The Giant Cable

The cable we took to Mexico last month was a baby compared to the one going to the Azores, this super-hi-tech beast weighs more than a pair of beefy men.

In order for this monster to travel safely Florian Bailhache made a special box on a pallet. The Giant Cable started it's journey to the Azores today where we will be lowering it into the deep ocean to help us look for the Giant Squid

Is No News Good News?

Our Mexican shoot was a difficult one to get off, lots of last-minute engineering and wrestling with cables. Packing took a whole week went on until four hours before setting off to the airport.

There will always be issues with US customs, in Detroit the crew had several hours interrogation resulting in missing the onward connection. Just to make sure we weren't hiding Bin Laden (or his body) the big cable was all pulled out and the cable ties cut so an untidy mass greeted the crew in Mexico, on top of the delayed flight we had to take a day to test the cable and make sure nothing had been damaged.

The crew are now happy settled in Cap'n Ron's boat, filming in the Sea of Cortez. Now they're afloat we have no communications available so we'll have to wait until the crew return before we can post any more about this one.

We have heard that the visibility hasn't been great, reports of dolphins swimming through the luminescent water sound amazing. There should be Humboldt Squid and Lantern Fish which we are hoping we can film using the new equipment.

Meet The Guppster

This is the mechanism that we are using in the ocean to carry our cameras as steadily as possible while we try and film underwater at depth. Many prototypes have been made and tested. You might remember this post when John Ruthven made a model from a children's construction kit. Since then there has been a half-sized aluminium version which we tested in Belize and now we have our full size steel Guppycam or 'The Guppster' as it has become affectionately known.

The Guppster will be tried out in Mexico over the next few days where we hope to find some Lantern fish and then we hope any final modifications will be made to enable it to be used in the Atlantic over the summer.

Testing, Testing Squidcam

The Amazing Bioluminescence Film has been in pre-production for months. First we had to try and anticipate conditions that might occur at sea, then we constructed scaled-down models of the kit that we intended to make. The last phase is trying the models out in our testing tanks where we recreated an ocean in miniature.

One of the creatures that we are hoping to encounter on this odyssey is a giant squid and we have worked out a system for lowering a camera into the ocean from the deck of a boat. The camera will be connected to a computer back on deck and this gives us more problems to overcome along with issues of drag, turbulance and the possibility that the squid might appear but not exactly in the right spot.

Here is John Ruthven demonstrating a prototype model made of parts supplied by his children




The sound on this is not very clear so here’s a rough transcript:

John: We’ve got this attached to a computer - and once it’s attached to a computer, the bit that’s turning can’t be let in and out because it goes round and round and would turn the whole computer and it’s assembly would be going round and round as well.

So given that we can’t do that, we’ll have to put some slack on deck and carefully play it out.

And the thought is, that as we can see the image, say there was a squid here, that was slightly too high we could pull it up so we could see the squid (device spins) - hopefully it won’t rotate like that either, the fins should stabilise it.

What you can get in the water is jogging like that so we’ve got to stop that too.

The other issues is that most sea captains are not terribly happy when they’ve got 500 metres of cable dangling off the back of their ships and they’re near rocks and they need to manouvre