"How I started working underwater"

 

 

I studied for my BA in fine art at Loughborough College of art, initially accepted on to the painting course. In my second year I switched from painting to sculpture. When I graduated, that choice, and a bit of ability, enabled me to get commercial sculpting jobs.
After working on films and tv at a studio in Twickenham, I slipped into being a scenic painter and prop maker. I had my own studio in Old Stables in Richmond town centre for a few happy years, making things for Museums, films, shows, and commercials.
As business grew, I moved to a large warehouse in Blackfriars behind the Old Vic. Business was good, I employed my friends and built a good team.
For a few years my work mostly came to me from production designers or art directors. They commissioned me on behalf of tv film companies or exhibitions and museums and I built scenery or made props from their briefs and drawings. I started getting calls directly from producers and directors and my role began to change. I was now working, running the whole art dept on commercials, this meant I was taking on the responsibilities of an art director, so I sort of morphed into one.

I had a lot of help and support from my good friend Roger Burridge, a top designer and my favourite art director.
Roger and Mike Hall put me up for my art director ACCT union card without which it was impossible to work in a studio. It was only a couple of years later Thatcher emasculated the unions and the closed shop was finished.
I had painted some Irving Penn style sludgy grey backgrounds for a director who specialised in ‘Hair and Beauty’ type commercials. I got on with his producer,

 My First Water Job.

John Nigel sent a job over to me. In those days, before fax and email, the script would arrive on a bike and was usually accompanied by a VHS tape of refs. This script opened on a stormy sea pounding on rocks. An Alka-Seltzer type tablet is dropped in and calms the waves to a beautiful day.
I agreed to make a simple fibreglass rocky outcrop, but, as usual, the job grew.

It was decided to shoot in Malta in the infinity tank at Mediterranean Film Studios. So far this was good for me I planned to take simple vacform moulds as hand baggage and from these sculpt the rocks in the tank.

Then they started talking about tablets!

They needed a large scale tablet to drop into the sea and fizz like a seltzer tablet.
At this I should have suggested they get an SFX company. My arrogance, and the naivety of youth, plus the appeal of a sunny location, made me volunteer to take on far more than my experience deserved.

‘Can you Scuba Dive?’ they asked,
Funny – I heard that as, ‘would you like to?
‘Of course I can,’ I said. How hard could it be?

So I called up a dive school in Putney and did a BSAC Novice Diver course over the weekend. I was off! It remains my only qualification after 30 years of diving all over the world.

The two tanks in Malta .

Mediteranean Film Studios.
Malta’s open lot studios have 2 tanks, the original one is an infinity tank about 2.5m deep but wide enough to shoot a small sea battle or  to fit Jason and most of his Argonauts.
The other, deeper, round tank was built in the  1960’s for  ‘Raising the Titanic’ The film bombed but some 25 years later the titanic model was still there.

 

The story was that the large scale model ship was built in L.A. then shipped to Malta. The modelmakers had packed the hold of the model with grass, well-hidden so they could smoke it during the months shooting at the tank. The remnants of films were spread about the tank, from the Popeye village to nowadays probably Game of Thrones.

 

The Aspro shoot in the tank

With the help of Mario a local Plasterer, I built an outcrop of rocks in fibreglass and a small section of beach for the Aspro Pack shot in the tank
For the stormy water effects, the studio has large high tip tanks to create waves and enormous hydraulic old wave machines in the tank. There were huge wind machines, one of which was an old hurricane fighter engine and propeller mounted on a skate in the tank. Scary jets of flame and smoke came from it, sometimes  during the takes.

The rocks were the simple bit, at the meeting with the director he explained enthusiastically how this frothing tablet would be shot in the open sea and massively scaled up.

I model made some scaled up pills, some filled with bicarb, and one with venting air cylinders, to give the effect of effervescence and bubbles. It was a nightmare, dropping them off the back of the boat and then releasing them from just below the surface, I had not even thought about strong currents or the swell of the seas or how different materials react with seawater.

My diving was a bit of a challenge.

I was almost incapable of keeping myself or my bubbles out of shot.

I managed with the help of the lovely Peter Scoones, the underwater cameraman who did the job swimming with one leg in plaster wrapped in a black bin bag.

Peter had broken his leg filming plankton and whales in the arctic, and when we met at a pool in Fulham for a model tablet test, he could only swim around in circles. Later Peter would be responsible for some spectacular shots for Life on Earth, but at the time he was chuffed to be the first person to have filmed a live Coelacanth. A prehistoric monster of a fish from the deep.

I was lucky to get away with it, there was very little fix it in post in those days.

Even with my dodgy model tablets and my inexperience in the water, the film had to be finished, the money has been spent, the airtime booked and paid for.

That was the first of many underwater jobs I got away with.

What you learn when you work with professionals in commercials is that a job cannot, and must not, fail.

With a good film crew everyone melds into an efficient machine to overcome all obstacles and make it work, and get the job done.
The Job is always finished,  you need a result.

In my career I can only remember one that missed the air date, a spot for Greenpeace, and that was because the famous director dragged out the edit.

Since then I’ve been lucky enough to travel to the best diving locations in the world and build sets, rigs, and sfx in different tanks, and on the seabed of different seas and oceans.

My serious introduction to underwater film making came a few months later, The same producer Jon put me in touch with a friend of his shooting a large project for Pepsi cola for the US.

 

Mike Portelly

Mike Portelly

Mike Portelly had had a successful career as a dentist and then taken up scuba diving.

On a trip to Sinai he dived with a wildlife photographer David Pilosof. he was hooked and bought himself a camera and a housing and his photography career took off. Within a year he had won all the underwater wildlife prizes and moved on to photographing his girlfriend underwater, selling a feature to the Sunday times mag. He then met and commissioned Peter Scoones to make him a housing for a Bolex and with his friends he made a film.

 

“The Oceans Daughter” Mikes movie won prizes at Montreaux and every underwater film festival in the world and introduced Mike to his hero, Cousteau and gave him credibility in the world of film.

 

He was picked up for a couple of smaller commercials, Jon Nigel had worked on Mikes movie and done one of his spots and he had mentioned me to Mike.

 

I had to go for an interview in Kingly Court in Soho. There were three big established modelmaking companies there already. I felt well out of my league.

I was both flattered and annoyed that they were seeing these people and I was resigned to not getting the gig.

My turn came and I briefly met Mark the producer and then I was introduced to Mike.

Mike was a small man, but larger than life, he was an excited, and enthusiastic character, who had to be centre of attention and holding court. I thought he was a little crazy, but I instantly liked him and wanted him to like me!

He talked me through his ideas and showed me clips of his films and they were brilliant, like nothing else I had seen or done, he had a knack of being interested in me and how I could help him.

Peter Scoones came into the office and was pleased to see me. It helped we had both done Aspro and we got on.

Next thing Mike was driving me back to my studio in Blackfriars. Mike had a new flashy Lotus that was probably the fastest ash tray I have been in, Mike smoked constantly, and the car was full of fags and chocolate.

Later I started to work the job out, I wanted the job and I had to make it work but knew that in the time I had, I could not do it all. Eventually the key Props were made at my studio and Asylum Models made masses of scaled up ice cubes. The ice cubes had to look real in closeup to match Pepsi beauty shots, but they had to work underwater. each cube was a 40cm cube and it was difficult to cast clear resin in that quantity without it discolouring or cracking. They had to have a space that could be filled with air or water to be adjustable for neutral buoyancy! I made giant acrylic lemon slices with the same properties.

 

I had  4000sq ft floor in the warehouse, it was a large bohemian art studio. I lived in the back in a fantastic loft like space. I employed my friends and it was a good atmosphere to work in. Mike enjoyed coming over despite the smells and dust from the fibreglass. I made 4ft diameter lemon slices and smaller ones with the same buoyancy properties as the ice.

Everything was packed up and shipped off to the location.

 

 

 

 

 

The shoot was to be based in Eilat Israel and we would work from a dive boat, “The Sue Ellen”,  2 guys from my studio came out with me and my learning started…

Mikes crew became lifelong friends we would work together for years.

We had a real mix of people on the boat including Mikes brother John a just qualified GP who was our Medic! Joining Peter Scoones in the Camera Dept was a very young Mark Silk working as a loader.

Mike had a topside dp Steve Smith with Wick Finch as his gaffer.A few years later on we did a Job for Thompson Freestyle and Pete Bijou lit it.

On all his other jobs Mike preferred to do his own lighting and was assisted in this later by Mark Silk.

Working on Mikes shoots was unlike any other, everyday away could have been a shoot day he didn’t  do down, rest, or prep days. We were always  in the water before first light and out at sunset.

Light, water temp and visibility were key to the style of Mikes jobs so most shooting is within 10 meters depth, and we only surfaced for air and lunch.

Despite Mikes medical background ,health and safety wasn’t really on Mikes list, he was as single minded as any other director in search of a shot.

Mike always had experienced divers around  and eventually had a tight crew… mooring a boat could be extremely complicated.

You have to keep the boat out of the light and the frame and still close enough to work from, without swinging around.

Although we worked near the surface, inevitably someone had to walk an anchor along the seabed or tie it around a coral head.

And be ready to free it at any time, if Mike wanted to chase a gap in the clouds.

This and keeping track of everyone was quite a serious task on its own, but if you were in the water you would be expected to hold a reflector, dress the set, build a rig,  shepherd fish, or check mikes air, because he never did.

For this we had Robin, Shmulik and Bobby, they spent the day keeping us safe and doing everything that needed to be done!

Unless we were filming actors or models in the water, then they were the key crew to plan buddy systems and protect their charges from the dangers of the underwater environment and an even more dangerous director.

Filming in the red sea particularly, as often amongst the spectacular corals were stone fish, scorpion fish, urchins or fire coral.

Filming with girls, kids and babies, Mike would always feel they could do a bit longer underwater than they should, so it was important the safety divers took charge.

I took a lot of scaffold fittings with me and each trip the first job was  to build an A Frame to raise and lower the heavy camera housings or a drop rig for the props

A 35mm camera in a housing is a very heavy beast and a major job to get in and out the boat.

The safety divers became key in the rigging department and we had some amazing rigs to build. Mike liked to work at shallow depths but he liked to shoot against the cobalt blue of deep water.

We would build a tubular frame like a room 4m to 6m wide and hang the frame on lift bags, this gave us an adjustable depth work space that presented its own problems.

We would typically be 35 to 40 m above the seabed and would anchor our rig to a coral head or point.

This worked for a while but as we worked and the rig expanded it would need adjusting.

Divers forgot about the physics that held the rig in place and would hang reflectors tools or spare air tanks on to the rig. So all the time the lift bags were filled with more air to even the load. The anchor line could become dangerously tort and had to be very secure.

 

A complicated shot could involve an actor 2 buddy divers a camera man and assistant  sparks on reflectors and some art dept or a bubble rig. It was not unusual to have 8 or 9 divers in the water and if one of them is weary and hangs on the rig  ears popped till someone noticed the whole set was sinking.

 

 

Robin Middleton, Me, and Mark Silk

Bob Johnson Robin and me with 2 of the boat crew in Bimini

Dan Travers  Being led into set Halls Mentholyptus Ad Eilat

Below, Mike and I planning a shot

 

Robin Scoones and Mark Silk Egypt