually shifted to the 24p Sony CineAlta F900A. "It isn't up to the resolution of film yet, but it works quite well, both underwater and above board," says Davis. The cameras, as well as Amphibico underwater housings, were leased from Cinematographer Tom Piozet's Santa Barbara-based Home Planet Productions, where Davis and his crew were trained in their use.
"You have to watch the contrast and watch the fidelity in the highlights, particularly shooting up into the light," Davis explains. "I really like to film the light underwater, the rays penetrating, because it drives a lot of these underwater ecosystems. I find myself hiding it a bit sometimes, though other times we just let it blow out if it works creatively."
The additional contrast of the F900 proved advantageous for underwater shooting. "The camera provides a little bit of extra contrast that really helps you read through the water, and it looks wonderful," the DP says.
Cousteau agrees. "When we are shooting, I go diving and I am an observer. I see things a lot of people don't see. But then I go to the editing room and say, 'I was there. How come I didn't see that?' The HD camera allows you to see things underwater that you don't see when you're diving. It literally goes through anything in suspension in the water. The camera sees further than your own vision. It's amazing."
Davis typically kept the gain settings on the cameras between -3, 0 and +3, but on the deepest of dives-to visit the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor wreck at 250 feet down-he found bumping things up to +12 produced fine results with minimal noise. "If I was near the surface, say, in American Samoa, I could work at -3. But down at the bottom, a lot of times I'd be at +6, or, at the Monitor, +12. It's just dark down there." Through-hole fittings on the Amphibico housing and fingertip controls to reach the camera's menu buttons made switching gain a snap.
For lighting, the Cousteau team's "workhorse" was the Pacific Vision PV200, a battery-powered 200W HMI developed by Cousteau and Pacific's Louis Prezelin. "Surface-supplied lights, dragging a 200-foot cable behind them, can be problematic, particularly in tough currents or in shipwrecks," Davis explains.
While Davis is particularly fond of the warm look of tungsten lighting underwater, he says HMI lights were the right tools for this project. "These lights [HMIs] put out three or four lumens per watt, so they're like having a 650W tungsten." The instruments were supplemented by several 1,200W surface-supplied HMIs whose ballasts remained aboard the boat.
The lights are all operated by lighting divers, a Cousteau trademark, as opposed to clamping them to the cameras, Davis notes. "I'll not only use them as fill lights but also as practical light sources. In a wide shot in an undersea wilderness, for instance, you might have a small diver silhouetted by a bright light. It tends to draw the eye to the diver before they're really evident." Sometimes a lighting diver can go from providing a fill light to becoming a subject within one shot. "We go back and forth. It's almost like a dance."
Good lighting divers are hard to come by-and greatly appreciated. "They have to be really good, stable swimmers because any movement or bouncing around will cause the image to be either blown out or underexposed. These guys are really good at holding these lights steady. It's not an easy job. We work almost through mental telepathy. You work with people long enough, they get the feel of where you're going."
For fixing color temperature, Davis uses a combination of an appropriate gel pack and in-camera scene files, the latter setup handled by digital imaging technician/1st AC Matt Ferraro. "We would generally balance our camera for about 9,500 Kelvin," Davis says, "but we actually had to put blue gels onto our HMI lights because it started to look too warm. The gels made it look more natural." For shooting in shallow depths, Davis chose a scene file for 5,600 K. "If I had a split-level shot, from near surface going to deep, I could switch the scene file just by pushing a button, which is a wonderful feature of the F900."
Some underwater DPs opt for up to six or seven scene files, but Davis does not prefer that much variety. "Some folks correct every 10 feet, which is a different approach. The way we film, especially with wildlife, I'd miss half the shots if I were sitting there trying to change color that often."
While most underwater creatures seem unaffected by the presence of artificial light, some marine mammals can be skittish around them. "I don't like using them around whales," Davis says. "Plus, trying to light a whale ... it's kind of futile."
Similarly, the use of rebreathers, which prevents exhausted breath bubbles from escaping into the water, allows the divers closer access to sea creatures that would otherwise be startled away. "It's not the bubbles themselves that startle the animals, it's the sound that the bubbles emit as they come out," Cousteau explains. "[Rebreathers] allow you to be quiet and stay there, as an observer-and, with the HD camera, you have 50 minutes to do it."
For those close macro shots of the smallest of creatures, the camera was most often mounted on an underwater tripod made by Eddie Paul's EP Industries of El Segundo, Calif. But Davis' most valuable tool for underwater macro cinematography is the Amphibico housing itself, particularly the optics of the housing's dome corrector. "I don't even have to use the macro function on the lens because the optics on the Amphibico are so good."
The corrector, developed by Fathom Imaging engineer Dr. Paul Remijan, features a dome of optical-grade acrylic with dual curvatures. "In the old days, there was just a flat piece of glass, which was problematic for wide lenses," Davis explains. "The colors would fringe out because light rays would hit at oblique angles on the edges. With the Amphibico dome corrector, the rays hit at a right angle from all points. The light might change speed, but it doesn't change direction."
The arrangement allows Davis to use a Canon 5mm short zoom or Fujinon 4.5, going through the full range from a close-up/macro to a wider shot. "It's incredibly convenient for folks like me who do this kind of work underwater because it gives you a lot of freedom and creativity while shooting."
Color can be an issue, particularly when a show contains underwater footage shot in the varied locations of 13 national marine sanctuaries off the coasts of Michigan, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Massachusetts, California, Oregon, Hawaii and American Samoa. "One thing we came across, particularly in the 'Whale' show, was that some of the water came out a blinding neon green," says creative director and editor Byron Thompson. When viewed during post, it was considered that the color must have been off, so it was neutralized somewhat during online editing. "We had to explain that scientists watching the show know that green water means healthy water. There's information in the color."
Adds Davis, "People who aren't divers and aren't used to working in this kind of environment tend to think water's always supposed to be blue and tend to keep everything blue throughout the show. That's fine for a commercial or theatrical project, but, in this case, temperate water tends to be greener because there's more plankton in it, while it's bluer in Hawaii."
Thompson cut the shows in standard definition with Final Cut Pro at his home in Atlanta. Online editing was performed later in high definition by online editor and Avid supervisor Robert O'Geen at KQED in San Francisco. The load of footage from 13 sites eventually led Thompson to add two additional editors: Jim Knowlton and Steve Morris. "I basically said, 'Guys, we have 13 locations-you watch it and make me a mini-movie. You find the stories that are interesting and we'll go from there.' We basically made 13 short films." The resultant total running time was over four hours, which was then arduously cut to the required 1:45 running time.
Avoiding the "travelogue" format meant being creative. "We rearranged the stories and found common themes to weave together. We didn't want to go, 'We went here, and then we went here, and then we went here.'"
Adds Cousteau, "Viewers get sick and tired of documentaries like that. After awhile, just looking at fish swimming gets to be boring."
Cousteau typically pre-researches and scripts a show as much as possible before an expedition hits the road. "Jean-Michel will have a wish list of shots," explains Davis, "but sometimes I might see stories developing in the water that I could just cover, and I go for it. He always gives me a lot of freedom to do that."
Adds Thompson, "Once they're out in the field, it's their responsibility to find the story. People like Chuck Davis know what you need to tell a story."
Some planned stories get made and some do not. "You have to be opportunistic. Typically we come back with 40 to 50 percent unplanned material," Cousteau says. "That's the adventure. That's the surprise. That's what nature offers."
Thompson ran across his own share of challenges when transferring files between Final Cut Pro and KQED's Avid Nitris, particularly with the transfer of motion effects. "Most of my slo-mos came up fine, but if I had repositioned anything in a frame, it all got lost when going from Final Cut to Avid."
Since Thompson was editing downconverted NTSC DVCAM, his timeline was drop-frame 29.97. "The trick was that, before I made my EDLs, I had to switch my timeline to non-drop frame." He did this with Final Cut Pro's Cinema Tools, which translated the EDL to one compatible with 24p.
To counteract the effects-loss problem, Thompson broke down the EDLs into individual timelines, which helped bring the effects shots to the attention of KQED's O'Geen. "He'd then re-create the effects by comparing the shot to my offline output."
A bigger challenge, Thompson says, was overcoming the F900's tendency to introduce countless timecode breaks into the raw footage when operating in 24p mode. "If the camera is placed in standby or gets shut off and is then turned back on, the head will not return to the same spot unless it's given a 'lens return' command," he explains.
"I had tapes that were 45 minutes long that had more than 110 timecode breaks! Digitizing that media took forever. Trying to edit that way is like bashing your head against a wall. It's very tedious and breaks up your flow. When it comes time to create an EDL, the timecodes are all wrong." Thompson ended up creating individual clips of each shot manually, providing a new timecode reference for each.
The effort is worthwhile. "I've heard so many times, when we talk to scientists in the field, 'You know, I'm a marine biologist because I watched Jacques Cousteau,'" says Thompson. "It makes me think, 'All these people did this because of Jacques. Where's the next generation going to get inspiration from?' So I do what I can to keep things moving and fresh, to try to inspire the next generation."
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