Underwater Mermaid Video: "Patches the Mermaid"
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Published: September 2nd 2013
Here is the link to our Mermaid Video:
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It is also available for viewing on my website:
http://www.immersion-photography.net/p727281724/h69a884f4#h69a884f4
When my partner and I, came back from Bonaire I really needed a project to free my creativity from my macro routine. I didn't think about it at all. I grabbed my phone made a couple of phone calls to the right people, send a few texts, emails and threw all my gear (and the one that is not mine) in the back of my truck. I made sure I had extra batteries charged and headed to one of my favorite locations. Lance Borsellino, an amazing freediver and very good all friend drove from Jacksonville to meet me. Lance goes down to 154 ft on one single breath and when relaxed can hold his breath for over 4 minutes...Also "Patches the Mermaid", a real mermaid, was a few hours from the location and manage to go through an adventure to get to hour meet up point. Patches showed up with "Trish" another local mermaid. So a story that started with no subjects ended up with 2 mermaids, a Freediver... and a bunch of awesome people along the way that were ready to help us with anything. All we needed was to get together to start a few awesome days of freediving, camping, grilling, chilling, enjoying nature ...and if nothing else get some footage : ) .
For a while now, I have been having a tickle for underwater film. Its been in under my seat for quite a bit..but every time that I think about it I turn the other way and put it in the back of my head because of the amount of time and technical knowledge that it requires to develop a quality Project. Knowing your equipment and having good visibility is a "must have"..then I needed a subject to photograph, a location...capture the material...I can't even start to tell you how much work its involved in the capturing phase... We had to synchronize many events to get the results that we wanted...We spent the first two days doing test shots and finding the angles. By late afternoon of the third day we found a couple of real cool spots that we all went crazy about. We only realized it when we reviewed the shots in camera late at night. The next day we went back to the spot with a plan but the light was different and it didn't not work out the way we wanted so we moved elsewhere and got something totally different. The last day we decided to give our idea another try and got nothing because our spot was so busy we couldn't even get there. Dissapointed, once again, we looked for another spot and decided to make the best out of it!...That's it 5 days went by and our time was up! We had to get back to where ever each of us came from. We didn't get what we planned for but got a lot of material to work with.
Underwater video is a whole different ball game from underwater photography and I didn't want to switch gears completely...so I decided to make the best of both worlds and decided to mix them. I have a bunch of photographs still in my hard drive..but we choose a few to start with and are included in our first underwater complete video production from end to finish.
To put a video together with professional digital post processing software feels like re-creating each moment to make it last forever.... my video editing programs weren't going to do it. I headed to my video expert and friend Diane Randolph to do her magic. I got all the files ready: Rough cuts of the clips, a few of the final images and a special soundtrack to be played in the background. We worked together for a bunch of hours until we got the project the way we were happy with and then...waited a tremendous amount of time for it to upload and see it playing live! ....wooo I guess I had to have a special state of mind to handle it all.
Thanx so much to everyone that participated in this project and made it possible. It was definitely the product of team work and each of us threw in a special part to mix in. It was, nonetheless, a lot of fun! I can't wait to do it all over again. I will be uploading more images as I go thru them. In the meantime, please enjoy and share our video and don't forget to watch hour behind the scenes shots! We had two underwater set-ups and one dry camera that any of us could grab and take photos if we wanted. Behind the scenes shots is a compilation of those...
Here is the link to our mermaid video:
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David
non-member comment
Wonderful time with mermaids.
Being the father of Trish the mermaid gave me a wonderful opportunity. I was able to help Patches get North, and while meeting her, was also fortunate to meet Ximena and experience the wonder of her work. I will always be grateful for their kindness and generosity. The images are a wonder. The experience was truly a highlight of the summer. I hope we will once again cross paths and continue similar journeys.