The film, which was shot over the course of two summers along South Africa’s wild coastline, documents the annual sardine run. During these runs, massive schools of sardines measuring up to 15km long migrate up the KwaZulu-Natal Coast in search of food. This draws many predators to the area, including thousands of sharks, dolphins and whales.
“There were several challenges – the remoteness of the location and the fact that we wanted to do it in 3D,” says Roller. “That area of South Africa is all wild coastlines and there are no houses or anything built up along the shore. A lot of the shoreline through there consists of big vertical cliffs with waterfalls. So there’s not necessarily easy access to the shore. A lot of times we would have to get in a river, and go down a tributary and out through a river delta.”
He explains that he and a crew of about five, including director Luke Cresswell and 1st AC Vance Wiese, would head out to sea in two, 25ft inflatable Zodiac boats, chasing massive ‘bait balls’ or schools of sardines, and the predators that followed them. In total they shot around 150 dives.
They relied on a Cameron/Pace Fusion Underwater HD 3D camera system, as well as an underwater housing system also designed by Pace Technologies. The Fusion system, originally developed in a collaboration between director and producer James Cameron and cinematographer Vince Pace, includes two parallel Sony F950s tethered to a Sony SRW-1 recording deck in a separate underwater housing. The cameras were outfitted with Fujinon HA10X5B-W50 HD Cine Style zoom lenses, encased in specially made lens barrels designed for the Pace rig.
According to Roller, “the lenses specifically helped us in the sense that we were diving out of small inflatable boats, and so we weren’t able to open up a camera housing and the elements to change out lenses. So we needed a lens that would serve a lot of different purposes in one package. So the 5-50mm lenses gave us a very wide field of view, but also allowed us to punch in at times.” He adds that with issues such as weight and recording time, “some of the previous 3D technology would not have even allowed us to get there.” In terms of postproduction, he explains that the directors did the editing in Final Cut Pro, while conforming and color correction were carried out at LA-based FotoKem using Quantel’s Pablo finishing system with new 3D software that was introduced to the market last September.
Roller has a long history with stereoscopic 3D and underwater cinematography having served as a cinematographer alongside Vince Pace and James Cameron on the 2003 film Ghosts of the Abyss, using some of Pace’s earliest 3D rigs. Roller was also a camera operator on the recently released film U2 3D, and first unit camera operator in Iceland on Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D.
In addition, Roller has lead film expeditions on all seven continents for documentaries for National Geographic, Discovery Channel, Nova/(PBS) and The History Channel, including the acclaimed 2003 Nature documentary, Under Antarctic Ice.
He explains that for underwater shoots, the crew size is always limited and that for Wild Ocean he operated the cameras himself, pulling focus, convergence and iris. “You wouldn’t want to take 20 people underwater,” he says. “But the way that Pace has set up the camera with controls to the Fujinon lenses allowed me to pull convergence, focus and iris externally.”
But his ability to operate 3D cameras underwater probably has as much to do with his experience with 3D in general, both underwater and on the surface.
“I could see very clearly through the mask and I kind of do a dance with the camera underwater – a dance with my fingers on the controls. I can move the lens even when someone is not pulling focus for me. You can pull focus or pull convergence to a place at times without even looking, because you know when you move your fingers on a knob from here to there, you just know you’re going from this point to that point. Sometimes I can do that on that fly, because I knew where it needed to be in relative space, and I could move the knobs without even looking at them,” he explains.
“I could also look to double check if I wanted to, but after you’ve done it for a while, you get it down to the point where it’s just a motor skill,” he adds. He explain that to ‘double check,” he had a viewfinder that could display one eye, or he could shoot with an underwater monitor that would display the separation in the image.
The cameras were tethered to a Sony SRW-1 deck in a separate underwater housing, operated by long-time collaborator, 1st AC Vance Wiese. The SRW-1 has the ability to record in 3D by taking dual 4:2:2 inputs for left eye and right eye, giving them a recording time of 26 minutes underwater. It’s also possible to record to two SRW-1 decks in dual 4:4:4, but that would have been far less practical underwater.
Roller explains that he and Wiese have worked together on numerous underwater documentaries and that, “after you’ve been diving with someone for a long time you can almost look at the other person and know what they’re thinking. Even though we had voice communication between divers and also diver-to-surface, we could do a lot without talking at times.
“I’ve been diving and filming for a long time underwater, so the diving is second nature to me. It allows me to focus on the creative and the filming,” adds Roller. “But on Wild Ocean it got very chaotic at times, because it was a massive feeding frenzy underwater and there’s a lot of action going on around you.”
Plus there was always the constant threat of thousands of frenzied Black Tip and Zambezi sharks. “We did have some Great White sightings in the area, but Great Whites don’t really frequent the area,” says Roller. Nevertheless, in addition to the film crew, they also had a frog squad to help ward off any sharks that came a little too close.
“The bait ball could be over a kilometer in diameter, and there could be thousands of sharks in the area – more sharks than I’ve ever seen in any ocean,” says Roller. “They could get very frisky and very forward. And they always seem to come up behind you – and just in those instances where they got a little bit too close, the frog squad would help send them off. It wasn’t that any of them were trying to attack. Basically, we wanted to prevent any chance that one might come up and taste somebody just to see what they taste like, and then figure out that they’re not a sardine.”
Overhead, the crew was accompanied by two ultralight aircraft, which would guide them to the ‘action’ and warn them of sharks sneaking up from behind. All of them were connected by a sophisticated underwater communications system developed by Ocean Technology Systems, which enabled the divers to communicate with each other, with the surface, and with the ultralights overhead.
“It’s a critical link,” says Roller. “If there was an emergency or divers are coming to the surface, the boats would know we were coming, or if there was a problem on the surface they could let us know.”
He explains that the ability to get in and out of the water quickly was vital, and that, “right at the beginning, we had the grip department build a small plastic spine. We could take the camera, deploy it and be in the water in a matter of seconds… timing is everything, because wild animals don’t give you a second take.”
According to Roller, once they were in the water the Pace housings for the camera and the deck were so well balanced that he could “easily push them through the water with my finger. They may look big, but they’re very pleasant to swim with underwater. I’m used to using much larger housings, so I was very comfortable taking those out there.”
Back on dry land
Roller reports that while he enjoys the unique challenges of underwater filmmaking, he also enjoys variety. Indeed, he’s equally prolific on dry land. Last year, he served as a camera operator for Pace on a live stereoscopic 3D presentation of the National Basketball Association’s All-Star game. The game was broadcast from the Thomas & Mack Center at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, across town to a theater at the Mandalay Bay for an invite-only crowd.
“What I saw there was absolutely spectacular, and there were actually people who had tickets to the live event, who stayed to watch it again on a 40ft screen. They described it as having the seven best seats in the house.” For the NBA tests, they had seven pairs of cameras running.
“In the past, they might have an event and have 17 or even more cameras covering one event and in 2D, they’re going to cut to all these different cameras to make it interesting,” says Roller. “I think in 3D, the cutting gets slowed down a bit, although it has also been proved that you can cut fast as well, as long as it’s the right shots cutting to each other.”
Here again, experience with 3D comes into play; however, “on the surface,” explains Roller, he would typically have the luxury of a focus/convergence puller. “Obviously, for live events, you’d want to have some sort of linked focus and convergence pull, depending on the situation. You can link things where you’re always converged behind the subject (or in front), so that every time you pull focus it’s converging just behind the subject. “If it’s a really challenging shot you may have two people doing it. The projects for me have kind of spanned the gamut, where we’ve had several layers of people on a feature type of project, to Wild Ocean, where we really wanted to have the least amount of people in the water as possible.”
Overall, Roller is gung-ho for live 3D sporting events, and believes that, so long as the cameras are properly aligned, the technology is up to the task. “Now it’s just a matter of the different entities figuring out how they’re going to get the content out to the audiences.”
One key question in stereoscopic filmmaking today is the issue of parallel cameras vs convergence cameras, which are offset at 90deg with a beam splitter in the middle. While most of his 3D projects were shot with the parallel configuration, including his work on 3ality Digital’s recently released concert film U2 3D, Roller explains that for his work on Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D, he got to try a convergence rig.
In Iceland, Roller shot live-action plates in a wind-swept valley on the edge of a glacier, under extremely cold conditions. “On that project, I worked as a first unit camera operator in Iceland on live-action sequences and most of the time we were using the beam splitter there,” he says. “We were there for about a week and did all those sequences. It worked out really well. The cameras were fine. We worked with them on lots of different mounts.”
But Roller is diplomatic on this somewhat controversial issue. “They’re both great approaches to 3D, and there are a lot of opinions. There are definitely right and wrong ways to do 3D, and these can yield results where you can see whether they work or don’t work. But as far as an overall approach, there are people that only shoot parallel and other people that only shoot converged, and I think there’s a time and place for all of them. There are places where they work or don’t work, and I think a lot of it comes down to what the creative calls for in the film.”
Overall, Roller cautions intrepid 3D filmmakers that, “it’s not like going from SD to HD. There’s a lot more to think about in 3D, and basically, it’s a lot harder, but I think as the systems keep evolving it’s becoming easier and easier. It’s not like in the past where gimmicky things come out of the screen at you. It kind of makes the screen disappear and you look in to another world. It’s like being there, and when the cameras are very well aligned, as they are today, you can watch a long movie or sporting event and not get a headache.”
 |
Scott LehaneScott Lehane is a Toronto-based journalist and documentary film producer. He can be reached at scottlehane@sympatico.ca |