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By Kristinha M. Anding
Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM
Covert capture with the Oceanic Preservation Society.
There’s Something Very Mission:Impossible about the Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS), a Boulder, Colo.-based nonprofit that creates films about the decline of the Earth’s oceans — and stops at virtually nothing to get a good shot.
Executive Director Louie Psihoyos spent years as a professional photographer shooting stunning images for publications including National Geographic before launching the OPS with the backing of billionaire Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and WebMD. Psihoyos then enlisted a little help from his friends: a dream team of professionals with expertise in everything from sailing and diving to avionics technology. This diverse skill set came in handy when the OPS brought its cameras — and commitment — to the land, sea, and air of Taiji, Japan.
According to Psihoyos, the small coastal fishing village has been the scene of a secretive slaughter operation taking the lives of thousands of dolphins annually.
“It’s called drive fishing,” Pishoyos says. “Thirteen boats go out, and they just wait for the dolphins to come by on their ancient migratory route. Once they come, they start banging on these pipes in the water. They make this wall of sound and start to slowly push the dolphins in one direction. They drive them into this lagoon, seal it off with nets, and then, the next day, come back for the slaughter.”
Psihoyos says the killings are legally and ethically questionable. But truly controversial, he says, is that the dolphin meat, contaminated with mercury levels up to 3,500 times higher than those allowable by Japanese law, has ended up in the nation’s school lunch programs and the food supply at large. He decided to make the dolphin slaughter the launching point for The Rising, an OPS film revealing the connection between oceanic pollution and human health.
By land
Psihoyos first went to Taiji with Flipper-dolphin-trainer-turned-dolphin-advocate Ric O'Barry, who had been trying to gain access to the secret killing lagoon for years. Because the cove is protected by both a natural fortress of imposing cliffs and a manmade fortress of high steel fences, guards, tarps, and razor wire, O'Barry had considered the task impossible.
“I told him, ‘Nothing’s impossible,’” Psihoyos says. “I started thinking, ‘How would we do it?’ I'd been to one of the temples in Kyoto, where there are famous gardens with rocks in the center. Thousands of people show up there just to watch the rocks. I thought, ‘Well, what if the rocks looked back?’”
With the help of Kerner Optical (of Industrial Light & Magic fame), the OPS fashioned five rock housings to match the shape and texture of the rocks in the lagoon. Into these, the team inserted Sony HDR-SR1s hot-rodded with 100GB hard drives and Automated Media Systems Li-77 expedition batteries to gain 10 hours and 55 minutes of run time.
But the real trick was getting these “rock cams” into the cove. The OPS filmmakers had already, through their association with O'Barry (and by the mere fact that they were Westerners with cameras), aroused suspicion among Taiji police and city officials, who wanted to protect the town’s dolphin-hunting interests from prying international eyes. With the police on their tail, the documentarians engaged in a little deception.
“We had to rent multiple cars and have one person in a vehicle looking as though they were on their way to do an operation go one way and then, 15 minutes later, send a second team and sometimes a third team out as decoys before we could send the people out to plant the cameras for the night. It was pretty wild,” says Production Coordinator Joe Chisholm. To facilitate the ruse, the OPS also set up time-lapse cameras at a regional tuna market and around town, giving the filmmakers a seemingly transparent — and acceptable — reason for being out in the middle of the night.
Having foiled the police, a driver then dropped off a few OPS operatives at a public beach to scan the area for guards using FLIR Systems ThermaCAM P640s and night-vision goggles. They then scaled fences laced with razor wire to access the secret inlet, where the rock cams finally found their home. The following night, the team repeated the process to retrieve the cameras. For the first time, Western cameras had captured footage of the dolphin slaughter from inside the cove.
“It was horrific, but beautiful,” Psihoyos says. “The lagoon goes all red, where it was once evergreen. So you have this weird contrast, with divers coming up through this bright-red water and hauling up a carcass, looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon because they are in black and have on these ancient facemasks. They're all screaming and laughing and happy; it’s surreal.”
During the multiple trips the OPS made to the lagoon over the past two years, the organization also embedded team members — including Psihoyos and Assistant Director Charles Hambleton — in blinds on the cliffs above the cove. There, they sat motionless with their Sony PDW-F350 XDCAM HDs, as well as the high-definition infrared cameras, and waited for the sun to rise and the hunters to conduct the slaughter.
“You just bury yourself in there and wait,” Hambleton says. “They come around with these drive boats, and they're searching the hills with these big spotlights for you. You pull camouflage in the underbrush — even the camera had full camo on it, and we had twigs on the tripod. We had pretty much an open view into that bay.”
The precautions may seem extreme, but the dangers were real. “We're big guys, so we're not that intimidated by threats of physical violence, but if you had 10 angry fisherman coming at you with knives, that would be a bit disconcerting,” says Hambleton, who ultimately considered his camera to be more dangerous than any gun he could carry. He adds that to prevent confiscation of the hard-won footage, a runner would immediately travel to Osaka, Japan, to FedEx the material once it had been taken back to the hotel.
On the OPS’ last journey to Taiji, conducted in November, the organization gathered footage for the film as well as provided production support for a group of surfer activists protesting the killings (the group included pro surfer Dave Rastovich and Heroes actress Hayden Panettiere). In addition to using the rock cams and the XDCAMs, the OPS customized a Sony HVR-A1U that came to be known as the “bird’s-nest cam.”
“It was a little camera that could hook onto a tree branch, and it had an 80GB hard drive that could record for 10 hours,” says Expedition Director Simon Hutchins, who often uses the mechanical skills he gleaned as an avionics technician in the Canadian Air Force to modify cameras and housings for the OPS. “It was completely controlled by remote-controlled aircraft radio, just like on a model aircraft, so there was a little joystick with which we could pan, tilt, and zoom and then turn it on and off when we wanted to save the batteries.”
The multiple cameras allowed the OPS many angles of the dolphin drive and slaughter. “We basically have all aspects covered like a sporting event,” Psihoyos says.
By sea
“All aspects” includes water-based perspectives, as well. During the OPS' many covert missions to the cove, a big part of going undercover meant going underwater to plant cameras and hydrophones.
Chief among these was the “blood cam,” a Sony HVR-A1U in a modified Gates housing and concrete encasement Hutchins built in a hotel bathroom and Hambleton placed on the bottom of the lagoon the night before the slaughter. Hutchins also customized two Gates videocamera housings to hold Cetacean Research Technology C54 hydrophones, specially designed to record dolphin and whale vocalizations.
“We placed them directly underneath the spots where they hand off from the big drive boats to the small drive boats,” says Hambleton, noting that a cetacean communications researcher later analyzed the dolphin cries for the film. “It’s horrifying. This is real sound that will be in the movie; it’s not foley.”
Other water cams included extra A1Us as well as Sony HVR-Z1Us and an HDW-F900. On the last mission, world-champion freediver Mandy-Rae Cruickshank and her husband, Kirk Krack, joined the OPS team to plant several cameras on the lagoon floor.
In addition, the OPS placed 560-line pencil cams from Helmet Camera’s HC-2 Land, Sea and Air Xtreme Kit on headgear worn by pro surfer Karina Petroni and journalist Peter Heller as they paddled out to the lagoon on surfboards in peaceful demonstration against the dolphin killings. Footage shot with these cameras showing Japanese fisherman thrusting large sticks at the protestors' surfboards made it into the news coverage of several major media outlets last fall.
OPS crew members outfitted a custom-painted 30ft. Minizepp blimp with a Sony HDR-SR8 camera, but the blimp was intercepted before they could use it. They were, however, able to use a remote-controlled helicopter with a Sony HVR-A1U to capture aerial footage.
By air
Of course, no special ops mission would be complete without a few aerial tactics, and the OPS didn't disappoint. To capture aerial footage during the surfers' protest, the OPS used a remote-controlled helicopter, purchased in Boulder and flown by expert RC pilot and engineer James Mack, that carried a gyro-stabilized A1U, also operated by remote control.
Chisholm says there were multiple hurdles to overcome with the RC helicopter, from acclimating the machine to the sea-level altitude of Taiji to configuring it to work in the coastal town’s damp weather. Another big challenge was the fact that Mack, hidden on the ridge in full camo, was essentially flying the helicopter blindly.
“[Mack] was relying on the camera operator, who was holding a video monitor, the Sony HDV Video Walkman,” Chisholm says. “He was able to articulate what was necessary for the movement of the helicopter [to Mack] by viewing it through a handheld monitor. But they didn't have eyes on the actual flying device at all times. It was rough.”
The OPS also brought a 30ft. Minizepp blimp painted, appropriately, like a whale and outfitted with a Sony HDR-SR8 camera, but the team never quite pulled off the stunt. According to Chisholm, the blimp was inflated in a truck that was driven to the location, but upon arrival, it was intercepted by police. The zeppelin was affectionately named “Kathy,” after a trained Flipper dolphin that had died in O'Barry’s arms.
The big picture
As exciting as the lagoon mission was, the footage obtained from those shoots speaks to only part of the film’s message. The big picture, according to Psihoyos, is about connecting the dots between the dolphin slaughter, the high levels of mercury found in the bodies of the cetaceans (as well as other apex predators such as tuna), and the causes of this oceanic pollution. The OPS did plenty of legwork to prove its point and make a difference, including getting dolphin meat tested for mercury contamination and then successfully convincing Taiji officials to remove the toxic protein from the local school lunch menus.
Psihoyos is quick to point out that this isn't just a film about villainizing the Japanese — noting that everyone who uses fossil fuels, the biggest source of mercury in the environment, is responsible for the pollution. To do its part, the nonprofit is installing a 23kW solar system at its Boulder facility, buying electric cars, and keeping track of its own carbon footprint for the film.
“We were victorious over the whalers and got this massive international attention,” says Psihoyos, speaking of news coverage last fall that was made possible by OPS footage. “But really, the takeaway [of the film] is: We are fouling our own nest in a big way, to the point where we can't eat the fish that’s coming out of our own oceans. Seventy-five percent of the world relies on seafood as a main source of protein, and if we lose access to the fish, then we are facing the biggest health crisis that humanity has ever experienced. This is a real heads up.”
The Rising is set to release in June. For more information about the OPS, visit www.opsociety.org.