Two weeks ago the world lost one its most charismatic documentary filmmakers, cinematographers, and guardian of the oceans and their creatures.

It's been months since I last blogged. That's not because I've had nothing to blog about. Actually, it's quite the opposite. Been extremely busy. We've been shooting in the U.S. in Baton Rouge, New Orleans and editing the trailer and promo to the Plastic Oceans film in Las Vegas. Locally, in Hong Kong, we just finished shooting a fabulous campaign for Shanghai Tang and we are doing pre-production for a campaign for Esprit, to be shot later this month. More to come on both when the film is edited and ready for release. I'm now in the UK preparing for the next leg of filming in Germany, the U.S., Fiji, Tuvalu, Lord Howe Island and Tasmania. It's then back to the UK for further preparations for filming in Manila, Hawaii and Midway Island in the middle of the Pacific. I'm particularly excited about the Fiji leg. Among the human health and marine sequences of mantas, sharks, fish and night diving sequences we are also filming a sequence with me and Fiji's top pro surfer at Cloud Break, considered one of the top five surf breaks on the planet. I'm feeling a little intimidated by it as it's pretty hard core. I'm rather unfit and haven't had a surf in two months due to my filming schedule, so I've started a swimming campaign here in the UK in a late moment attempt to get my vo2 max in some sort of order. I'm also hoping to film some surfing sequences in my home state of Tasmania when we go there to film Shearwater birds nesting on the outer islands. Marrawah, on the West Coast of Tasmania's North-West Coast is a sacred aboriginal area and has fantastic surf, making for an incredibly spiritual experience in the water. I will post pictures as we go and try and keep up with blog. For now, it's off to Cologne.

Tomorrow I head off from Bristol to Nice, France, to begin directing the deep water Mediterranean sequences for the Plastic Oceans film, "Away". Thursday and Friday we will be filming free diving world record holder, Tanya Streeter, diving to around 40 metres on one breath. Tanya is a truly remarkable talent. She was the first woman to break a men's sporting record when she free dived to 160metres several years ago before retiring in 2009. Today, she is a presenter for natural history documentaries and tv series and is great fun to work with and will be one of the 4 explorers featured on the Away film who is  travelling the globe to investigate the extent and effects of plastic pollution in our marine environment.

After two years of pre-production, filming for the Plastic Oceans project finally kicked off in Sri Lanka on Monday. It's been a hell of a journey but I can tell you, seeing my first blue whale off the Coast of Marissa, in southern Sri Lanka, makes the entire project worth everything that has been put in to it. These creatures are amazing to watch. At around 30 metres, they dwarf the boats around them and make our underwater camera teams seem tiny in comparison. They are the largest animals ever to have lived on the planet. They make me feel insignificant. Blue Whales have been an animal I've studied from a young age. They are few in numbers, some say just ten thousand left in several populations around the world. But their numbers are growing. There are three sub species and we are here with cetacean scientists to study their migrations, their food habits and the toxicity levels in their blubber. But they are incredibly shy and very difficult to find and film. We have been on the water now for two days. The first day was rough and windy and whilst we saw whales spouting and fluking in the distance, we just couldn't get close enough. We also broke some very expensive kit in the rough weather. My new Polecam snapped off one of the carbon fibre lengths. But we managed some home repairs and luckily the electronics haven't been effected. We've also encountered some heavy duty bureaucracy here which has hampered our filming efforts, but we continue to push on undeterred in our quest to expose the problem of plastic and pollution in the world's marine environment. Last night, my presenter, Ben Fogle, arrived from the UK and we began filming the sequences of Ben interacting with our cetacean scientist, Lindsay Porter, and of course, the whales. Only problem was, unlike yesterday, when we encountered around 8 whales during the day, today there were none. Fingers crossed for tomorow.

Assistant cameraman John Chambers checks the Reds in the special Gates underwater housings.


Polecam operator John McIntosh gives the new Polecam a trial run


My DOP, Mike Pitts, checks the damage to one of the Polecam sections after we were hit by heavy seas on the first day of filming.


Me with my crew, filming our first Blue Whales. What a day! What an experience!


And that she blows. All 35 metres of her.






Presenter Ben Fogle, the man who rowed across the Atlantic, loves the razor wire around this  tug, put there to protect the crew from Somali pirates.


The water visibility is unbelievable, almost 40 metres.


A perfect end to another great day of filming.

Next Saturday myself and my crew plus a ton of equipment fly to Colombo, Sri Lanka, to meet our UK producers for the first shoot in a round of seven shoots scheduled this year (before October!) for a feature film on the damage plastic is doing to our marine environment.

The working title of the film is "Away" and it's to be released theatrically in the U.S. in 2012. It will then be broadcast by National Geographic Channel on global cable release once it's done its rounds in the cinemas. The film is called "Away" because that's how we view plastic as a one time use product, when the opposite is the truth. Plastic does not biodegrade and is with us for the rest of our lives and the lives of our children. Almost two billion barrels of oil are used to produce more than 300 million tonnes of plastic every year and most of that ends up in our marine environment.  The film investigates the issue of our use of plastic and how our marine environment and consequently us humans are now threatened by this plastic.

We will film four explorers as they travel the globe with the world's most renowned ocean scientists studying the amount of plastic in our oceans, the toxicity levels in marine animals and how it is affecting our food chain. In our first shoot starting this Saturday off the south coast of Sri Lanka we will film pygmy blue whales. For the first time ever, our scientists will dart these enormous creatures and take biopsies of blubber samples to determine what they are eating, where they are migrating and the levels of toxins they are carrying. It will be a difficult shoot as little is known about these hard-to-find creatures who have rarely been filmed.

We will also shoot this year in Hawaii, Midway Island, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, Indonesia, Los Angeles and the Antarctic.

The cinematographers and producers of the film are the best ever assembled for one project and have worked on documentaries such as Blue Planet, Life, Earth, Big Cat Diary, Frozen Planet, Pacific Abyss and Walking With Dinosaurs. Indeed, one of my heros, Sir David Attenborough, is associated with the project. It was he who first tweaked my interest in natural history subjects and lit the fire of documentary film-making under me.

I have been asked to executive produce and direct the film and I also get to present several of the segments in the Indian Ocean and Antarctica, where my producers have requested that for one segment I dive with Leopard seals.

It's an honour to be associated with such a fabulous project on an issue that is affecting us all. It's an even greater honour to be directing with such notable natural history cinematographers as Mike Pitts and Doug Allen and producers Jo Ruxton, Adaire Osbaldson and Lizzie Bewick.

We are filming on ultra high definition Red cameras and will have two underwater crews, one topside crew and one making-of crew. We will spend 16 days on the 102ft Galileo with two 10 metre inflatable boats and a helicopter to help us achieve our desired shots. We will also have a Polecam to give us dynamic moving shots and we will be taking 20 terabytes of harddrives to upload our vision. The logistics in arranging this shoot have been enormous and have taken 12 months to sort out, from the permits to dart the whales to the funding for the film, to the carnets for the equipment.

For more information visit the Plastic Ocean Foundation's website at www.plasticoceans.com. And now a word from the legend himself...
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7MtuG2I_f0