ES TO CAPTURE DRAMA OF DEEP
Flying fish It started as no more than a rumour. A “friend of a friend of a friend” had told the team about fish that leapt from the ocean to capture and eat seabirds.
And when the team finally filmed giant trevally fish grabbing their prey it was similar to the suspense of the racer snake sequence in last year’s Planet Earth II.
Mark says: “Our ambition was to try to introduce the audience to new characters and show the complexity of the marine world that perhaps we weren’t even dolphins scenes of the new d dolphins surfing in aves. t looks like they are ere actually being ecialist cameraman
and rode jet skis to dible footage. “To find those new ng stories we have s ourselves and go to new worlds and it requires highly trained skills.
“Filming in those massive breakers in South Africa that required its own skill set.
“That’s why we called for Chris Bryan. He’s a surfing cameraman.
“He specialises in filming huge waves. If you don’t know what you are doing you could drown.
“It requires huge experience in knowing how to breathe in between the breaking waves.” aware of. We got a tip-off from a friend of a friend of a friend whose mate was a South African fly fisherman who had been on a fishing tour in the Indian Ocean and spotted these giant reef fish leaping into the air and catching birds in mid-flight.
“In this case we didn’t have a scientific paper or even a photograph to go on and so it was a real leap of faith.”
Mark says they managed to track down the fisherman who described the huge fish. He says, “We thought, ‘We’ve just got to go for it’.” Percy the tuskfish The essence of perseverance, Percy used his teeth to smash open clams in the first episode of Blue Planet II – after a lot of tries.
Mark reveals the underwater cameraman had to wait for weeks to capture this amazing behaviour and was only able to do so with the help of special diving kit.
“We work with highly trained professionals who make entire careers out of underwater filming,” he says. “We were using ex-military rebreather apparatus. Unlike scuba, which produces a lot of bubbles and noise, we use closed breathing loops, which means when you exhale your breath isn’t let out. You rebreathe it in with topped-up oxygen.
“It’s dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.
“You can stay underwater for four and a half hours in silence and the creatures just accept you.
“That’s how we were able to film Percy, who got used to our cameraman as he sat week after week getting to know this fish.” Mobula rays eating plankton One of the most beautiful scenes in episode one shows mobula rays feeding on plankton.
Technology meant the plankton, which light up when disturbed, could be filmed for the first time.
Mark says the phosphorescent plankton was visible to the naked eye but only the latest camera sensors made the spectacular sequence possible.
Mark says: “It was like something out of Harry Potter. It was so wondrous.” Mark and his team were also able to film marine life in extraordinarily deep water – about 1,000 metres – thanks to low light camera technology.
He says: “We spent over 1,000 hours in submersibles for one episode. It was pitch dark.
“We were able to film these great squadrons of Humboldt squid that feed on lanternfish and we’ve got footage of them hunting in packs and then turning on themselves.
They are cannibals, they eat each other. It’s extraordinary.”