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| Cat Holloway of NAI'A and Betty Almogy of Undersea Hunter ferry the housed IMAX camera to the film crew below. |
Fiji's Finest Diving Fills IMAX® Screens
Fiji's famous reefs and friendly underwater creatures star in a new giant screen IMAX® theatre film featuring Howard and Michele Hall, MacGillivray Freeman's Coral Reef Adventure. The story celebrates the magic and thrill of coral reef diving and investigates the precarious future coral reefs face. In a legendary creative partnership, Coral Reef Adventure is produced by MacGillivray Freeman Films with Greg MacGillivray directing (Everest, Dolphins, The Living Sea), and with premier marine documentary filmmakers, Howard and Michele Hall (Island of the Sharks, Secrets of the Ocean Realm) in charge of filming the underwater sequences. Currently in production, Coral Reef Adventure will be released in February 2003 and will reach 15 to 20 million people internationally.
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| Howard Hall shares the excitement of deep trimix diving. |
The film follows the Hall's diving journey throughout Fiji as well as to Australia's Great Barrier Reef and French Polynesia. During the three months of filming among Fiji's islands, the team includes divers Rusi Vulakoro, Rob Barrel and Cat Holloway of the live-aboard NAI'A as local guides and spotters both underwater and on land. Traditional ceremonies and village life at the island of Gau, where NAI'A passengers have dived and downed kava for eight years, feature prominently. As do their well-known dive sites including Cat's Meow, Mount Mutiny, E6, Nigali and Namena.
According to Howard Hall: "Fiji was clearly the best location, not only because the NAI'A crew have found spectacular diving, but also because of Fiji's accessibility and safety. IMAX® filmmaking requires outrageous amounts of gear and logistical support - despite Fiji's recent political problems, it's been easy sailing for us all along. Between the sequences of hunting sea snakes, octopus and turtles plus the deep trimix exploration we've shot some of the most exciting underwater sequences ever recorded on film."
Specially modified to launch, recover, and service the massive IMAX® cameras and underwater housings, the Undersea Hunter (usually based in Cocos Island, Costa Rica) is the film crew's support ship. NAI'A supported the topside film crew during filming at Gau. The camera team uses fully closed-circuit rebreathers on all dives and stay submerged for up to six hours at a time to get the shot. Among the most ambitious projects for Coral Reef Adventure is the "Twilight Zone" filming of the reef between 200 and 400 feet deep. Here, armed with trimix, tech training and a rebreather, maverick ichthyologist, Richard Pyle, is discovering new species of fish at a rate only dreamed of elsewhere on the planet.
Ichthyologist Richard Pyle on rebreather at Wakaya in Fiji.