The term smooth sailing doesn’t always apply to productions shot on or near the water. According to Halifax’s Topsail Entertainment, producer of the new documentary series Tall Ship Chronicles, and others, the mix of water and film gear is not always easy on the nerves, or the stomach.

Tall Ship Chronicles follows the adventures of the crew of a tall ship as they sail around the world (see Atlantic Scene, p. 17).

With a crew of 40, the cinematographer for the first leg of the voyage was Wade Cornell. He says his time on the ship was challenging, but he was very pleased with how the equipment held up.

‘It was a lot friendlier than I thought it would be,’ he admits, adding that Tall Ship Chronicles is still his toughest shooting gig to date. ‘You’re talking about a ship that is moving side to side and there is always a lot of movement. When you are shooting on deck you always have one hand for the ship. It’s a difficult environment.’

Having shot in conditions ranging from darkness to extreme brightness and from smooth-sailing weather to torrential downpours, Cornell says he is thankful for his sea legs and that the right camera was chosen for the job.

‘It is imperative to have a camera like the Sony DSR-PD150 [a Sony digital camera] on that kind of a shoot, mostly because of its small size, which is the most important thing. A lot of the shooting was done aloft, and even when you’re not aloft there is a lot of shooting done from the deck. I don’t think I could have done the shoot with anything other than this type of camera.’

He says a large percentage of the filming was done in the daytime because night shooting would have created far too many hazards aboard the ship.

‘You can’t put up a lot of lights on the ship at night because it impedes navigation,’ he explains. ‘It impacts on people who are working at the helm steering and on the people who are on forward lookout.’

The perils of working on the ocean are not foreign to Eco-Nova Multimedia Productions’ John Wesley Chisholm. As producer of The Sea Hunters and Oceans of Mystery, he knows what can happen to a crew at sea.

‘Someone may be perfectly comfortable being around boats and not get seasick, but when you close one eye and look through a little black-and-white view finder with the other eye, and then have the boat pitch and roll, it is very sickening,’ says Chisholm.

He says film gear manufacturers are competing to come up with the perfect camera housing.

‘Basically, for every one of the new three-chip cameras, somebody makes a housing that can go underwater, but also very near the water when you are shooting near the surface,’ he says. ‘When you know the camera is going to get wet, you pretty much have to have a housing. They vary widely in quality and design.’

Cornell says he improvised on Tall Ship Chronicles to keep moisture off the lens. He used a shower cap he picked up in a hotel room and he keeps it over the lens when he’s not filming.

Keeping cameras dry isn’t the only problem on maritime shoots. Producer/director John Brett went through three cameras when shooting the doc The Voyage of the 7 Girls for the National Film Board and CBC. The first was lost during the second day of shooting when a rogue wave washed Brett and his camera clear across the deck.

‘Water brings with it a share of problems, but I think the end result [one gets shooting on water] far outweighs the problems,’ says Terry Dwyer, who deals with this sort of thing on a daily basis. As president of Halifax-based Movie Marine Canada, Dwyer has seen it all. His company offers diving support services for local and visiting producers.

The first assignment taken on by MMC was James Cameron’s Oscar-winning epic Titanic, testing lights, cameras and other submersibles in Halifax. He recently added K-19: The Widowmaker, starring Harrison Ford, and The Shipping News, with Kevin Spacey and Cate Blanchet, to his resume, both of which wrapped recently in Halifax.

For K-19, Dwyer says MMC provided safety measures to ensure the offshore submarine set was up to code. On The Shipping News, Dwyer and company oversaw a lot of filming in the water and taught Spacey to scuba dive. They also provided safety divers when Spacey was in the water.

Dwyer says he has become used to American producers – in search of a low dollar and locations – coming to Halifax and enlisting his help on their films.

‘Anything shot in or around the water can be complicated or easy…. I think the trick is to use the local expertise,’ he says.

And he is starting to see some repeat business. K-19 director Kathryn Bigelow previously worked with Dwyer on The Weight of Water, starring Sean Penn.

Dwyer is proud of the fact three of his divers trained at California’s Pace Technologies, which specializes in the creation of underwater, wet and hazardous location filming equipment. This adds to foreign producers’ comfort level, he says. If any of the marine film equipment is damaged or faulty, MMC’s Pace-trained workers can fix it, service it and support it.

‘We’ve invested heavily in unique things,’ he adds. ‘We provide special equipment for underwater communications. It’s wireless so there are no hoses or cables. When [producers] are looking for freedom and mobility, if they are doing a drowning or dream scene, it makes all the difference in the world. We also have inflatable Zodiacs that go up to 20 feet. And if [a project is] shooting in Newfoundland, we can send the gear there. We cover the entire East Coast.’ *