The process leading up to the production of a documentary film that depicts a special bond with an octopus
While octopus is popular as a food ingredient, it is also known as a very smart creature that
THE MAKING OF MY OCTOPUS TEACHER by Sea Change Project
https://stories.seachangeproject.com/the-making-of-my-octopus-teachernbsp
'The Mystery of Octopus: The Sage of the Sea Talks' is a documentary film about a year-long interaction with a curious octopus that Craig Foster discovered during a freediving in a seagrass bed in South Africa. He was selected as a candidate for the Emmy Award for Documentary in the Emmy Awards documentary category because of his direct visualization of how octopuses sleep, eat, and live, and Foster's confession about the impact of his relationship with octopus on his life. I won the Best Film Award at a film festival sponsored by the environmental protection organization EarthX .
Octopus Mystery: The Sage of the Sea Talks | Netflix Official Website
https://www.netflix.com/jp/title/81045007
When Foster went to South Africa to shoot the BBC's nature documentary series ' Blue Planet II, ' he said he had a relationship with an octopus alongside the shoot. Roger Holox, a Blue Planet II camera operator and Foster's old friend, revealed that he felt a shining relationship between Foster and the octopus and started shooting.
The seaweed bed, which is the shooting site, is expressed in English as 'Kelp forest'. As the name suggests, it is a sea area filled with seaweed of the order Kelp, and medium and small creatures are hidden from large predators. I live in seaweed. Foster spent several years developing a dedicated tracking system to track octopuses that could hide in rocks by changing the color and pattern of his body surface. Furthermore, in order to shoot in a narrow place, Mr. Foster and other shooting teams not only secured small shooting equipment, but also learned the technique of diving into the cold sea without oxygen cylinders and wet suits.
After hundreds of hours of filming, we will welcome Pippa Ehrlich, who was active as a marine conservation journalist in 2017, to continue full-scale filming for another six months. At that time, he literally dived into the sea for shooting every day, and he was shooting even in bad weather like rough waves rushing to the rocks.
Building a series of footage shot in this way into a full-fledged 'movie' requires not only the task of reviewing hundreds of hours of footage over and over, but also scientific knowledge to understand octopus behavior. was. Foster succeeded in getting the cooperation of Professor Jennifer Mother of the University of Lethbridge, Canada, who is renowned as an 'octopus psychologist.' Professor Mother came to South Africa to cooperate with the film.
Mr. Foster, Mr. Ehrlich, and Mr. Tiyagarajan discussed which scene to adopt until late at night every day and excluded many beautiful scenes because they were 'too far from the subject'. In this way, I continued editing work for a year and finally reached the preview stage, but although the work in the preview stage had an impact, 'It is easy for people who actually participated in the shooting, but it is difficult for the viewer to understand.' Since it was a work, I decided to brush it up further.
The team decided to 'focus on the story of the octopus' in order to convey the actual experience to the viewer, but one of the problems was 'how much to talk about environmental conservation'. At the time of editing, the octopus fishery was flourishing in False Bay, South Africa, and it seems that there were two cases in 10 days in which a whale was caught in an octopus net and drowned. Mr. Foster and Mr. Tiyagarajan thought that the topic of whales should be included in the movie, but Mr. Ehrlich decided not to adopt it because 'the topic of whales overwhelms other stories' .. Mr. Ehrlich had the belief that it would be a movie that makes us think about nature conservation if we tell it as it is, without touching on the common polarized theory of environmental problems.
In addition, the team, which had admitted that it lacked an objective perspective, decided to bring in James Reed, who has worked on many BBC documentary movies. Reed traveled to South Africa to check the scene and then returned with Ehrlich to re-edit the film into a contemporary style.
After that, another 6 months were spent on color editing, etc., and the video was completed. The completed video was sent to Netflix, which broke through Netflix's strict quality control standards and was released to the public as a Netflix original work on September 7, 2020. “We experience the emotional and spiritual magical experience of being deeply connected to nature in our South African seaweed forest every day, with viewers around the world,” said Tiyagarajan. We look forward to sharing this experience. '
My Octopus Teacher Trailer | CPH: DOX 2020 --YouTube
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