When something is worth doing it is also worth documenting. I’ve spent a few days with Bryan Stanislas of H20 Films to learn how to handle a filmcamera both over and under water. Bryan has been filming underwater for near on twenty years and has a lot of experience to pass on in his courses. He runs courses from two days for amateurs (that’s me) up to six week projects for professionals.

Me being an absolute novice in all things filming, I had a lot of information to take in about angles, movement of the camera, cutting etc. This made for long days of theory mixed with time in the water.
We spent the whole first day looking at different cameras and how to make short films even when you only have simple means. Nowadays almost every phone or computer has a built in camera and they only get better. Every part of our lives will be documented. But of course all this video has to be cut down to something people actually want to watch so we spent a lot of time looking at post processing the material. The day ended with packing the car full of all sorts of dive and camera gear. In the end I think we loaded six cameras for two persons, a bit excessive you might think but I think we actually used all of them and it was good to have many different types to play around with. Personally I brought my Olympus Pen-3 Lite that not only takes good still pictures but also films in 1920*1080 HD. Very neat when trying to travel light but still want to document both with pictures and video.

We headed to Vobster in the morning, somehow I seem to be drawn back there time and time again and the last few weeks I think I have done more dives there than some of the staff in the same time period. During the filmmaker course it was definitely an advantage to go somewhere familiar since I knew where to go for the shots I wanted. When we had parked our car we met Jon who had attended TekCamp the week before and now wanted to do a few more dives so he agreed to be our model for the day. After making sure all O-rings were intact and the cameras ready to go we entered the water and started pointing our cameras at everything that moved and particularly at Jon who dealt with our abuse heroically. All the dives of the course we did a similar tour, which gave us the opportunity to go back to the same places and getting some new angles we missed on previous dives.

In the evenings we downloaded all the video from the day onto our laptops and started to put it in order. With the six cameras we had a lot of data to store and HD video takes up a lot of space so two days gave me more than 50 GB to try and cut together. The result of my attempts will be shown here shortly, it’s a promise. I will do my cutting on the laptop but we visited a full size post processing studio belonging to Bryan’s friend Nick to see how some of the pros work.

Thanks to Bryan I now have a fighting chance to document my year with moving pictures and I will try to make use of it so that hopefully I can share more of my trip with you.