New Vistas Opened by Film on Sea Life

In “Seasons of the Sea,” underwater photographer Howard Hall’s first solo project, he attempts to convey the adventure and excitement of exploring the deep without the requisite photographer-surrounded-by-hunger-crazed sharks scenes, or the man-against-nature sequences that have become standard fare for underwater documentaries.

“Frankly, filming people underwater is tedious,” said the 40-year-old Del Mar-based Hall.

“Seasons of the Sea,” which opens the ninth season of “Nature” on KPBS-TV (Channel 15), at 8 p.m., Sunday, instead focuses on the animals, showing the often bizarre behavioral patterns of creatures that inhabit or feed off the 100-foot-deep kelp forest off the coast of Southern California.

Its producers believe “Seasons of the Sea” will break new ground for underwater documentaries.

Executive producer David Heeley said he commissioned the hour-long film for “Nature” at a time when it seemed like all underwater producers are “doing the same thing.”

“To be honest,” Heeley said, “this is one of, if not the , most remarkable underwater film I’ve ever seen.”

In three years of filming in the kelp forests, Hall photographed spectacular scenes--some of which had never been captured on film before--from the tragic life cycle of thousands of squid to the birth of a shark, from the attack of a group of tiny sea urchins to the feeding of a giant blue whale. Except for a brief introduction, no humans are visible in the film.

Through the photography, Hall tells stories about the animals, giving the film a dramatic base rarely found in underwater documentaries. Throughout, there is a sense of exploration and discovery. In one scene, the camera slowly slides through the kelp bed, discovering a lounging gray whale. The wandering of an octopus becomes a mini-drama when it survives an attack from a moray eel and loses a tentacle in the battle, only to be gobbled up a few minutes later by a passing seal.

Hall used techniques more often employed by filmmakers doing documentaries about animals on land. He set up a tripod and staked out an area, observing the swirl of life and telling stories about the creatures’ activities. He tracked some animals for months.

“Instead of swimming around and looking for pretty things to shoot, we went back to the same places and shot the same thing,” said Hall, who has won four Emmys working on other people’s projects.

“When you see an underwater film you usually see the animals swimming and the narrator talks. Seldom do you see animals doing something.”

Hall says audiences and filmmakers have been so enthralled by scenes of underwater life, they haven’t maintained the same quality standards on underwater documentaries imposed on films about Africa, for example.

“The audience wouldn’t watch an African film if the animals didn’t do anything,” said Hall.

Extensive pre-production research and tips from local divers and fishermen helped Hall’s crew, which often included his wife, Michelle, to be in the right place at the right time. However, he said many of the discoveries came as a complete surprise.

Hall hoped to film bat rays mating, but he didn’t know he’d come across a huge school of hundreds of bat rays lounging on the ocean floor. With the camera rolling, the bat rays slowly rose from the ocean floor, eerily blocking the moonlight with their huge winged forms.

“It reminded me of scenes from ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ the winged monkeys flying across the dark sky,” Hall said.

His greatest surprise came when he happened on a group of blue whales, the largest mammals on Earth, which are rarely seen off California. Hall’s cameras captured a 100-foot-long blue whale munching on krill, it’s massive throat enlarged, as it sucked in millions of tiny fish.

“The blue whales were completely a fluke,” said Hall, inadvertently punning with an ancient marine-biology joke. “If someone offered me $1 million dollars to film that sequence again I’d have to say I couldn’t do it. There is no way I could get it again.”

A swimmer and diver in high school, Hall graduated from San Diego State University with a degree in zoology. To earn money during college, he taught diving through the Diving Locker stores. Chuck Nicklin, the owner of the Diving Locker and a veteran underwater cameraman for Hollywood film projects, enlisted Hall to work on the filming of “The Deep,” which moved Hall toward a career as an underwater photographer.

First, he free-lanced still photographs to nature magazines, eventually earning enough money to build his own underwater movie camera apparatus.

“The film projects are just a vehicle to get me out there,” Hall said. “It justifies going to great lengths to go to places. Even I wouldn’t do it just for fun.”

Hall’s list of credits is long and varied, working as a photographer, director and cinematographer for “Wild Kingdom,” “National Geographic” and the BBC, in addition to several PBS and ABC film projects. He won cinematographer Emmys for ABC’s “Spirit of Adventure” and “Tim McCarver’s World of Adventure,” and “3-2-1 Contact” for PBS.

Although he’s co-produced several projects, “Seasons of the Sea” is his first solo production effort.

“It’s kind of frightening,” Hall said. “I never wanted to produce films; it’s taken a lot of the fun out of it.

“But as you get older it’s a natural evolution. It’s almost unavoidable if you want to retire.”

Hall is already working on his next project for “Nature,” a documentary on the Sea of Cortez. Already a year into the project, Hall is experimenting with different techniques, including an expensive “rebreather” system, which will allow him to stay underwater longer without producing the air bubbles that often distract his subjects.

“He’s constantly looking for new ways to do something,” Heeley said. “He’s obviously so comfortable in the underwater environment that his imagination can take over.”

Like “Seasons of the Sea,” the Sea of Cortez film will not have any footage of people interacting with the animals, nor will it contain the overt environmentalist message that permeates most underwater films. Hall said he prefers to let the beauty of the scene speak for itself, although the message is still there.

“People look out there and they know so little about it and it’s so beautiful,” Hall said. “If you expose people to that they will have a greater desire not to dump stuff into it.

“In doing this, we try to create a sense of value of the environment.”