To get inside the mind of the Great White shark, Fabien Cousteau is getting inside its body. Not such a strange endeavor, perhaps, for a third-generation oceanographer who was practically born with fins. “I did my first dive on my fourth birthday,” says Cousteau. “My father found me on the bottom of the pool buddy-breathing — a pretty advanced technique for sharing an oxygen tank — with a family friend.”

Since then, Cousteau has hardly surfaced for air. Following in the wake of his famous grandfather Jacques and father Jean-Michel, Fabien has made the oceans his second home. “I went along on their expeditions during every school break,” he says. “I’d scrub the hulls, paint the rails, do whatever needed to be done — and dive. For me, that was vacation. I loved it.”

“When I was seven years old I read a Tintin story called ‘Rackham le Rouge,’ where he makes a sub in the shape of a shark and goes underwater. Since then I’ve always wanted to build a shark sub.”

After studying environmental economics in college, Cousteau did a brief stint at a Vermont-based manufacturer of green home products. But the siren call of the deep was too strong. “Business didn’t fulfill me the way exploring our planet does,” he says. “The most fun for me is experiencing the beauty of our planet firsthand. Of course that connects with my environmental interests, because when you’re out there you see the flip side — the damage people do.”

Audacious Experiments

Today, the Paris-born New York resident applies his wide-ranging curiosity, deep-water experience and passion for technology — including a boatload of Macs and Apple software used for everything from planning to postproduction — to design and execute his own experiments, which are among oceanography’s most audacious.

Take “Troy,” Cousteau’s nickname for the custom-designed sub he crawls inside to swim with the sharks. Meticulously designed by renowned Hollywood engineer Eddie Paul, Troy is enabling Cousteau to gain an unprecedented perspective on the planet’s largest predator: the warm-blooded, 21-foot-long, 2700-pound Great White shark.

“When I was seven years old I read a Tintin story called ‘Rackham le Rouge,’ where he makes a sub in the shape of a shark and goes underwater,” recalls Cousteau. “Since then I’ve always wanted to build a shark sub.” The idea has family precedent: in 1989 his father deployed a shark look-alike vehicle that was attacked by a large female Great White and completely destroyed. Fabien is undaunted; Troy, he points out, is an utterly different beast.

Sharkseye View

“Troy uses the latest-generation equipment,” says Cousteau, who assembled a team of crack engineers and scientists to advise the project. It’s an anatomically correct, 14-foot-long, 1000-pound, one-man “wet” sub (there’s water inside) that Cousteau operates in full diving gear. Troy’s experimental motors haul as fast as five knots. “The sub is an observational platform that lets me swim along at shark speed,” says Cousteau. “The whole point is to fool them into thinking I’m a shark.”

From his Trojan hideaway, Cousteau studies carefully chosen shark pods in Mexico and Australia. “Lots of sharks are baited for tourists nowadays,” he notes. “We looked for pods that have had the least possible human contact, so our data is as unbiased as possible.” He’s tracking preselected members of each pod and filming their responses as they’re introduced to a series of precisely designed and controlled situations.

Cousteau’s crew oversees the experiment via his shipboard command center — the topside boat that carries communications and support equipment. Inside Troy, Cousteau wears a full face mask with voice recording to talk to the support team. They include a marine biologist, sound engineer, topside cameraman, underwater cameraman, deckhand and video editor, as well as his sister Celine (“my lifeline”).

Producing a TV Special

Like his grandfather and father, Cousteau is driven not just to explore but to share what he learns. A key part of the project will be a TV documentary (working title: “Mind of a Demon”), through which Cousteau hopes to tear away ingrained assumptions about sharks.

That’s one reason why Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro are so important to the endeavor. The applications have helped Cousteau convey his ideas to team members and pitch them to prospective backers and TV executives. “We use Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro to edit proposals and treatments, make QuickTime movies and burn DVD demos and rough cuts,” he says.

Cousteau appreciates the powerful features included in Final Cut Pro. “It’s great to be able to do things like 24 frames per second editing without having to buy additional hardware or software, like you do with other programs,” he says.

Next page: Anatomy of a Fake Shark