Swimming with Sharks

Underwater DP Peter Zuccarini goes
deep sea diving for Into the Blue
By David Geffner

To capture Into The Blue’s underwater world of treasure-seeking divers, Peter Zuccarini called on his long-standing team of camera professionals, accustomed to spending 12-hour days underwater. Lighting in fifteen-foot seas, free-diving with actors to depths of more than fifty feet, and wrangling hundreds of Caribbean reef sharks helped mold Zuccarini’s most challenging (and rewarding) assignment to date.

ICG: What was in your toolbox for this film?

Peter Zuccarini: We used all Arriflex 35-III’s with custom Watershot, Inc. housings that we’ve designed to make shooting underwater more efficient. For example, the housings have rotating viewfinders so if I am shooting up I can rotate the finder and not have water going up my nose. Using low profile magazines, the housings are streamlined, neutrally balanced and ergonomically designed for swimming and diving. We also have proprietary lens ports that shed water in a way where we can seamlessly dip the camera in and out of the water without having to blow water drops off the lens.

ICG: The clarity of the image was breathtaking.

Peter Zuccarini: I used Cooke S-4 Primes [14mm, 18mm, 21mm, 27mm, 32mm and 40mm]. Changing lenses underwater is time-consuming and not feasible if you’re working at depth, with tanks. So I had at least three cameras in the water at all times with different lenses. We use wide lenses underwater because we don’t like to shoot through too much water, which cuts off color and contrast. Typically I would work fast and cover each piece of action with each lens. I believe we shot less than 4,000 feet of film a day for the ocean work, and 1.5 times that for the days in the tank with the wrecked plane. For the daytime scenes we were shooting at a 5.6, and the night scenes were all wide open. We used the 5245 for all the daytime work. Some people consider it more of a contrasty stock, which is a plus for me working underwater, where you lose contrast due to particulate matter that washes out your blacks.

ICG: Is focus not as critical underwater, given all that particulate matter and the fact you’re shooting so wide most of the time?

Peter Zuccarini: Focus is just as critical because most of the time we’re shooting so close to our subjects. A 40mm lens sounds pretty wide, unless you’re 8 inches off the lens! There’s also an optical focal shift when you’re working both above and below the water. Every lens we have has a custom ring with two sets of numbers, one for above the water, and one for below. Add to that, a flat port shifts the focus 25% closer below water. With the domed ports, generally speaking, five feet above water could be sixteen inches below the surface. That’s a big, fast pull. Our new focus system on Pirates of the Caribbean 2 is remote, but Into the Blue was on a whip. The focus puller had to also be a very strong swimmer to keep from bumping into me as I’m moving the camera all over the place.

ICG: Speaking of movement, this film breaks ground in terms of all the tilting, tracking and panning underwater.

Peter Zuccarini: A film camera is weightless underwater: it’s a dolly, crane, helicopter and Steadicam all in one shot. This is very seductive for most cameramen. The problem is that when you’re using scuba tanks, you can damage lung tissue in only five feet of water if you ascend too rapidly without exhaling air. You need to really develop the necessary breathing techniques that will preserve both the shot, and your own safety.

ICG: So the big difference on Into the Blue was the amount of free diving versus traditional scuba work?

Peter Zuccarini: Absolutely. John and Shane brought me into story meetings early on in the process, and I suggested having the characters free-dive, or what we call apnea diving because I knew it would totally liberate the camera. I could track with the actors or the stunt doubles at very rapid speeds. I could move down to see the wreck beneath the characters as they were diving, and then quickly rise back up into the sunlight as they swam for the surface, all in a single move. Other than a few handheld HMIs bounced off of white cards, there were no lights or cables to impede my framing or movement.

ICG: The only direct artificial light used is at night diving down to the plane.

Peter Zuccarini: We had a grid of practical lights hanging down from the salvage boat that would throw an ambient wash on the fuselage. When we got in the water it was glassy. Within half-an-hour, there were ten-foot seas and the grid started flopping all around. The lighting went from darkness to ambient and back again, which made the look even spookier. The mantra on this film was: we can’t control the ocean, so embrace whatever she throws out.

ICG: Were you concerned about capturing detail inside the plane?

Peter Zuccarini: The actors were all young, athletic guys who were quick to pick up on what we needed. It’s a tricky thing because as a DP, you don’t want to burden your actors with lights, but there were times that their flashlights were the only things that made sense. I told Paul Walker: the only light on you inside that aircraft is your flashlight bouncing off the coke kilos. I would show him what I meant. He’d give me an okay sign, and do it flawlessly.

ICG: Why not use lights, at least to fill in faces during the daytime?

Peter Zuccarini: There is a loss of warm tones as the sunlight penetrates the sea to depth. Skin-tones, in particular, become an issue. But after an extensive pre-production test, Shane knew he could restore them in the DI process. He and John gave me the freedom to find the best angles that would highlight the natural ambient light. Also, the water is so clear in the Bahamas there’s less of those color shifts. Of course, it’s also cold. Hypothermia sets in after about 20 minutes when the water is 70 degrees, and your actors are all wearing board shorts and bikinis. The actors’ lips would go blue from the cold water and long breath holds.

ICG: How does the what’s going on above the surface—light, swell, wind, etc.—impact what you’re doing below?

Peter Zuccarini: The surface of the sea affects the light underwater in profound ways. Think about water patterns on the bottom of a swimming pool. When the surface is calm, the sunlight is sharp and well defined. The same goes for the ocean. When it’s glassy the sun will refract a hard, sharp light on the actors in patterns that can transform a scene from the mundane to the spectacular. The long tracking shots I did with Paul and Jessica free-diving along the bottom or rising up into the sunlight were graceful, satisfying examples.

ICG: And when the ocean is messy, as it was for many of your days?

Peter Zuccarini: It’s like shooting with diffusion, with no clear edges or modeling. The ASC handbook will tell you that the best light for shooting underwater is from 10-2 p.m., but I haven’t found that to be true. When the sun is straight overhead, the patterns can be five stops over the surrounding ambience. When the sun comes through the surface of the water at a lower angle, like in the last two hours of the day, those patterns will be a stop-and-a-half difference from the surrounding ambience. Magic hour on land is the same underwater. It’s prettier and easier to shape when the sun is low in the sky.

ICG: How did you communicate with the actors underwater?

Peter Zuccarini: If it was critical to time an actor’s reaction, like when Paul Walker was inside the DC-3’s fuselage, there was someone on the dive boat watching a video assist and calling out the cues over a loudspeaker. Mainly, we had an elaborate system of hand-signals, which included flipping the bird during a fight scene when a guy is running out of air! The handle on my underwater camera housing folds flush, and if I open and close it really fast it makes a piercing, hollow aluminum sound and that means everyone needs to look at me. [Laughs] The rule of thumb is that everyone is always looking at me, all the time.

ICG: Only two of the hundreds of sharks we see trolling through frame are digitally rendered. How did you exercise any control?

Peter Zuccarini: The way you wrangle sharks is by the handling of food—the more the sharks eat, the friskier they get. To get the sharks to be background, we just put a bit of scent in the water. To cue the sharks front and center, we had a diver swim through with food and clear the frame. Basically, the sharks see the camera as a glistening shiny object that gives off sound and electronic wavelengths. When we chummed food and rolled, they assumed it was feeding time. By the end of the film the camera had a dinner bell effect.

ICG: Did you have specific conversations with Shane about the type of negative he required from you before he went into the DI process?

Peter Zuccarini: Shane is a very technical DP and he was able to answer any questions regarding density, even though he wasn’t underwater with me. I remember on the night salvage scene, I took 10 spot-meter readings and called Shane up. I said the plane is .7, their skin is 1.4, the coke bales are 2.0 and we’re shooting the 20mm tonight. How dark did you and John want me to go? We didn’t have to lock in specific exposures all that much, but when it was necessary, the communication was excellent. What made Into the Blue so unusual was Shane and John’s risk-taking. They wanted moves and lighting that pushed us to the edge of what’s physically possible underwater.”