A Q&A with "Chasing Coral" Director Jeff Orlowski
July 19, 2017
- Author: Jeremy Snow
July/August 2017
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To film the new Netflix documentary, Chasing Coral, Jeff Orlowski used the latest technology to capture the devastation climate change is having on coral reefs.
To film the new Netflix documentary, Chasing Coral, Jeff Orlowski used the latest technology to capture the devastation climate change is having on coral reefs. Today, 29 percent of the Great Barrier Reef has been lost, much of it due to coral bleaching, which causes corals to lose their bright colors and whittle away to a skeleton of its former figure. The bleaching is a result of the one to two degrees Celsius climate change in the ocean.
Director Jeff Orlowski and his team photographed the death of coral reefs as it happened day-by-day. Over their excursions, they spent hours underwater each day, documenting the reefs rapid disintegration. Three years later, Orlowski shared the team’s journey through the Netflix original documentary, Chasing Coral, which is available now through the streaming service.
From 360° video to virtual reality, Orlowski embraced the latest technology to capture the scale and severity of the problem the corals face. Now, he’s hoping to use the documentary and footage he captured to continue spreading awareness of the issue and climate change at large.
“We can’t solve coral bleaching without solving climate change,” he says. “So we need to figure out collectively not just how to stop emitting carbon, but also how to remove carbon from the atmosphere. And that is going to be a major challenge over the coming decades. We have no choice – we need to figure this out.”
To film Chasing Coral you used a variety of emerging technologies, ranging from 360° cameras to 4K UHD. What new devices did you use?
It’s sort of hard to summarize because we use so many different types of new and cutting edge technology. It starts off with Richard Vevers, who is one of our subjects. His team had already built a 360 degree still photo camera; the technology is the backbone for Google Earth.
Zackery [Rago, another film subject] and his team also had an underwater webcam they modified in the film they used to do high-resolution time lapses. It can sustain itself underwater and keep clean. That was really an essential piece of technology that we were able to modify for 4K and high-resolution time lapses over a long term.
You also used drones to film the aerial shots, correct?
One of our team member’s actually custom built a craft to fly a RED Dragon [camera]. His name is Larkin [Carey] – he is a NASA engineer by day and a drone pilot and builder by night. He designed this system that we were able to use from boats, but it was rather tricky. When we were flying, we were doing hand launches and hand catches on moving boats over the ocean with a lot of expensive equipment in the air. We were literally catching it with our hands – you are holding your hands over your head trying to bring the drone down by these two handles. You have to figure out the best way to hold it and balance it while the boat is rocking beneath you and while you are standing close to the edge. And its $80,000 worth of equipment flying over you. Luckily we never lost any cameras that way!
Did you plan to use this technology or was there a larger process behind choosing to use it?
I think it’s more of the latter. For me, the question was how can we capture [the corals] and showcase what is going on. It never was, “Oh we really want to make a 360° video.” It was more, “Wow, this landscape necessitates 360°.” The landscape is so immersive, we wanted to get people to feel what we felt and 360° was the perfect way to do that. The whole team was constantly working to figure out what puzzle pieces could be put together, where the technology was and where we could push the technology.
Why did you choose to create a VR companion piece for the documentary?
Scuba diving is the quintessential immersive landscape, there is so much happening around and above you at all times, compared to the terrestrial world which has a much more flat and panoramic screen view. When you are underwater, you are constantly turning your head, looking in all directions and something is above you at all times. It was the perfect platform for a VR piece. The VR experience feels like you’re scuba diving, especially if you wear a good headset and are moving your head around. Only less than one percent of people actually go scuba diving, so this will be as close as some get.
I’ve been thinking how you can make this experience even more visceral – maybe you could be wearing some sort of suit where you are laying on your stomach and as you move your arms, it can turn you through three-dimensional space as you actually feel water on you. You could even wear a headset and go into a dunk tank. It shows the fun behind thinking, “Oh that would be really cool, making that.” That’s what drives a lot of the cutting edge technology. What would be cool – and do we know how to do that?
How can the tech world help fight climate change?
One of the problems we have right now is the concept of waste – we’re the only species that makes garbage. There are some companies that are trying to figure out their entire manufacturing process to minimize and eliminate waste. So how do you change your entire cycle to be able to conserve resources all across the board? I think we are going to hopefully see a huge shift in how manufacturing is approached as we move forward. We need to figure out how to take these products and not only recycle them but actually reuse all the materials. Because these are finite resources on this planet and as more and more people use them, that’s where we are going to get into major problems, but we can cut that off now.
What other technology would you like to experiment with in your films?
I’m super curious about where LiDAR [laser scanning technology] is going and if you can do room scale VR based on video capture. How can you walk through a real room and capture that in VR? Can we film something so that someone could walk through a space and walk around and see the front and back of our faces? As where the space is going, the more immersive you can make it, the more impactful it could be. This is the beauty and challenge of VR.
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