The newest floating attraction at Monterey Bay Aquarium is not the captive great white shark nor the flotillas of portaled jellyfish, but an equally exotic high-definition video.

First, there’s how you watch it. The 4-minute looping movie, which introduces aquarium visitors to the wonders of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, is uniquely rear-projected onto a special clear-coated plastic screen that sits on a pedestal but appears to float in a small theater designed to accommodate the easy ebb and flow of viewing traffic.

Then there’s how it got made. Directed by Mark Shelley, President of Sea Studios, Inc., and Executive Producer of Sea Studios Foundation, this rare HD specimen was spawned in a state-of-the-art Panasonic Varicam camera on DVCPRO HD tape, captured with a FireWire-enabled Panasonic deck onto Power Mac G5 computers running Final Cut Pro HD and post-produced in an unbroken digital workflow using the latest versions of Apple Pro apps.

“Just to give you a little perspective on our front yard here, if you drained this big bay, it would reveal a canyon as spectacular and dramatic as the Grand Canyon and about the same size and shape.”

The rap on HD production used to be: “nice images, too cumbersome, too expensive.” But the “Sanctuary” video’s desktop post workflow produced a complete high-def video in a week, with no loss of image quality, at far below cost for a traditionally produced HD project.

Full Immersion HD

“The Aquarium has always been interested in presenting the highest quality visuals, which means high definition,” says Shelley. “But for me that also meant displaying it properly rather than just showing it on a small monitor. I believe we’ll find ways to use this projection screen technology with HD to make an even more immersive exhibit experience.”

And there’s no reason to doubt that they will. Since creating and installing the first video exhibits for the 1984 opening of the aquarium, Sea Studios has produced successful science and natural history films, videos and exhibit installations for science centers and aquariums around the world.

But the implications of the new digital HD workflow may ripple even more significantly into the work of Shelley’s spinoff, Sea Studios Foundation, formed in 1996 to create HD science and nature shows for television.

Made for TV

“I started Sea Studios Foundation in 1996 as an outgrowth of the work that we’ve done at the aquarium,” he says. “I wanted to communicate these kinds of ideas to a broader audience.”

In his first major Foundation project, “The Shape of Life,” Shelley set out to document the underreported invertebrates, which compose about ninety-eight percent of all animals. “They’re unsung heroes that typically don’t get cover-featured,” he says. “But National Geographic said we couldn’t do 8 hours on animals our audiences hate: spiders, bugs, leeches. So we covered the whole animal kingdom, shot it all over the world, and produced it in high definition.”

“Strange Days on Planet Earth,” also in HD, and hosted and narrated by actor Edward Norton, looks at major global environmental issues through the lens of earth system science. Scheduled to air on PBS in April, 2005, it’s already won two Panda Awards — a kind of Oscar for wildlife films — including a Best Series award.

In the Cannery

Doors down from the aquarium in his Sea Studios office on Cannery Row, a retrofitted street now as much about Starbucks as Steinbeck, Shelley comes off as precisely the right man in the right place and time to take up a new paradigm for HD documentary production.

“You know Steinbeck’s ‘Cannery Row’?” he asks. “Well, Doc, the hero of ‘Cannery Row,’ his lab was in the building right next door to us. The guy who owned his lab owned this building. It was a cannery back in the late 40s, but not long after that the sardines went belly up. Now it’s our offices.”

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