Sea Studios' groundbreaking TV series, "Shape of Life," is one small slither for a flatworm--and one large jump in the understanding of evolution.

Under the pier on Cannery Row, starfish are on the hunt. The Pisasters are creeping up the slimy poles that held the canneries in place. A camera catches purple, orange and brown arms climbing and slithering their way, bit by bit, to where patches of blue-black mussels live adjoined to the poles, their shells slightly open to catch their food. A starfish reaches a mussel, which snaps shut but cannot withstand the strength of its predator. A tiny endoscopic camera inside the mussel films the starfish''s legs prying open the mussel''s shell. For the first time ever, this camera captures the starfish inverting its stomach inside its prey, where acids will break down the flesh. Sated, the starfish recoils from the mussel shell, leaving it clean and empty of life, swaying open in the surge.

This is the stuff of "Shape of Life," Sea Studios Foundation''s upcoming TV series that introduces nature''s blueprints of evolution. Tucked away in an old cannery next to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a trailblazing group of scientists, producers and photographers at Sea Studios are capturing first-ever footage of animal behaviors and exploring some of nature''s biggest questions: Who are our ancestors and what guides these creatures? How do they overcome nature''s challenges? How do humans relate to the great diversity of life on earth?

Sea Studios is moving beyond the flashy "charismatic mega-fauna"--think lions and tigers and bears (oh, my)--known for their big eyes, jaws and claws, to debut an almost entirely new cast for this drama. About 540 million years ago, an outburst of biological vigor called the Cambrian explosion gave rise to the great diversity of the animal kingdom. Using 30 major body plans (phyla), these creatures filled the seas and covered the land, not losing or gaining any new phyla to the present day. The vast majority of these creatures are spineless wonders known as invertebrates, curious life forms like the predatory tunicate and more common species like the earthworm and jellyfish.

An astounding 99 percent of all animals conform to only eight primary body plans, living within their constraints and benefiting from their versatility. These eight phyla--sponges, cnidarians (jellyfish types), flatworms, molluscs (snails, octopuses, squids, etc.), annelids (earthworms), arthropods (insects, lobsters, spiders), echinoderms (starfish, sea urchins) and chordates (fish, birds, humans)--take center stage in "Shape of Life," each meriting their very own hour-long episode and perhaps a place in the hearts of humanoids.

But, with the nightly news filled with melodramatic footage of death and destruction, and with 60-plus television channels offering a titillating brew of sex and violence, can a documentary series about lower-life forms pack enough drama to keep viewers tuned in? The makers of "Shape of Life" say yes. "You see a starfish running at you like an elephant," says series producer David Elisco, "and you''ll never look at a starfish in the same way again."

Jellyfish to Sea Slugs

"Shape of Life" is poised to challenge central assumptions about natural history programming, much as the Monterey Bay Aquarium did in 1984 when it opened to instant success, despite the popular belief that crowds only go to animal parks to be splashed by belly-flopping killer whales. Through original exhibits featuring low-profile creatures, the aquarium proved to the world that jellyfish could be beautiful and kelp forests a magical new world.

This common goal of the aquarium and "Shape of Life" is no coincidence. Several of the key players in founding the aquarium--including biologists Nancy Burnett and Chuck Baxter--joined Sea Studios director Mark Shelley in generating series ideas back in 1995. "With the aquarium we said ''no'' to the skeptics and we got what we wanted," says Burnett, "I hope we can do that again."

As both an acclaimed filmmaker and a biologist, Shelley designed interactive exhibits including "Jellies" and "Exploring the Deep Canyon" for the aquarium, and formed Sea Studios Inc. in 1984 along with biologists Nancy and Robin Burnett. Pioneering new deep-sea video technology that records life down to 3,000 feet and cinematographic techniques to film seldom-seen underwater life, Sea Studios has produced award-winning programs for National Geographic, the Audubon Society, and museums and aquariums across the country.

"My main goal for ''Shape of Life'' is to turn people onto the 99 percent of animals they don''t interact with or have any appreciation for, and to get across the ingenious solutions to life that they find," says Shelley, who shares the role of executive producer of the series with Nancy Burnett.

While natural history programming abounds with characters like the Australian Crocodile Hunter poking snakes to rile them up for viewers'' delight and the Discovery Channel''s violence-packed "Trials of Life," "Shape of Life" aims to take a deeper look into the evolutionary path that began with single-celled organisms and ultimately led to complex life forms.

To achieve this goal, the Sea Studios Foundation was incorporated in 1996 as a public education arm of the company and to facilitate the gathering of funds toward the project. The Foundation soon secured a whopping $3.5 million from the National Science Foundation as well as smaller grants from the Packard and MacArthur foundations, and began hiring staff and writing scripts for the program while working to convince National Geographic that the series would work. The Foundation began outreach to a consortium of 12 educational institutions to reinforce the concepts in the series and assist with exhibits. These institutions return the favor by promoting the series through fliers, newsletters and other publicity.

But matching the goals of the series with the demands of television production proved to be a challenge. Baxter, scientific content director for the series, says "National Geographic worried that invertebrates are not interesting to public, and we assured them that they are. We know it''s daring to say we''ll do an hour program on flatworms, but we will make it exciting."

Flatworms, for instance, engage in a behavior aptly known as "penis fencing," in which the multicolored hermaphrodites rear back and then plunge down with their two penises ready to eject sperm under the skin of their cohort. No vertebrates can top that performance.

Two years later, National Geographic Television agreed there was merit to the series, and signed Sea Studios as co-producer for "Shape of Life."

"The series caught our eye because it does something new," says Michael Rosenfeld, executive producer of National Geographic Specials. "Sea Studios brings great passion to the project and does a brilliant job of capturing hard-to-see animals on film. They are telling a story of scientific revolution that most people are unaware of."

Now with an overall budget of $10 million, "Shape of Life" has taken on a life of its own. As co-producer of the series, National Geographic participates in all major creative decisions, and maintains constant communication with Sea Studios by phone, visits to Monterey, and viewing natural history footage. In addition to what Shelley calls "branding" the series with its trusted name--which generates widespread support for the project and helps attract top-notch scientists and producers--National Geographic has also contributed funds to "Shape of Life."

Concern lingered on the scientists'' end over whether the scientific content would be compromised in the process of translating it for a TV audience. "I don''t watch TV and I don''t like it," Burnett explains, "but TV is where you reach the largest group of people and see things you can''t find with your bare eyes."

Nuts and Bolts

Back in Monterey, Sea Studios became the center of this massive project involving over 100 people and spanning several continents to prepare the series for the 2001-2002 television season. Shelley says the grand scope and scale of the project is the biggest challenge. "I am figuring out a new role for myself, taking a step back and making sure this large team understands the goal rather than doing it all myself," he explains. "When a team becomes too big to have everyone over for dinner, it''s a totally different management scheme."

Burnett says the biggest struggle has been finding a producer who understood what the group really wanted and could hold the project together. After searching for a year, Sea Studios hired series Producer David Elisco in June of 1999 to be the glue that connects the 40 full-time employees in management teams, line production, writing, scientific content, and photography to a central vision.

Cellphone in hand, Elisco takes on the challenge of converting the series vision into eight one-hour stories that will change the way viewers see animals. "We have people working around the world," says Elisco, "I need to keep scientists in Bristol, England on the same page with crews shooting at Granite Canyon [in Big Sur]. This means meeting with the character producers, talking with photographers, and being here to receive the call that a crew lost their film. That means running through all eight hours of film over and over again every day."

Elisco, who relocated from Pennsylvania to take on the "Shape of Life" project, fondly refers to the production process as "organized chaos," characterized by extreme highs and lows. Distinct from East Coast documentary groups that tend to hire out to lots of companies, he says, Sea Studios attempts to concentrate on people in the Monterey area, which immerses them in the inspiring environmental diversity of Monterey Bay and helps create a culture around the goals of the series.

The target audience for "Shape of Life" is PBS'' standard audience of curious adults and families who take an interest in the world but are not hardcore science folks. According to Mary Jane McKinven, director of PBS Science, Natural History, and Explorations Programming, people watch natural history programs for the visual beauty of the nature and ideas they present. "Whatever your age, it''s empowering and exciting to understand how the world is put together, particularly the world of living things," McKinven explains. John Hoskyns-Abarhall, president of Bullfrog Films, which distributes environmentally educational films, agrees that humans are naturally interested in learning about the creatures with whom we share the planet.

Since Sea Studios is working with many little-known animals for "Shape of Life," it will need to work extra hard to spark viewers'' interest. The series'' strategy is to grab the audience through inventive filming methods like underwater motion control and time lapse, and then introduce scientists who take viewers behind the scenes to see what the animals are really about.

One model of such TV programming was Carl Sagan''s 1980 "Cosmos" series, which used Sagan''s dynamic personality and awe-inspiring footage to translate the message that people must understand the natural world in order to understand ourselves, and that science is a form of history.

"We intend to bring the filming of lions and tigers and bears to snails and flat worms and flies," says Shelley. The operative factor here is Panasonic''s new DVCPRO50 Progressive camera equipment for the incredibly high-resolution Panasonic 480P format, donated to Sea Studios by the Panasonic Corporation. Shelley selected the 480P format over the standard interlacing, because it offers what he calls "the ideal new format for delivering a high-definition final product." (See sidebar this page.) Additionally, says Shelley, Panasonic''s camcorders and post-production equipment are lightweight and rugged, and withstand constant exposure to humidity and salt water.

Four teams set off to capture natural history footage last June, and will continue filming through the summer of 2000. The filming spans several continents from Big Sur to Australia, Hawaii to Indonesia. Due to the incredible natural diversity in Monterey Bay, a quarter of all the macro-level natural history footage of animal behaviors is taking place at Granite Canyon on the Big Sur Coast. Granite Canyon''s special salt water tanks and 24-hour filming capacity make it possible to capture long sequences of animal behaviors, such as a rainbow of starfish swarming (at a starfish pace) to devour a dead fish.

Not unlike the Lorax who speaks for the trees, Chuck Baxter assumes the role of speaking for the animals in his work on the scientific side of the series. Baxter works along with other scientists and script-writers to determine the scientific content of the series, which will provide detailed background for the dramatic animation and live footage.

The team of 20 scientists who will appear on screen, averaging three per episode, will explain that anemones staged the world''s first fights--virtual tentacle-to-tentacle combat over prime feeding space on rocks at the ocean''s floor. As viewers watch the anemones engage in a stinging competition that leaves the loser inactive and the winner''s tentacles searching for food, the scientists explain why these battles occur and how other animals mirror similar behavior. They make sense of the visual beauty on screen.

Shelley films much of the underwater natural history footage, local photographer Earny Kovaks also shoots for the series, and Sea Studios hires outside groups for other facets of production. The 4:2:2 Company in England will produce state-of-the-art animation to take viewers inside the starfish and other creatures to see their mysterious workings. And Elisco selected Michael Whalen, who he has worked with for many years, as the music supervisor. Whalen is developing a series-wide sensibility involving his own original compositions and those of other composers.

But while viewers will see incredible diversity in lower life forms during "Shape of Life"''s eight hours of programming, they will not see much diversity in the humans who present the scientific material. Women represent almost one-half of the scientists appearing on the series, but the group includes only one minority, according to Shelley. Whereas made-for-TV scientific productions have the potential to play a central role in attracting diverse young viewers into the scientific world, "Shape of Life" remains in step with a low statistical representation of minorities in science across the U.S. Nationally, minorities compose only 13 percent of undergraduate science and engineering students and a lessor and declining percentage of science graduate students.

Why Now?

Over the past decade, articles examining new research and scientific theories have been piling up at an unprecedented rate. In what Baxter describes as "the most exciting time in the study of evolution since Darwin," evolutionary developmental genetics, molecular biology and paleontology have seen a burst of activity that renders age-old debates ripe for fresh examination.

While "Shape of Life" does not take a scientific stand on the controversies, the series will explore many rising questions. For example, while scientists concur that the final body forms rose out of the Cambrian explosion, "Shape of Life" furthers the debate over why all the plants and animals on earth appeared suddenly during those 10 million years. And the series furthers the widely held, but not yet documented, belief in many scientific circles that the sponge is the base of all animals and that it gave rise to the rest of the animal kingdom.

Molecular biologists produced a phylogeny of life on earth in 1988 that establishes patterns of relationship between all life forms. This phylogeny revealed that fruit flies and mice used many of the same genes for developmental patterns, suggesting that all animals shared a basic set of genes before the Cambrian explosion branched species development. Although not everyone in the scientific community is convinced, Sea Studios is not shying away from these hot debates--or from the expected critique by creationist groups that deny the very existence of evolution.

Shelley points to still other reasons that make "Shape of Life" possible right now. The proliferation of natural history programs about large exciting animals, such as the Discovery Channel''s "Ultimate Guide Series," he says, demonstrates a proven interest in natural history and opens the way for the story of less-known creatures. Geographic''s Rosenfeld says "science and natural history companies are stumbling over each other to tell the same story."

The popularity of low-impact, outdoorsy eco-tourism also shows that people are focusing more on nature, according to Shelley. "People desire to know more about the animals than they can see with the bare eye or from other natural history programming," he says, "they''re ready for a deeper level of understanding."

And never before has understanding the natural world been so crucial to its survival. "Shape of Life" does not pound a conservation message into the minds of viewers, but Sea Studios hopes that people will come to this conclusion on their own. "We will involve the audience with the organisms, make them feel invested. That is the strongest message of preservation," says Baxter. "Shape of Life"''s exploration of the elegant balance between form and function, physics and the evolutionary process, is meant to increase people''s awareness of the inherent beauty of diversity and the body plans behind it. Baxter predicts that the final episode will ask some larger philosophical questions about the continuation of life and meaning of diversity.

Recognizing that viewers resent environmental propaganda, Bullfrog Films'' Hoskyns-Abarhall says that telling the animals'' stories well and involving the audience is one type of conservation message that could work. But he laments that explicit messages of conservation are almost non-existent in TV programming. "Americans like an upbeat ending, so you need an empowering message," he explains. "If you give people a way to participate, they will take action. People like being active citizens; that''s the whole point of democracy."