Five oceans. Thirty-three countries. Six years in the making. Five hundred days at sea. Four thousand hours diving underwater. Over 1,000 species.
These are the superlatives that Sara Edelson, director of documentary series at Netflix, opened with on Thursday, Sept. 26 for a special screening of the first episode of Our Oceans, a five-part docuseries narrated by Barack Obama.
“[The ocean] is an amazing place, and I just hope that people really see that beauty,” said Inka Cresswell, series researcher during a question and answer session following the film.
The auditorium at the Monterey Bay Aquarium was packed. Researchers and ocean enthusiasts – including a few Tik-Tok “ocean influencers” – filed in from the Marine Mammal Gallery. If you’ve ever watched Planet Earth, you’ve probably wondered how they capture footage. Our Oceans raises the bar even higher, using cutting-edge, and in many cases custom, technology that makes you feel like you’re riding on the backs of humpback whales or swimming alongside the underbellies of cuttlefish.
“We had to develop kits to help us capture these scenes,” series producer Jonathan Smith told the audience. “We built underwater motion control rigs, we pioneered low-light filming and we developed really long running cameras to remain underwater for long periods of time.” The film is truly an underwater cinematic feat, with seemingly impossible scenes captured from around the world.
As a result of this series and the endless underwater footage gathered, about two dozen scientific papers were produced – a testament to the amount of footage of lesser-known species and to the collaboration with other scientific institutions around the world.
The first episode invites viewers into an underwater world that feels less mysterious and more understood, with scenes spanning diverse species and oceans, all connected by the Global Ocean Current – the single current that links all oceans. Upcoming episodes follow stories along this current, exploring themes of climate change, pollution, and the unique characters within these ecosystems across the globe.
“The ocean is under huge pressure,” James Honeyborne, the series’ executive producer, said in Monterey. “But they have the capacity to recover if we choose to make a difference in our relationship with it.”