How to produce a TV-series on a sailboat
Making the documentary series “Under Overflaten” was a huge dream and a big passion project for me. In this post I will talk a bit about how we executed some of the production. Check out the trailer for the series below:
Motivation
A question I get asked a lot is: What was your motivation for making this series?
I had been working several years as a SCUBA instructor, and was always so fascinated by the way my students was surprised by seeing the underwater world for the first time. This really motivated me to make a bigger film about diving in Norway, and really showing others how wonderful diving could be. I just needed to figure out the angle of the story.
After a few years I met Ole, and he always talked about his big dream: living aboard a sailboat. We decided that this would be the perfect way to make both our dreams a reality. We both agreed that we wouldn’t do this without our partners Hanna and Henrikke. They needed no persuasions. I talked with NRK about our proposal, and they loved the idea. Now we needed to figure out how we could make the journey interesting for the TV-screens.
Pre-production
Before we started sailing we spent well over a year planning how to film, where we would sail and which equipment we needed for a year a long the Norwegian coast.
Together with NRK we decided that we wanted to make “active girl 28 years old” our main target group for the series.
We tried our best to figure out where we would visit along the coast, thinking we had a lot of time to visit every places we wanted. This became the foundation of “the bucketlist”. A red thread in the series. We also wanted to do some something unique for the series, something that had not been done that much before. That became talking under water with each others, making the underwater scenes even more engaging.
Together we started our own company Havblikk Film As, and bought a Bavaria 50 sailboat, which we named Havblikk. I quit my job as a marketing consultant, and was finally ready for the journey.
Getting the boat ready
Making a TV-series requires a lot of equipment. Making a TV-series on a boat, and under water demands an extreme amount of equipment!
Packing the right amount of equipment is truly an art form. Non of us had really been living on a sailboat before, which resulted in us bringing way too much equipment. Luckily we had the opportunity to get rid of a lot of equipment after a few months, making the day to day life a lot easier.
Conclusion: Plan the travel route really well, which makes it easier to figure out how much, and what type of equipment you need.
I am really glad we had enough cabins to dedicate one of them for technical equipment such as drones, cameras, underwater housing and charging hubs. This really made the logistics of filming a lot easier.
Rules of filming
We decided to make some rules for filming during day to day life. For instance we were supposed to film everything we found interesting or exciting, even though if there was situations that some of us was not comfortable being filmed in. Our thinking was that after seeing the footage a few weeks later, it wasn’t that bad after all. For example: sea sickness, grounding the boat or discussions. This in hopes of capturing authentic situations.
We also decided that everyone should learn to operate the cameras on land, so that we could film each others.
Voice
Getting good sound is almost as important as getting video. It was certently challenging getting good sound with four “main characters” in a documentary, in scenarios were we needed to get ready to record in a few seconds if something suddenly happened. We solved this by wearing voice recorder on our body at all time, recording everything each day when sailing or doing adventures. At the end of the day we offloaded all the voice recordings to our on-board server which I later synced to our video material.
Flying drones from a sailboat
Although I considered my self as an experienced drone pilot, flying from a sailboat in motion was a new (and sometimes nerve-wrecking) experience.
To fly safe and responsible, ideally you should have a big nice space to take-off and land on. This does not exist on a sailboat. If you add big waves, boat speed, strong winds and lots of wires and sails to potentially crash into, you have the recipe off high pulse on every take-off and landing.
Actually take-off was actually hardest since we didn’t know if the drone was flying as intended before it was in the air. If something wasn’t right, the drone got a one way ticket to the ocean floor. The safest solution was to have Ole wearing a thick welding glove and held the drone in the air behind the boat, while I started the propellers. Then I pushed the sticks full throttle and flew out of Oles hand when he let go.
When landing, I turned off all automatic help systems (the wires, sails and instrumentation caused disturbances), tried to match the boat speed with the drone speed, found right drone hight in relation to the waves and flew right in to Ole’s hand on the next wave top.
All this resulted in 79 registered drone flights, 5 broken propellers, one lost drone and a lot of invaluable footage. Even though it was challenging it was definitely worth it.
Talking under water
As I mentioned it was important that the series contained a new element: Talking under water. It proved to be quite challenging i relation to “regular” diving when you use a mouth piece. The solution was to use full face masks, so that we had our mouth free to talk. Then we added microphones and senders/receivers we could talk to each others. On the microphones we also added a waterproof cable that ran from the masks, through a specialised valve on our dry suits and into a voice recorder hanging in a water tight plastic bag.
Underwater scenes
It already exists a lot of truly stunning underwater video featuring animals and creatures. That is of course important to show the under water world, but we also wanted to show divers together with the animals, so that the viewer could get a better understanding of how it actually is to interact with the life and nature under water. We also wanted to get closeups off reactions and dialoge to create even more dynamic under water scenes.
Handling the Raw-materials
Filming almost every day for a whole year generates a lot of raw video material.
To combat this we acquired a data server which we placed on a safe place in the sail boat. Then we pulled cables all around the boat so that everybody could connect to the server at the sane time, and assist in off-loading the materials from all the different cameras and recorders. We used 8 SSD drives (to combat vibrations and hits) in a Raid5 array for redundancy.
In total we recorded near 350 hours of video which I cut down to about 100 hours for NRK to edit into eight 42 minute episodes.
In retrospect we should have planned the expedition even better in order to predetermine what we actually needed to film. This would have made our day to day life a lot easier, and would allow us more time on the experiences we actually used in the series.
Equipment we used
We used a lot of different equipment. Here are some of the most important main components.
Sony PXW-Z90
Sony a7iii
Sony 16-35mm f/2.8
Sony 24-105mm f/4.0
Sony FE 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 GM OSS
Nauticam underwater housing for Sony a7iii
Nauticam Wide Angle Conversion Ports
I-torch c-92 underwater video lights
DJI Osmo Action
DJI Mavic 2 Pro and Zoom
Sennheiser 8060
Audio LTD A10 with Countryman b3 lavaliers
Tentacle Sync E
Qnap TVS-882ST3
