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Capturing Coral Coitus On The Darkest Nights Of The Year With ‘Avatar’ Videographer Peter Zuccarini

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Filming coral having sex is, it turns out, really difficult. The process – technically it’s spawning – is especially fraught if oceanographers are trying to help the coral recolonize an underwater desert battered by rising ocean temperatures, pollution and other ravages.

The staghorn coral in question – attempting to restore an ancestral home off Key Biscayne, Fla., with the help of researchers from the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences – have strict requirements when they’re feeling frisky. Coral, it also turns out, can be rather modest.

They only spawn at night, only during a certain time of year, and only at a certain moment in the cycle of the moon that leaves the ocean pitch black just 30 feet below the surface. That need for near-absolute darkness makes filming nigh impossible for most cameras.

All of which is why the project needed some particular help to capture the first successful reproduction of reintroduced coral in Rainbow Reef, about 2.5 miles offshore from Key Biscayne.

The university turned to long-time film and TV underwater videographer Peter Zuccarini, along with a most unusual video camera from Canon, which has been working UM as part of the company’s own corporate sustainability program, enclosed in an underwater housing from Gates.

Though capturing the coral spawning was anything but simple, UM’s project did have a few things going for it, like the availability of Zuccarini, whose more than 100 film and TV credits over nearly 40 years include Bumblebee, two Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, All is Lost, Life of Pi, and the upcoming Fast and Furious sequel F9.

The past four years, Zuccarini has been working as director of underwater photography in Los Angeles and New Zealand with director Jim Cameron on multiple sequels to his blockbuster Avatar.

With the pandemic temporarily interrupting the Avatar filming in New Zealand, Zuccarini was temporarily back home in Key Biscayne, where he grew up learning to dive and photograph underwater, and available. When UM approached him to help capture the coral restoration work, he jumped at the chance.

“It's exciting for me swimming out on those reefs, which can be a little bit of a downer if you grew up seeing coral, and now you see these algae-covered rocks and just dead coral everywhere,” Zuccarini said. “And all of a sudden, you go out to this site, and there are these fresh, they almost look like flowers, these bundles of staghorn corals that they've planted all over the place, scattered around and you're like, ‘Wow, it's really looking healthy and alive and very exciting.’”

The restoration involved harvesting pieces of coral from a dozen areas where hardier, heat-tolerant strains survive, nurturing them in the lab, then transplanting the result back in the wild.

Given the extreme limitations on capturing the transplant’s first spawning, Canon offered up a new camera, its ME20F-SH, which it calls a “multi-purpose” machine but which comes with a secret weapon, a CMOS sensor capable of an extraordinarily low-light ISO setting of 4 million. For comparison, prosumer-level DSLR and mirrorless cameras are considered extremely capable in low-light with ISO levels in the 100,000 range.

The ME20F CMOS uses light-capturing pixels 7.5 times larger than those in Canon’s full-frame DSLRs. The flipside of bigger pixels is that they take up a lot of space. That DSLR sensor might have around 18.1 megapixels, but the ME20F has room for just 2.26 megapixels on the same footprint. That still allows excellent video capture possibilities, but most importantly, it brought a flexibility that met the coral project’s extraordinary demands.

“At first, when you when you get hold of one of these types of cameras, you imagine it to be something like you'd see in a military video, infrared or thermal imaging,” Zuccarini said. “But what it actually does is quite different. It just incredibly ramps up, almost like a superpower, the ability to see in the dark, and you see with normal colors. You're expecting to have this gimmicky image, but you get this really beautiful, colorful image.”

That makes the camera much more useful, Zuccarini said, “because now you don’t have to only use it in some kind of novel way. The most extraordinary moment is when you start. The idea that you’re swimming in the dark, and you cannot actually see (your surroundings), except through your monitor on the camera. It’s like you’re watching TV, and you take your eye off the monitor and you’re like, ‘I can’t see anything.’ That’s like stumbling around in a haunted house with just a little glimpse of light.”

Normally, Zuccarini would heavily light a night shoot underwater, to better show off all the colorful plants and fauna, and the topography of the ocean floor. Not on this shoot.

“I was told right up front in the pre-dive briefing that this was such a sensitive event for them,” Zuccarini said. “They really did not want to risk any lights that were powerful enough to trigger some kind of unanticipated response from the corals.”

To navigate during the spawning period, researchers first dove during daytime to plant a visual path among the coral using extremely low-light glowsticks. Once the dark fell, they had about a three-hour window to capture the work of gathering gametes from the spawning process.

Zuccarini trailed a researcher wearing a tiny, infrared light on her forehead as she moved among the corals, helping shepherd the gametes into collecting funnels topped with glass containers.

“It just struck me as, ‘This is what it's all about for a scientist. Their lab work has led to this moment,’” Zuccarini said. “It just really felt to me like that intensity of investigation was well captured in those moments.”

As the spawn capture went on, the researchers were able to add a tiny bit of additional light, a penlight similar to what might be used on a camping trip to find a restroom in the middle of the night.

And that modest light, Zuccarini said, sparked his instincts as a cinematographer to “capture these nice, backlit moments with light streaming around the head, like you might see in a feature film. And it was functioning like on my movies, where I might have a 4,000-watt (lighting array). I was stunned. I was making these little sort of science-fiction moments with hand tools, which I was completely excited by.”

The camera will have applications in his future film work, Zuccarini said, mentioning a Ron Howard project based on Herman Melville’s research interviews with whalers before he wrote Moby-Dick. And when he finishes the Avatar sequels, Zuccarini said he already has another side project in mind with the ME20F, capturing the enchanting movement of bioluminescent creatures in the ocean at night.

“That is one of the most magical things you can see in the ocean,” Zuccarini said. “”I thought to go in with this camera full strength and really do a balletic/techie art piece showing human forms moving through bioluminescence. That’s the thing I really want to do with that camera next.”

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