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 It's a scene of startling beauty: Countless garden eels, some more
than 6 feet long, rise out of their ocean-floor burrows and, as they
waver in the ocean current, they resemble a field of tall grasses in a
gentle breeze.
This shot, from the new IMAX documentary "Under the Sea 3D," now
showing at Celebration North, was costly, time-consuming and required
mountains of patience.
"Every time we'd turn the camera on, they'd go
down into their holes," said director Howard Hall, calling from
Detroit, where he was promoting the film. "We had to turn it off and on
to acclimate them to the noise. At $60 a second, which is what it costs
to run the IMAX 3D camera, it's an expensive proposition. In the film,
you can see the eels slowly going down, and they're reacting to the
camera running."
The success of Hall's 2006 "Deep Sea 3D" film, which grossed $37
million on domestic IMAX screens, opened the door for a follow-up
project, which he undertook with his wife, producer Michele Hall. They
hauled the ridiculously impractical, 1,300-pound IMAX 3D camera --
which only shoots three minutes at a time before needing a reload -- to
remote locations near Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, shooting 10 hours
of film for the 40-minute final product.
He waited six hours to film a stonefish, camouflaged in the sand, lunging at its prey.
"Having that kind of patience is probably a genetic defect that I've
got," he said. "I can understand why other people wouldn't bother. I
spent 350 hours underwater making the film, and a lot of that is just
waiting for things to happen.
Howard, who has had a 30-year career filming numerous underwater
documentaries for TV and the big screen, considers himself, first and
foremost, an oceanographer. He said anticipating the animals' behavior
and understanding the ecosystems is the expertise he relies upon most
while shooting.
There's also an exploratory element to his work; documenting
wildlife in obscure places means capturing on film creatures nobody has
ever seen before.
"Some species in the film haven't even been identified yet," he
said. "The little shark that crawls along the bottom is an undescribed
species."
by John Serba | The Grand Rapids Press
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