memorable. I did a feature length one in Guyana, while I shot on a 35mm imaging camera. We tried to take a more cinema-style approach, because we were shooting feature length, and it was just a very epic journey. I was shooting high resolution at the time, 4K, and that’s quite a few years ago.
Jeremy holding Goliath Tigerfish Hydrocynus goliath Episode: Demon Fish Photographer: Daniel Huertas
It was completely unscripted, and the stories developed as exactly as they unfolded. We shot two films back to back, “Demon Fish” and “Congo Killer.” In the first film, Jeremy desperately tried to catch a fish. On the final day of the shoot, he caught this fish, which was extraordinary, and the drama of that is in the film. There’s no contrivance there. There was no forcing or heightening of the drama. That was my induction into River Monsters, and hopefully I established a certain look for them early on. This was quite a few years ago, and there wasn’t much around by way of super 35mm cameras, but I was using quite a lot of super 35mm imaging for all the dramatic construction stuff, but also a lot for weird abstract stuff of Jeremy, trying to get a sense of what he was going through on the journey. From there, I’ve gone on to do films with Jeremy in South America, Mongolia – Chernobyl is very 53
Shallow depth of field was involved, but more importantly, I wanted to bring more color depth to the documentary genre. I was tired of shooting on 8-bit-color cameras or even 10-bit-color cameras. The optics of traditional video-style lenses designed to focus through prisms were never giving me what I was used to seeing in the commercials world or the drama world. I had a lot of experience with super 35 mm lenses, and super 35 mm imaging, and larger, medium formats. I’m a complete cinephile. I live and breathe cinema. As good as video and broadcast and ENG-style lenses and cameras got – and they did get very good at one point – I was always frustrated by the look that they delivered. I shot some work I’m very proud of on those cameras and lenses, but because I’ve kept my feet in both worlds, I was always pushing for more potential. I’m still with River Monsters. I just shot one in Thailand a month ago. I love them. No matter where my career takes me, I would always want to come back and do River Monsters, because of Jeremy and also because of Icon, a great company. I’ve got good relationships with them and they’re good people. They’ve always encouraged the best in my work, and when I’ve tried stuff, they’ve always embraced it and supported it, which is not the case with a lot of other companies. I shot a 3D film for them as well, which was very hard to do, particularly since I shot it all handheld, which was at the time supposedly not possible. That was a big push again from me to do something different.