PLANET EARTH
How the Famous OCTOPUS Film was Made Text MARCIN TRZCIŃSKI
Cinematographer Roger Horrocks shooting in the waters of South Africa’s False Bay Courtesy of PIPPA EHRLICH / Courtesy of NETFLIX Source: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/my-octopus-teacher-cinematographer-on-capturing-the-bond-between-a-filmmaker-and-an-octopus-4165485/
At first, I honestly thought something had gone wrong with my internet connection – the bandwidth dropped so much that the stream automatically downgraded to 340 pixels. I silently cursed T-Mobile and rewound the video, but when I reached the scene where the octopus played with a school of fish, surprisingly, the same thing happened again.
I
t repeated on the third and fourth tries too. I checked the settings and... I was still on Full HD. Slowly, I began to realize it wasn’t the stream’s fault.
52
So once I finished drawing conclusions from the octopus’s lesson (if I understood the message correctly, it was that it’s better to die than raise your own children), I dove deep into the internet to figure out what was going on with those fluctuations in quality. It turned out I wasn’t the only one who noticed. The web was full of speculation. Eventually, after filtering out flat-earth theories (it’s curious how their posts always rank high on Google), I found a few genuinely interesting sources. I became deeply fascinated by how the film 'My Octopus Teacher' was made. The film wasn’t made in the way we’re used to. It was more of a collage of various productions. Odd, considering that its protagonist and narrator, Craig Foster, was an experienced filmmaker. But he didn’t want to make another documentary. In 2010, after finishing his second film on the San people of the Kalahari Desert and while his marriage was falling apart, he decided to take a break and reflect. Like Forrest Gump, but instead of
running, he went swimming. In False Bay, south of Cape Town. In the world of the Great African Sea Forest – dense, towering kelp swaying with the surf. Then he started diving with only a mask and fins – not even a wetsuit, bordering on masochism. Day after day, year after year, with just a small waterproof Panasonic camera in hand, he not only explored but also recorded the underwater world of the bay and the habits of its inhabitants. He became so engrossed that he reached out to Professor Charles L. Griffiths from the Department of Marine Biology at the University of Cape Town, and his doctoral student Jannes Landschoff, who helped identify and classify the underwater animals and interpret their behaviors. At the same time, on the other, more northern end of the world – in Bristol, home to the BBC’s Natural History Unit – preparations were underway for the production of the second season of the Blue Planet series. Topics were being scouted, preliminary scripts drafted, and