Welcome to the DeeperBlue Podcast, and “Our Planet” underwater filmmaker Hugh Pearson

SPEAKER_02 0:13

Welcome to the Deeper Blue Podcast, your weekly guide to everything that is happening around the world underwater. My name is Stephen Whelan. I'm the founder of DeeperBlue.com, the world's most popular diving website. Every week, the Deeper Blue Podcast covers everything that's happening in the scuba diving, freediving, diving travel, and ocean advocates world. So join us as we explore the Deeper Blue.

Stephan Whelan Commentary

SPEAKER_02 0:47

Hi there. My name is Stephen Whelan. I'm your host and guide for our brand new weekly show, the Deeper Blue Podcast. I thought I'd welcome you to our first show by chatting a bit about what you might expect to hear from us. So, what is the Deeper Blue Podcast? Quite simply, it is your weekly guide to everything happening around the world underwater. We'll keep you up to date on our latest underwater news, trends, equipment, and events happening all around the world. And we'll spend time covering every major way that people get in the water. From scuba diving to free diving, dive travel to the latest in marine science, and regular reports from the front lines of ocean advocacy. We'll also talk to the most interesting people in a diving world. From world-famous underwater pioneers to fearless modern explorers. We'll discuss the latest in diving innovations from people who created them, athletes pushing the limits of what we think humans can do underwater, and we'll speak to people leading the efforts to protect and preserve the oceans we love. But we'll also talk to you, the dive community, to hear what is important to you. And finally, we'll give you our honest opinions and intelligent, unvarnished commentaries on what we think is important in the dive world. You'll quickly understand that this will give you the best 30 minutes about getting underwater every week. So I'm very excited about starting this podcast. I started Deeperblue.com 24 years ago as a passion project at university to publish stories about my experiences being a diving instructor. It quickly grew to become a hub for divers all around the world, and today is one of the largest diving websites in the world, reaching over half a million people every single month. Over the years, I've been asked many times by my friends and colleagues in the industry if we would ever start up a podcast covering everything happening in the diving world. It was only after I became friends with Jason Elias from the Big Deep podcast in 2019 that we hatched a plan to launch this weekly show. And Jason joins us as the producer for this show. As discussing with Jason and putting together the format for the show, it was very important to me that we get the latest news and information out to divers of all ages, no matter whether you're a world-class freediver, seasoned cave diver, passionate warmwater holiday diver, or someone who's just simply interested in helping look after the oceans we love. I also wanted the podcast to reflect the truly global community that we have. The community that's made deeperblue.com so important to the diving world over the last 24 years to today. So, we've created this podcast to keep you in the know every week. So, what can you expect to hear each week? We'll start every episode by laying out what happens around the world in the past week. Every important story, anything that might impact the diving world, things that you may have missed, or even things that no one knows yet but should. This is even more important in the current crisis as it engulfs the world. You'll be pleased though that it won't just be my voice that you're here. We'll be bringing in some of the foremost experts deeply connected to the diving and underwater world to help provide your commentary and guidance. This will be honest, intelligent, and unvarnished. But I can promise you it will always be enlightening and thought-provoking. Next up, we'll hear from some of the most interesting people in the diving world. These will be stories from interesting characters, industry legends, world champions, real life heroes, and anyone else we find interesting. We want you to learn about the diving community in a deeper way. With that inspiration, we'll take you to the best dive spots around the world with stories and reports. This is where you can come in as well. Every week we want to hear your stories and share them with the world. So, please record and send in your short story of your best dive ever. If you can keep it brief, that'll be fantastic, as anything longer than two minutes will not be shared. Tell us where you were, what happened on the dive that made it so great, and why it meant so much to you. You can send that in to bestdiveever at deeperblue.com.

Hugh Pearson Underwater Filmmaker

SPEAKER_03 5:48

You're listening to the world's only weekly podcast of scuba diving, freediving, dive travel, and ocean advocacy. This is Freediver William Trueberich, and you're listening to the Deeper Blue Podcast.

SPEAKER_06 6:05

Hi, this is Jason Elias, producer of the Deeper Blue Podcast. Every week we highlight an interview with someone who's done something interesting or unique in the ocean world. And for our first episode, we decided to talk to someone who's done something pretty amazing. Today we speak with Hugh Pearson, a wildlife filmmaker whose credits include Blue Planet, Africa, the Hunt, and he also produced and directed the two ocean episodes of the Netflix series Our Planet. Hugh told us a little bit about his career, how he got to where he's at, and an incredible story he had filming whales off the coast of Southern California. Hugh, can you give me a brief history of your career, how you got into it, and what you love about it?

SPEAKER_00 6:49

Yeah, well, I basically I'm a wildlife filmmaker. I produce and direct shows, so I'm not the cameraman, I'm not the cinematographer actually filming it. I manage the teams, and I specialize in telling stories about the wildlife in our oceans.

SPEAKER_06 7:03

So how did you get to the place that you're at? Was this a passion as a kid, or did you discover that later?

SPEAKER_00 7:08

I've always had a passion for the ocean. I did marine biology at college, and I left and actually worked as a pharmaceutical sales rep for three years. Didn't know what I wanted to do, and then it became pretty obvious to me fairly quickly that's what I didn't want to do. And I was watching TV, I'd always watch these wildlife programs, and I thought, well, someone's gonna make them. And I looked into it and everyone said, forget it. So I I went away at it, I went back to college, did an MSc in science communication, got work experience at the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol, and then got my foot in the door, got a job as a runner, and then as a researcher, assistant producer, and and then eventually I sort of found myself with a job producing wildlife shows and had to sort of pinch myself of Blimey, it happened. I've I've sort of reached the dream.

SPEAKER_06 7:57

Well, that's obviously an amazing career path. What shows has that led to that our audience might have heard of?

SPEAKER_00 8:03

Well, going way back, I worked in the original Blue Planet series 20 years ago now, I think. Then I worked on a series about Africa on the BBC, a series called The Hunt, which is all about predators and prey, nature's great events, which I made a film about the sardine run in South Africa and the plankton bloom in Alaska. And then most recently I directed the two underwater episodes of Our Planet on Netflix, which I'm particularly proud of because we were able to, in a sort of a mass entertainment medium, we were able to hopefully touch on some of the issues that face our planet and especially our oceans and hopefully bring those issues to a wider audience. Because it's only by informing the vast majority of people that you can hopefully get people to change and get pressure to put on governments to change and maybe try and turn things around.

SPEAKER_06 8:50

And what is the underlying passion that drives you to do this?

SPEAKER_00 8:54

I I think it's firstly it's being out at sea. It just feels home to me. As soon as I actually step on a boat and push off, everyone said to me, I sort of change. And having that camaraderie, you're with a team of people with a common goal. And it's just great, you're with your friends, you know, you step on a boat for three weeks, and you've all you just want to nail that sequence. I love witnessing. It's a privilege to witness the thing I s things I see, to be in the water with dolphins and whales and sharks, and that is is amazing. And then I you know, I love telling stories with it. I love the whole process of coming up with an idea, planning the logistics, getting out there, filming it, and then putting it together in the edit room and crafting it and the music, the grading and the commentary, everything just to hopefully create this 45 minutes that transports people.

SPEAKER_06 9:42

Well, I think anyone that's seen your work would say that you do that. Is there one story that's really stuck with you from all of your years of filming underwater?

SPEAKER_00 9:50

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the most memorable experiences I had in the ocean, and certainly in my filmmaking career, was when we were filming blue whales. For for this the BBC series The Hunt, there is the biggest predator on our planet, the biggest animal on our planet, which is the blue whale. And I thought, well, this is sort of like a 20-year obsession. But blue whales are incredibly hard to film. So to film that sequence, we filmed it over two years off the coast of Southern California. And each year we had a four-week shoot. So that was eight weeks of filming just for the underwater. And the reason blue whales are so hard to film is for a start they're very rare. There's only about 10,000 left in the world now, sadly, from a population once of 300,000. They live out in the open ocean, they live far from land, they feed on krill hundreds of feet down, so they spend most of their time down in the deep ocean, they come up to the surface to breathe, maybe at the surface for two or three minutes every 15 minutes. So you've got to find them, and then you've got to try and film them underwater. And the first year it really didn't go very well, conditions weren't great, and we basically had one good day during which we got three shots, three to four shots. So as as we thought, feared, we were gonna have to go back the second year. So we went back the second year for another four-week stint, and that was a year that we just had magical conditions in California, one of those times every decade, two decades, we had a 10-day period of 100, 120-foot visibility, and we just starting to get shot after shot. And just uh you know, I'm getting goosebumps now, that experience of a blue whale coming within 10 feet of you and gliding by was very, very hard to portray the size of these things. They are about 80, 90 foot long, 150 tons. But what does that mean? You know, think when you're stepping on a plane, that's about the size of a blue whale. And have this thing, it just piles by you, and then this massive tail fin comes by, which is you know, 25-30 feet across, and they're just the most iridescent, glowing, beautiful blue colour underwater. So underwater they just glow, and it's just this it's it's the uh one of the most beautiful things I think I've seen. And then we had one day, August the 10th, sticks with me. It was a Sunday, and that was one of the rare events when the krill actually came to the surface. And myself and David were getting in the water, and you could see the blue whales feeding at the surface, which is what we were what we were really wanting to get. And then right at the end of the day, I just looked up in the boat and I just saw this massive white pectoral fin at the surface, which basically meant the blue whale's gone on its side to feed, and it's its pec fin and its tail fin have come out of the surface, and there was birds bouncing down. So it's just like right, David and I slipped in the water, and then I looked down, and almost beneath David's fins, there was a blue whale swimming. It must have been within five feet of his fins, underneath us, and so I just went because we're about sort of like, you know, ten feet down or whatever. So I just screamed at him and any way I can. He just turned around, looked at me, saw this whale pan down. And this whale came by, did a flyby past us once, came up, took one big gulp of the krill, and then we lost it. And the whole time I'm partly looking like this, it's bizarre those situations. I sort of don't enjoy them at the time, because I'm just looking at David thinking, is he recording? Is he recording? Is it going okay? I look at the whale thinking, where's it gone? Where's it gone? It's all I'm thinking about, this is the moment. Are we getting it? And then it's sort of like all went quiet. I said to David, you okay, okay? And he's like, Yeah, yes, all good, all good. Seems to have gone and thought maybe the whale's gone. So okay, let's just film some krill again then. And then just coming out of the behind us, this blue whale just rolled straight to camera and just opened its mouth. And one of one of our safety concerns is actually getting in the wet mouth of a blue whale, because I mean, you know, it can engulf a bus in its mouth. So the shot is sort of like a bit messy because we're frantically trying to swim backwards, trying to not go down the well, but to look into the mouth of a blue whale as it's coming towards you. And when it engulfs the krill, it literally doubles in size. Um, you know, this massive throat pleat just balloons out. And I think the good thing is it's pretty much like putting on an anchor for the whale. They're very streamlined, they're very fast. But as soon as they open that mouth, that streamline goes and they literally grind to a halt, which probably stopped us from going down the mouth. And then it just came by, shut its mouth, looked it in the eye, and glided off into the blue. And that was the moment. That was it. David, did you get it? Where you're recording? Everything all right, any problems or whatever? He said, No, I think it's okay. So he got up on the boat, quickly popped the housing, checked the camera, look at the shots. I knew that was special. The shots that we got there, that experience was something I was unlikely to ever experience again, and very few people will or have. So to share the water with the biggest animal that's ever lived, to look it eye to eye, was uh something I will never forget. And when the whole film was made, I sort of went back and analyzed it, and I worked out that we'd spent more than 50 days at sea. All the shots that we used we got on seven days, and most of them we got in that 10-minute interaction.

Dawn Kernagis NEEMO Aquanaut

SPEAKER_06 15:41

Every week in Deeper Blue, we offer one top tip from an expert in some aspect of the ocean. Today's top tip comes from Don Carnegis, a research scientist in the human performance extreme environments realm. But she was also an aquanaut at the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations Center, or NEMO, where she lived underwater testing aspects of NASA's space station. And her top tip is something you might not necessarily use every single day, unless you're an aquanaut.

SPEAKER_04 16:08

So my top tip is going to be a little unique because it does have to deal with living undersea. But one of the things that they told us for our mission was that we needed to bring something down that was spicy or flavorful that was that we agreed with, something with a really strong flavor. And it turns out when you live undersea, you actually lose a good sense of your taste and smell. And so we had a lot of hot sauce that we went through over the course of our mission, and it actually helped. So essentially, we ended up adding hot sauce to, I think, all the camping food we ate, all the salads that we had, like anything that we had down there you definitely topped up. I can say I probably didn't have hot sauce for a little while after because I definitely got my fill over the course of the mission. So, but that would be my top tip if you're gonna go live undersea.

SPEAKER_06 16:50

So, your top tip is bring salt.

SPEAKER_04 16:52

Yes. Salt, something flavorful.

SPEAKER_01 17:01

Hi, my name is Luke Inman. I'm an instructor trainer for scuba, a writer, a filmmaker, and you're listening to the best 30 minutes about diving, the Deeper Blue Podcast.

Erin Durbin Sherer "Best Dive Ever"

SPEAKER_02 17:17

Finally, every episode we share a story from you, the Dive Community, where we ask you to tell us about your best dive ever.

SPEAKER_05 17:25

I'm Aaron, and I'm from San Diego, California, though I currently reside in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My best dive ever was in the Solomon Islands in 2017. I was aboard the MV Taka, which is the Solomon Islands Dive Expedition Slipboard. We were a few days out, and this was a site called Kovachi Kicha, which is five kilometers from an active volcano. So the dive started with a live drop, which put us right next to this huge ball of yellow tailed barracuda, which just like kind of adjusted their speed, it seemed like, so that we could keep up with them for a little while. And then after that, we descended and started swimming along the reef. And at one point, a silky shark cruised by on the right hand side. It was the only time we saw a silky shark on the trip. There were couple turtles on that dive. And then at one point, I was looking at a little group of convict fish trying to struggle and stay where they were in the current, and all of a sudden, like this rumble through my entire body. So as it turns out, you can feel the volcano rumble on these dives, and it's this like sonic vibration that you can feel in your chest, and it was just the most incredible thing. And so that was my best dive ever.

SPEAKER_02 19:00

We'd love to hear your story about diving. So at the end of the show, you'll find out all the info you need to submit your best dive ever. Thanks for listening to the Deeper Blue Podcast. Find out more on all the stories you've heard this week, plus connect to the world's largest online dive community at deeperblue.com. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe, like, and comment wherever you hear the podcast. Please comment and subscribe to really make a difference. Before we go, I want to give a big shout out to Jason Elliott, off of Jupiter. Connection strong, but I've dedicated time part of their lives to be the people working on half of the water. Take a listen when you get aligned, to take the show, the 15th podcast. Every week, work in your story, and share them with the world. Rere record and sending your short story for your best dive ever. Keep it brief, no longer than two minutes, please. And in it, tell us your name and location. Where you were on the dive. What happened to make it so great, and why it meant so much to you. You can get that over to us at bestdive ever at deeper blue.com. Or head to our website podcast.deeperblue.com forward slash best dive every yeah.