Dream Job: The Ocean Red

Jan 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Kristinha M. Anding

The Oceanic Preservation Society shoots Japan’s controversial dolphin slaughter as part of a larger environmental film.

Louie Psihoyos (right), executive director of the Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS), sets up a shot with the Sony PDW-F350 XDCAM HD while OPS cameraman Brook Aitken looks on.

You don't often hear whales and dolphins referred to as “swimming toxic-waste dumps.” But, according to Louie Psihoyos, that's exactly what they have become as rising levels of pollutants accumulate in their bodies.

Psihoyos — who has spent the last 27 years capturing iconic stills for National Geographic and other publications — is producing a film to raise awareness of the interconnections between pollution, oceanic life, and human health. He is doing so through the Boulder, Colo.-based Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS), the nonprofit he conceived after witnessing illegal shark fishing and finning while on a Galápagos Islands diving trip with friend Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics. Psihoyos is now the executive director of the OPS, and Clark is its principal sponsor.

The film gets to larger issues of environmental devastation and its consequences by following the approximately 2,300 dolphins slaughtered annually in Taiji, Japan. The legality of the killings is questionable, but even more controversial, Psihoyos says, is that dolphin meat with mercury levels up to 3,500 times higher than those allowable by Japanese law has ended up in the nation's school lunch programs.

To shoot the highly secretive slaughter operation, Psihoyos had to be sneaky. “I took pictures of the area around the lagoon and sent them to my old assistant, who used to be the head mold maker for George Lucas at Industrial Light & Magic,” Psihoyos says. “They made these five rocks to match the shape and texture of the rocks in the lagoon, and then, using thermal cameras and night vision, we snuck in past the guards the night before they put the dolphins in the lagoon and planted the cameras [hot-rodded to include extra hard-drive space and battery life]. They looked just like rocks.”

On their latest trek to Taiji, Psihoyos upped the ante by using 14 cameras, including a Sony HVR-A1U on a remote-controlled helicopter and a Sony HDW-F900 stealthily planted on the lagoon floor in an Amphibico housing.

The footage from the film, scheduled for completion next summer, is “horrific, but beautiful,” Psihoyos says. Particularly poignant, he says, is one perfectly framed scene in which the dolphin hunters chat around a campfire. “They're saying, ‘See those sperm whales over there spyhopping? It reminds me of catching sperm whales off the coast of Midway, where you used to see them from horizon to horizon.' But now these guys are fishing out the dolphins at the same rate as the whales and not seeing the connection.'”

For more, visit www.opsociety.com.