TV Crew Immerses Itself in ‘Contact’ With Penguins

In the frosty 45-degree waters of an Antarctic setting, amid wind-blown rocky cliffs and frigid, thick ice floes, a diver appears to be frantically trying to direct a procession of penguins.

Curious Chinstrap and Gentoo penguins pause to perch on the diver’s shoulder, intent on inspecting the blow pipe that seems to grow from his head. Some of the penguins take to using the diver’s arm as a hurdle, leaping over, splashing and waddling away.

All of this penguin activity is just what Lawrence Engel, field producer for the “3-2-1 Contact” television show and a novice diver, had hoped for.

Engel is a producer for the Emmy Award-winning children’s show, which appears weekday afternoons at 5 p.m. on KPBS. The program is produced by the Children’s Television Workshop, the same folks who bring you the popular “Sesame Street” and “The Electric Company.”

“Contact” aims to interest children ages 8 to 12--especially minorities and girls--in science. To that end, Engel and his crew were in San Diego this week to take advantage of the local amenities for animals.

Earlier in the week, they filmed a segment at the San Diego Zoo to demonstrate picky eaters in the animal kingdom. Next week, they are scheduled to film footage of local kelp beds in the Pacific Ocean for a story on ocean farming.

But Friday, the assignment was a frigid one. While a seven-member production crew set up outside the glass-enclosed Penguin Encounter at Sea World to film, Engel, cast member David Quinn and underwater photographer Howard Hall--all divers--were head deep in icy waters.

At one point, a crew member tried to signal Engel to clean the glass so shooting could resume. But every time the glass was wiped off, a playful penguin flipped and splashed water all over it again.

One giant petrel, a huge Antarctic bird, was fascinated with a cameraman’s bag, placed on the ice. While attention was focused on the divers, the bird removed a handkerchief.

The three men spent nearly three hours frolicking with the penguins in the water, and Engel and Quinn were wrapped for warmth in thermal blankets and towels when it was all over. They had been splashed and pecked at by frisky penguins--as well as giant petrels--but they came away with a few precious minutes of good shots.

“This is terrific,” Engel said after the shooting was finished, “to be able to go in and have penguins standing on you. They know that this is their environment, not ours.”

“Contact” came to Sea World’s Penguin Encounter because its environment is so realistic, said Alfred Hyslop, the program’s executive producer. Always in search of “scientific role models,” he said his show’s film crews have traveled the world and set up in places like Malaysia, Holland and England.

Friday’s footage, Engel said, is to illustrate the difficulty of providing an artificial environment for penguins that will make the birds feel comfortable enough to survive and reproduce. Eventually, the three hours in the water will be edited into a 10-minute story.

Engel tried to explain the illusion they would try to create, illustrating how the artificial can be made to seem real.

“In the opening shot we will see the ice, the rocks and the penguins, and as the camera slowly pans down to water level we will see a diver,” Engel said. “We will slowly reveal that it is David (Quinn). Hopefully the audience will not know at first that it is not the real thing. And then we will say that we are not really in the Antarctic, but at Sea World.”

Hyslop, interviewed by telephone at his office in New York, said “Contact” arose out of a need for the kids in the United States to remain competitive in the field of science.

“When we developed this show we felt that science for elementary school kids was of considerable importance in light of the tough competition from the rest of the world,” he said. “Eight to 12 years is the most effective time to reach them. Kids tend to get turned on or turned off to science during these years, especially girls and minorities who tend to get turned off even more.”

The program has devoted weeks of shows to such themes as the human body’s senses, hot and cold, communications, surfaces and the tropics.

In one program, astronaut Sally K. Ride demonstrated the use of the space shuttle’s mobile arm, and Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling made models relating to his work in chemistry.

“We’ve had a very favorable response to the show in the four years that it has been on the air,” Hyslop said. “Kids actually learn about science from this show. It is important that these kids will grow up as adults to make informed judgments and decisions, many of which involve science.”

Once the water scenes were completed, the film crew shifted its attention to the surface of the ice floes, where the photographer concentrated on taking footage of the nearly 400 penguins out of water, to study how they maneuver.

The humans had to leave the water and return to their own world.

“It’s wonderful,” Quinn said during a break. “I wish we didn’t have to get out.”