Wonders of the Sea in Deauville

The 6th edition of the Deauville Green Awards are kicking off with a sneak-peak of Wonders of the Sea by Jean-Michel Cousteau. Together with his co-director Jean-Jacques Mantello he shows an underwater world as never been seen before. Fot this documentary the team was travelling from Fiji to the Bahamas. The film was shot in 3D, 4K, high speed with macro lenses.

 

"With this new technology we are now able to show the public things that after my 72 years of scuba diving I am not able to see by myself with the naked eye. We filmed in slow motion, came close to microscopical things and put it on a big screen", says Jean-Michel Cousteau. "We had to bring that back to the boat, put it on a small screen and take a look at it. If the material was not good, we had to go back diving. We needed to have a tripod and lights in place. It took a long time and we had to be very patient. We also had two scientists who were looking for interesting creatures and then they told us where we need to go.

 

After 72 years of scuba diving it is exciting for the ocean explorer to see things on a big screen in 3D which he cannot see with his naked eye in the water. "Bringing that to the attention of the public is one of the privilige thanks to my father I am able to do and thanks to the technology that we are now able to use. My father used to say ‘people protect what they love’ and I kept saying ‘how can you protect what you don’t understand’. We have explored maybe five, six or seven percent of the ocean in the shallow water but we don’t know anyhing about hundred of thousands of species that we have never seen up to now. Now we can go deeper and deeper and discover a lot of species which we have never seen before."

 

 

The film was shot the maximum of 90 or 100 feet. But the environmentalist wants to go down and stay much longer. With his diving suit he can go down 1,000 feet in five minutes and spend ten hours down there.  "I can move my hands and pick up samples. I have a high definition camera on top of my head and LED lights. With my right leg I can go forward, back, left, right. With my left leg I go up and down. I can adjust the air and make sure the air that I am rebreathing is healthy. I can be back up there in five minutes because I am protected from the pressure."

 

With Wonders of the Sea, the team will make sure that decision makers in governments and industries understand how we are connected to the environment and how much we depend on it. "It is important to coach them and to reach their heart, their families and their children. We have to help them to bridge between their obligations with the future. We need to keep the ocean healthy and that will allow a lot of people to create new technologies to capture chemicals and heavy metals before it goes into the ocean. By doing this, millions of new jobs are gonna be created for people all over the planet. We need to take care of life support system which is the ocean. If you compare that to business, the planet is our capital. But we are abusing the system and are heading towards bankruptcy", says the ocean explorer.

 

Nevertheless, Jean-Michel Cousteau is optimistic about the future. "It is our choice. We are the only species on our planet that have the privillege to decide to disappear or not. There is no other species that can say that. Nature was there before we showed up as a species. It can continue without us. A lot of people who will see Wonders of the Sea will say what can I do to help. And that’s what it is all about."

 

Photos: © GFS/ 3D Entertainment Films

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