'Jungle Cruise' Cinematographer Ian Seabrook Dives Deep On Underwater Filmmaking
If there’s underwater scenes in your movie, there’s one name Hollywood calls upon to capture the mysterious realm and that name is Ian Seabrook. Maybe his surname was just a coincidence or maybe kismet but the Director Of Photography is best known for capturing splashy imagery in many box office behemoths like ‘Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice,’ ‘It: Chapter Two’ and ‘Deadpool 2’ to name but a few. For his latest foray into the filmstrip, Seabrook waded into the waters of the Amazon River… Or at least the river’s stand-in: Blackhall Studios in Atlanta, Georgia to film Disney’s new period exotic journey, ‘Jungle Cruise’.
Jungle Cruise stars Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt in a riverboat adventure based on the Disneyland theme park ride of the same name. Seabrook kindly took a moment with Filmspeak’s Kaleena Steakle to talk about the challenges and rewards of filming this summer blockbuster as well as his start in the industry. “I think that the work involved to get to a certain position in whatever you’re doing, if you’re a surgeon, or if you’re a helicopter pilot, or whatever, there needs to be a training ground. And I think there’s for sure, a disconnect with a lot of people who go, ‘I can get into film, I can do this,’ and certainly with my job - which is I just jump in the water with a camera. It’s been attempted a few times and they learn real quick that it's not as easy as it looks to the eye or on paper. I mean, I’ve always felt that the journeymen process or journey woman process in any discipline is the reason why there’s steps involved in your learning. It’s no different from your black belt, in martial arts; you move up when you’ve acquired the proper training for that stage.”
Seabrook reflects on his early career that got him into recording underwater images, “I was a photographer, I was into photography before I got into the film industry. I learned how to develop my own negative, and dark rooms, and so on, so forth. Then, when I got certified to dive, I was diving in Australia and living in Australia for a little bit and they had a camera rental place there. You can just sort of take this little plastic housing that would surround an Instamatic film camera. So, I took that down, and everyone else says, ‘We’re just gonna dive around, we’re not going to play with cameras.’ So I took the 36 exposures and I still have the photos. They’re all on slide film.”
When finally able to work with underwater cameras full time, Seabrook realized how niche and nuanced the different setting proved to be. Filmmaking is already subject to Murphy’s Law and adding the potentially fatal environment of a subsurface locations with hundreds of moving parts is a long way from that first Instamatic point-and-shoot. “It became pretty apparent that the underwater dp had a lot of responsibilities. It wasn't simply just holding the camera and framing something you were lighting; you were gripping, you were working with the special effects department, you were making sure that the talent was safe even though there’s safety divers. You're the first point of contact if you're looking through the lens when things could go wrong and sometimes have gone wrong. The scope and scale of some of these productions, you know, they would have multiple cameras on some of them like some of the earlier Bond films, I guess it's like ‘Never Say Never Again,’ they had maybe three cameras underwater. But the people that were hired for these jobs were specialists underwater cinematographers. So, it wasn't like they were being trained on the job, they already knew what they're doing. So, I started assisting underwater, you know, basically being the surface housing technician that puts the camera- which is a very important job -which seals a camera in the housing and ensures that it doesn't leak. So, by being a second assistant and a focus puller, you are detailing the technicalities of the job. All that training really pays off when you're taking cameras underwater and you know, the likelihood of a flood which would wreck all that equipment inside, could cause half a million dollars worth of damage to the equipment, well, who had their hands on the camera?”
“I’m able to shoot in any environment”
Working on these big budget projects has allowed for an easier pre-production process as Seabrook says, “More often than not, you're involved several weeks or several months before they actually shoot it. Oftentimes underwater cinematography sequences are usually scheduled until the end of the show. On one picture, I just recently finished doing for Netflix, which Francis Lawrence directed, the underwater work was scheduled throughout the shoot. So, that is a little uncommon to do it that way. What’s also common is computer pre-visualization and that is usually done by an animator where the camera whizzes around at Mach 10 speed and you're like, ‘Okay, well that's not realistic. We're not going to be able to do that.’ The storyboards or the [pre-visualization] usually are meant as a rough, loose guides. They're not meant to be nailed in stone, but sometimes on some films, they want it exactly like that. So, it just depends on the job.”
For Jungle Cruise, Seabrook says, “there were some rough storyboards for that but we were more just dialoguing the whole thing. Then, after that, I went on a survey to the art department. I went to the art department and some of the construction stages to see the sets that were then built. The set was already designed, it was already under construction but had not been completed. Then, I had other meetings with other art department members and construction teams about what materials to use, what materials not to use, what to ensure would not come apart in the water. Obviously, the set would be built outside of the of the tank and then have to be lowered in and there's a settling period where air bubbles come out or the paint doesn't react well with water, whatever the chemicals are, chlorine or bromine or what have you, or salt water. All these things have to settle to make sure that you get in there and it's just not just murky, milky water that you can't really shoot in; which was the case when we first got in.”
Despite problems that can arise with both shooting practically on location as well as controlled sound stage tanks, Seabrook confidently states, “I’m able to shoot in any environment. The original plan was to shoot all the underwater work in that exterior tank. Now, the water was clear when they put everything together but then they had rain towers and they had a whole bunch of other things. Wave machines were going and they had real foliage there they had dressed like a jungle, as you see in the film. So, when the rain towers went on, or when there was any water movement, the plants, the dirt or anything else, that set dressing all kind of went into the water. The water color turned brown, which is accurate for what we were trying to shoot, but it is in no way conducive to any kind of underwater film, shooting clarity, what have you. If you're going to shoot anything underwater, you're better off doing this separately because you're never gonna see anything and then you're gonna on the day be frustrated.”
He continues, “We went to Tahiti on Batman vs. Superman and when we shot that in Bora Bora, that water was crystal, it was fantastic. It was beautiful. There were real fish everywhere. We were shooting inside a protected atoll so the waves and the surge was was minimized. Certainly, when we when we shot in Tahiti, or anytime I've worked in the South Pacific or open ocean for anything, if you are using lights, you have to have the lights with the generator on the boat, the boat has to be tethered, everybody has to be kind of anchored and clipped in. It’s more conducive to success really, when it's done in a controlled environment.”
Finally, when shooting blockbusters compared to low-budget films, he says, “The larger films, sometimes, as far as the visual back scope of it is concerned, or the special effects scope of it, the realism of the sequence is more realized, if that makes sense. On some smaller budget films, you're forced to work harder to make it look more realized, if you will. You can't just assume that if I shoot off the area that we're shooting, if we if we've pinpointed an area to shoot, then that's fine. I was being very cautious on one job I was doing this year, and the director who I know quite well, he was saying, ‘Oh, no, you can just you can just keep going.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but I'm going into a lot of rigging and gimbal and cables and stuff.’ [The director said] ’Don’t worry about that.’ It depends on the project and it depends if it’s something a little smaller, like a Netflix series. It's not going to have the budget of Batman versus Superman. So you'll need to to adjust.”