Producer's Notebook: A day at sea (mostly)

Any time I get assigned to do a story involving the outdoors, boats and filming things underwater, the guy in me looks around for someone to chest bump and the producer in me looks around for some aspirin. It’s a really cool headache.

As a “TechKnow” segment, this was a no-brainer for us: You have a scrappy group of scientists who, through passion, innovation and teamwork, are seeking to revolutionize the way we study the marine world.  And, by the way, they are using robots to do it and the test subjects are sharks.

Home run.

And then the fun starts.

The Cal-State Long Beach Shark Lab does a good portion of its teaching and research at the Wrigley Marine Lab on Catalina Island. This place is like the Atlantis of college campuses. It’s a small collection of classrooms, dorms and labs overlooking a secluded and breathtakingly beautiful cove on the east side of the island. The typical undergrad morning there seemed to consist of scuba diving in one of the most beautiful bodies of water on the West Coast, followed by sunbathing on the bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean until lunch. Spending time there made me seriously second guess my entire educational experience.

One of the reasons Wrigley is so special is because of the aforementioned seclusion. There were rumors of a road, though I never saw one, and it’s not in walking distance to any of the Catalina’s public ports. It’s basically an island within an island, which made getting two cameramen, an audio engineer, a grip, myself and our contributor Marita Davison and all of our gear there something of a challenge. Throw in some uncooperative Ferry schedules and here is what our travel itinerary looked like:

• Meet at San Pedro Ferry Terminal in Long Beach
• Take Catalina Express to Two Harbors
• Take shore boat from Two Harbors to Wrigley Marine Lab
• Film segment
• Take shore boat from Wrigley Marine Lab to director of photography’s personal boat
• Take DP’s personal boat around island to Avalon
• Take Catalina Express from Avalon back to San Pedro.

By my count we spent roughly five and half hours on boats the day we filmed which, while pretty cool, only left us about five hours to film.

There are two huge challenges to filming underwater. The first is visibility and that’s out of your hands. The water is either going to be clear or it isn’t, and if it isn’t you’re going to have a really short day followed by a really long conversation with your boss. The second is communication, or rather the lack thereof.  Once your cameraman goes into the drink, that’s probably the last you’re going to hear from him for a while. You really have to trust that he is going to capture everything you need and that his instincts are on the same page with your instincts. We lucked out on both counts. The weather and water clarity were perfect and our cameramen are some of the best in the business.

 All this isn’t to say that filming on dry land doesn’t present its own set of challenges. “TechKnow” really prides itself on being smart. We want to tell smart stories, and we want to explain those stories with a level of detail that gives you guys a front row seat to some really amazing things that are going on today in the world of science and technology. But we also don’t want it to all come across like a know-it-all’s power point presentation. Finding someone involved with the story who has a passion and excitement for it and can explain it in a way that’s accessible is really the whole ballgame.

Frankly, I don’t know who the best marine biologist in the world is, but any list that doesn’t include Chris Lowe on it probably isn’t one worth looking at. The guy loves the ocean and he loves teaching others about it. He’s been studying marine life for roughly 40 years, but from an enthusiasm standpoint you would swear he just started the job last week. This is true everywhere and not just for us, but you get a sense of who a person really is when the camera is off, not on. We had lunch with Chris and, cameras off, he talked to us about fish and the ocean and the waters around Catalina with the same passion and intensity and enjoyment that he did when we were filming. The only difference was, here he was interrupted every couple of minutes by a steady stream of well-wishing undergrads who treat him as a cross between Jacques Cousteau and Bruno Mars.

So we lucked out with the weather and we found a great storyteller in Chris Lowe. But the cherry on top was what Marita brought to the table.

I rarely want to switch places with the correspondents I work with. They get moved here and moved there and are told to “do this” and “do that” and then get told to “do this” and “do that” again, “only this time smile.” It’s just a tough job that they all handle with class and professionalism.

But watching Marita snorkel with Chris in this serene cove of water surrounded by dozens of leopard sharks and seeing the look of amazement on her face—I don’t know anyone with a love of nature and the ocean who wouldn’t have wanted to be in her shoes.

All right, flippers.