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Flight of the Aquanaut / production notes

To put Flight of the Aquanaut on film, Director/Producer Stephen Low, Associate Producer Paul Mockler and a crew of up to 20 divers and technical personnel spent four months diving from a specially equipped Hatteras sport -fishing boat and from additional support boats.

Working out of Port Lucaya on Grand Bahama Island in the Bahamas, the team filmed almost entirely underwater, using dozens of locations, from coral reefs in the sparkling turquoise shallows, to the massive underside of a supertanker, to a deep-water shipwreck; they filmed sharks, turtles and moray eels, and swam with trained dolphins in the open ocean. Working around storms and aiming for periods of maximum water clarity, the team was able to capture the Bahamas' unique underwater vistas.

To shoot some of the key dramatic sequences and achieve a high level of realism, the team worked at depths of 100 feet and more, far deeper than Hollywood productions which manufacture the deep sea experience in tanks or in shallow water. In an ironic twist, the divers, operating with conventional SCUBA equipment, could operate for only a limited time at depth, while the film's ill -fated character, the well -equipped 'aquanaut' was capable of remaining below the surface for many hours without difficulty.

Despite a rigorous diving schedule and the hazards and complexities of creating dramatic sequences at depth (some of them inside a shipwreck), filming for Flight of the Aquanaut was completed without incident.