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Special OPS

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

Covert capture with the Oceanic Preservation Society.

By land

Psihoyos first went to Taiji with Flipper-dolphin-trainer-turned-dolphin-advocate Ric O'Barry, who had been trying to gain access to the secret killing lagoon for years. Because the cove is protected by both a natural fortress of imposing cliffs and a manmade fortress of high steel fences, guards, tarps, and razor wire, O'Barry had considered the task impossible.

“I told him, ‘Nothing's impossible,’” Psihoyos says. “I started thinking, ‘How would we do it?’ I'd been to one of the temples in Kyoto, where there are famous gardens with rocks in the center. Thousands of people show up there just to watch the rocks. I thought, ‘Well, what if the rocks looked back?’”

With the help of Kerner Optical (of Industrial Light & Magic fame), the OPS fashioned five rock housings to match the shape and texture of the rocks in the lagoon. Into these, the team inserted Sony HDR-SR1s hot-rodded with 100GB hard drives and Automated Media Systems Li-77 expedition batteries to gain 10 hours and 55 minutes of run time.

But the real trick was getting these “rock cams” into the cove. The OPS filmmakers had already, through their association with O'Barry (and by the mere fact that they were Westerners with cameras), aroused suspicion among Taiji police and city officials, who wanted to protect the town's dolphin-hunting interests from prying international eyes. With the police on their tail, the documentarians engaged in a little deception.

“We had to rent multiple cars and have one person in a vehicle looking as though they were on their way to do an operation go one way and then, 15 minutes later, send a second team and sometimes a third team out as decoys before we could send the people out to plant the cameras for the night. It was pretty wild,” says Production Coordinator Joe Chisholm. To facilitate the ruse, the OPS also set up time-lapse cameras at a regional tuna market and around town, giving the filmmakers a seemingly transparent — and acceptable — reason for being out in the middle of the night.

Having foiled the police, a driver then dropped off a few OPS operatives at a public beach to scan the area for guards using FLIR Systems ThermaCAM P640s and night-vision goggles. They then scaled fences laced with razor wire to access the secret inlet, where the rock cams finally found their home. The following night, the team repeated the process to retrieve the cameras. For the first time, Western cameras had captured footage of the dolphin slaughter from inside the cove.

“It was horrific, but beautiful,” Psihoyos says. “The lagoon goes all red, where it was once evergreen. So you have this weird contrast, with divers coming up through this bright-red water and hauling up a carcass, looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon because they are in black and have on these ancient facemasks. They're all screaming and laughing and happy; it's surreal.”

During the multiple trips the OPS made to the lagoon over the past two years, the organization also embedded team members — including Psihoyos and Assistant Director Charles Hambleton — in blinds on the cliffs above the cove. There, they sat motionless with their Sony PDW-F350 XDCAM HDs, as well as the high-definition infrared cameras, and waited for the sun to rise and the hunters to conduct the slaughter.

“You just bury yourself in there and wait,” Hambleton says. “They come around with these drive boats, and they're searching the hills with these big spotlights for you. You pull camouflage in the underbrush — even the camera had full camo on it, and we had twigs on the tripod. We had pretty much an open view into that bay.”

The precautions may seem extreme, but the dangers were real. “We're big guys, so we're not that intimidated by threats of physical violence, but if you had 10 angry fisherman coming at you with knives, that would be a bit disconcerting,” says Hambleton, who ultimately considered his camera to be more dangerous than any gun he could carry. He adds that to prevent confiscation of the hard-won footage, a runner would immediately travel to Osaka, Japan, to FedEx the material once it had been taken back to the hotel.

On the OPS' last journey to Taiji, conducted in November, the organization gathered footage for the film as well as provided production support for a group of surfer activists protesting the killings (the group included pro surfer Dave Rastovich and Heroes actress Hayden Panettiere). In addition to using the rock cams and the XDCAMs, the OPS customized a Sony HVR-A1U that came to be known as the “bird's-nest cam.”

“It was a little camera that could hook onto a tree branch, and it had an 80GB hard drive that could record for 10 hours,” says Expedition Director Simon Hutchins, who often uses the mechanical skills he gleaned as an avionics technician in the Canadian Air Force to modify cameras and housings for the OPS. “It was completely controlled by remote-controlled aircraft radio, just like on a model aircraft, so there was a little joystick with which we could pan, tilt, and zoom and then turn it on and off when we wanted to save the batteries.”

The multiple cameras allowed the OPS many angles of the dolphin drive and slaughter. “We basically have all aspects covered like a sporting event,” Psihoyos says.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.