Behind the Scenes: Filming Coral Reefs in Virtual Reality with Mads St Clair

I think the thing that makes VR so special is that you can bring this world unseen to people who have never seen the ocean, who have never been in the ocean. And not only is it seen, but it's felt. It is this feeling of total immersion, breaking the barrier between two worlds. I think there's something really beautiful about when we can use technology for nature. Virtual reality is one of those occasions. I've seen firsthand how putting on a headset and seeing a manta ray, or seeing a turtle swim by, or seeing coral, suddenly something that is part of their life, but isn't part of their world, becomes something that they can relate to. We're here in Seychelles, an archipelago of islands in the tropics. And our aim with this VR project is to capture this underwater world, and particularly these pristine coral reef ecosystem sites and the opposing degraded ecosystems, and to showcase this by using Canon technologies. So we're using virtual reality to show these worlds in a way that they've never been seen before. So in order to shoot this, we have a virtual reality setup, which is the Canon R5C with the RF 5.2mm dual fisheye lens in a custom underwater housing. The thing about this virtual reality lens is that it gives us what we would normally see. It's a 180 degree field of view, and in the housing this is cropped slightly to 140 degrees, but it still gives us this feeling of immersion. As someone who's shot on the R5C for a really long time, I was already really comfortable with the camera. All I had to really learn at this point was just how this lens worked underwater, how it worked inside the housing, and really gauging where I needed to best place myself in the water to get the best images possible. Filming in the ocean is nothing like shooting on land. You're going into a world that is suddenly way more dimensional. You have up, you have down, your position in the water is completely different to the position that you would have in land. You're suddenly buoyant, you're floating, you have way more positions that you can be in, and it's a really exciting medium. The other thing you have to deal with when working underwater is that you are at the mercy of the ocean. You have currents, you have weather, you have swell. Everything you can imagine will dictate your filming day. That's something I think that can be really exciting, but on other days it's really challenging. That was quite the surge though, it was moving this quite a lot. You're either going side to side or if you're pushing forward, suddenly you get pushed really quick forward and then you're being called back. I think it'll be really disorienting for people in the headsets, so I think you're going to have to do another recce and find somewhere else that works better, which is annoying because the light was perfect, visibility was so good, and the coral was looking amazing. I hope that when people watch the VR from this project, they can see how clearly the challenges are for reefs at the moment, and I hope they can feel the difference. They can see the difference in coral, they can see the difference in fish life, and they can really feel this change. So something I really like about this setup is that it's simple. Traditionally, VR has relied on having two different lenses, which requires a more complicated setup, syncing. This system eliminates all of that. You have one lens with a dual fisheye and then your output, the workflow, is equally as easy. You just have a single file. We were really lucky because on one of the dives we did see a turtle and immediately we went down and by the grace of something, this turtle wanted to be filmed and we managed to follow it for about 10 minutes along the reef as it ate, as it drifted and got stuck in the reef in the surge, and finally as it gracefully swam up to the surface and took a breath. It looks so good. I'll tell you what, this turtle swimming into the sunlight actually looks better than I thought it would. I think there's something about capturing megafauna, especially with turtles. They're a keystone image of coral reefs. Everyone thinks of coral and turtles hand in hand, so to be actually able to capture that moment and to be able to bring that above the surface was really cool. I think the thing that surprised me the most when I was reviewing the VR footage that we shot was how actually immersed I felt in the underwater world. I really felt like I'd been thrown into it because suddenly I could look to the left, I could look to the right, I could look upwards, I could look down, and I really felt present. Oh it looks good. The light is so good and the visibility looks really good as well. Oh he looks so good in the sun. We can take this to communities to understand more about the ecosystem and to care for them because you protect what you love but you can only love what you know. So virtual reality is this incredible tool that bridges that gap. This is a tool to preserve the past. This is a tool to keep a fraction of what was and to show it to future generations too.