BBC One – Asia – The Search for the Sea Rabbit

Now that we had a main character, we needed to film this little thing. Kristina Karliczek Skoglund, an experienced underwater cameraman, was tasked with capturing the sea rabbit on camera.

One of the biggest problems with the guinea pig was time. To film the daily life of this creature, we had to spend hours underwater. Essentially an adorable underwater slug, the sea rabbit moves at a snail’s pace. To get the best photos of the sea bunny going about its normal life, Christina needed to spend as much time underwater as possible. But using a traditional scuba rig, most divers can only spend an hour underwater. Luckily, Christina had her own specialized rebreather diving system, a unit originally developed by the military that recycles the air a diver exhales. This allowed Christina to spend more than four hours underwater at a time, emerging for lunch on the support boat before heading back for another stay in the “underwater studio”.

The second problem with photographing the sea rabbit was its size. Since he’s not much bigger than a snack-sized chocolate bar, we needed some serious macro lenses to show off this slug in all his glory, but to get the most out of those lenses, you need a lot of light. Large underwater lamps had to be carefully moved into place. The balloons were tethered to a lighting rig on the surface and then slowly deflated to allow the equipment to sink into the sea. The divers were then able to carefully place the lanterns on the seabed. Finding clear areas of sand to place two lights and a camera tripod without damaging the corals proved a challenge. The currents, sunlight and ocean visibility had to be just right for the sea bunny to look its best on camera.

In difficult conditions, Christina and the dive team captured some incredible moments. To complement their efforts and properly showcase the sea slug by giving it the close-up it deserves, we knew we had to go further. So we set about creating our own miniature reef in a specially adapted seawater tank right on the seashore. Under Peri’s expert guidance, we were able to briefly move the sea slug into the tank and capture some great “hero” extreme close-up shots that simply wouldn’t have been possible in the open ocean.