|
Email From a Shark (Shark Bay Films), VHSThe Secrets of Southern Australia by Charlie Oldfield (SeaDragon70), VHS
Email From a Shark (Shark Bay Films), VHSThe Secrets of Southern Australia by Charlie Oldfield (SeaDragon70), VHS
Veteran underwater film-maker Stanton Waterman once gave me some advice on making underwater documentaries. Don't just film what you did on your diving holiday, he said. Find a niche, something that hasn't been done before, a new story, unusual marine behaviour or rarely seen creatures. I have been watching two new videos that do just that.
Email From a Shark has taken some fairly commonplace footage from the Cornish coast featuring basking sharks and turned it into an underwater mystery by combining it with the work of two researchers, Dr David Sims and Colin Speedie. Where the sharks go in winter, what they do and where they come from has always been a mystery. Dr Sims' project aims to solve it by tagging 10 sharks with devices that will send back emails indicating what they get up to when they're not visible near the surface.
The team experience the frustrations of tagging such big creatures as Speedie tries to photograph them at the surface. It would be unfair to reveal the results, but they do smash many existing theories.
The content is excellent, though it doesn't match production quality you would expect from the BBC or Channel Four. Also, it's only 25 minutes long, and with imagination could have been extended and made more dramatic. Still, if you like basking sharks this video will be a hit in gift stores in coastal Cornwall.
You wouldn't buy The Secrets of Southern Australia unless you were going on a diving holiday there, but after watching it I felt this was just the sort of destination I should be visiting.
Over 55 minutes there was plenty of footage of unusual marine creatures such as leafy and weedy seadragons, saw sharks and giant Australian cuttlefish. More common creatures are made all the more fascinating by revealing clips of behaviour rarely seen by divers, including mating habits, electrocution of fish by the numb ray and crabs mugging each other.
It's everything Stan Waterman recommended a film should be and, despite the rather amateurish production quality, I preferred it to many of the more expensive wildlife documentaries.
A surefire hit on the shelves of the Warrnambool gift shop and worth the trip there to get a copy.
Brendan O'Brien
|
Email From a Shark (Shark Bay Films, email: info@sharkbayfilms.demon.co.uk). VHS, 27min, £15
The Secrets of Southern Australia by Charlie Oldfield (SeaDragon70, www.fourthelement.com). VHS, 52min, £15
|
|
|
Archive | 
