The following is a special presentation of WTCI, Chattanooga, North Georgia, and the Tennessee Valley.

It's time to dive in under the sea, that is.

We had a lot of laughs.

We had three stops around the shop and.

Sit at four feet away.

Find out what it takes to bring a 3D ocean adventure above the surface to IMAX theaters.

This week, I sit down with filmmakers Howard and Michelle Hall straight ahead on the A-list.

Howard and Michelle Hall, this dynamic couple are the film industry's only underwater 3D 70 millimeter filmmakers pioneering the depths of the world's oceans and waterways.

They have seven Emmys under their belt.

Well Michelle and Howard, welcome to the A-list.

Let's start back a little bit.

So I understand that you met around 1975.

Howard, you were Michelle's dive instructor.

We didn't even date until she was long finished her diving class.

You had to make sure she would pass the certification, Right?

It involved a lot of remedial work.

I did well, making them think so, didn't I?

So then what happened?

Is it that you're both filmmakers who love to dive, or is it that you have this shared love of diving and you happen to want to capture it on film?

Well, I really primarily consider myself a professional diver.

I've been diving all my life, and I've been moonlighting as a filmmaker for the last 30 years.

So when did you know?

Okay, this is it.

Now I've combined my love for underwater and zoology and all those things with my fascination for diving.

When did you know the two marriages or the marriage of the two?

Is would be your vocation?

It was never one particular moment, but at some point, probably really within the last ten years, I realized that I can actually make a living doing this.

So it actually became a serious job.

I never really started out to make a living as an underwater filmmaker.

Every year in the early years, every year, I made a little bit more money and I got further away from teaching, diving and other jobs.

And then eventually I found one day that I didn't have time to do anything else.

And I just slowly, slowly evolved into it.

But it was never a goal.

It was always more of a hobby than anything else.

It just consumed everything that I did and eventually turned into making underwater IMAX films.

Over the last two decades.

Howard and Michelle's unique style of filmmaking has opened a window to an unknown world for millions of moviegoers.

How many people like you are there in the world.

Doing underwater IMAX 3-D films?

I'm the only one.

Yeah, in 70 millimeter.

There's several people that are making quite good underwater films in high definition video and then blowing those up to IMAX.

And they look they look pretty good, but nothing is as good as 70 millimeter.

And I have seen many of your films, including the very first 3-D film ever made Into the Deep.

And but I understand the new one coming out is Under the Sea.

It's called Under the Sea 3-D. And we think it's probably the best of the IMAX 3-D films that we've done.

Really?

Why is that?

Well, we needed to push the bar.

I mean, every time you do something, when you do something again, you want it to be at least as good as, if not better than the last one.

And the previous films, the IMAX 3D films that we made were made in North America, and we wanted to push push it a little bit this time.

So we went way offshore to the South Pacific.

We made five filming expeditions, each one about a month long to South Pacific, Indonesia, two trips to Australia, South Australia and the Great Barrier Reef and two trips to Papua New Guinea.

How confident are you in the way that the fish in the sea animals are going to react to you and your crew and especially that gigantic camera?

When you go under, do they ignore you?

Are they curious or does it really depend on the species?

The camera is very noisy.

We have very bright lights.

We've been out on top of it.

And animals that are afraid of the lights or animals that are bothered by the noise arent in the film and we end up go we end up going into the field with a very long list of ideas and animals we want to want to film.

And sometimes you go down and they just won't come near the camera because the lights or very often you'll set up a spectacular behavior, as soon as you turn the camera on.

It sounds a bit like a lawnmower.

They just stop.

So in many cases we see that that's happening and that that sequence just gets thrown out because we're just not going to get there.

So the animals that are not bothered by the camera or or just don't seem to care or actually are attracted to it are the ones that actually make the cut.

And animals like the Australian Sea Lion were actually attracted to the camera.

The Australian Sea Lions are probably the most beautiful sea lion in the world and they're very, very playful.

They sort of look like little puppy dogs.

If the sea lion can look like a puppy dog with, they're very playful and very curious.

The camera again is so big and the port on the camera is quite large and it's a bit reflective.

The sea lions would come in and with some animals.

Howard has trouble getting the camera close enough to the animal to to film it with the sea lions.

It was sort of the opposite.

We kind of once we got them into the area or got to where they were, had to try to back away from them a little bit because they'd see the reflection in the port and they were coming up and and looking at themselves.

And there's scenes in the film where they're touching their nose to the to the port au.

When watching their films, you get a sense that they just happen to be in the right place at the right time.

But that is rarely the case.

Even with the most precisely laid out plans and perfectly equipped crew.

Underwater field shoots always present unexpected challenges.

The whole deck was black with ash.

Rocks were falling out of the sky.

It looked like it was raining, but it was really just rocks falling out of the sky.

And there it goes again.

Have you ever been afraid?

Mostly of.

I'm afraid of the boat's sinking when I'm underwater.

No.

We've had so have surprisingly few incidents underwater.

We didn't have anybody injured or or anything like that.

And I don't really worry about that very much.

I worry about the boat drifting away from the anchorage, breaking loose in in a high wind, leaving our divers out there in the, you know, by themselves or hitting something in the middle of the night and sinking.

I worry more about being on a boat than any other part of the diving.

The diving that the diving is routine for us.

And when you're underwater were in control.

And all our divers are professional divers.

They feel in control when they're underwater.

When you're on a boat, you know somebody else is running the boat.

So that makes me a bit nervous.

Varying weather conditions can make getting the IMAX camera in and out of the water very difficult.

The camera only holds 3 minutes of film, though.

It can take 2 hours to roll the 3 minutes.

The team's launch and recovery divers are on standby to swim the camera back to the boat for reloading while the filmmakers stay underwater.

The turnaround can take 30 minutes or more.

More than enough time for the star of the film to potentially get away.

And in the tropics, bugs are not only an annoyance to the crew, they also present a problem when unloading the camera.

Great care must be taken not to damage the film, but the crew's patience and perseverance pay off when they photograph a rare creature or behavior for the first time.

And at the end of the day, the incredible array of marine life that is captured on film makes up for all the production challenges.

Oh.

120 days.

2000 hours underwater.

8,000 pounds of equipment and gear.

And this just scratches the surface of what it takes to create their movie Magic.

And that gigantic thing only runs for 3 minutes before you're out of film.

And then it has to go back to the boat and be changed.

When the camera's off the tripod, it doesn't weigh anything.

It's neutrally buoyant, but it still has that enormous amount of mass.

And once it starts moving, it doesn't want to stop.

And you certainly don't want to be caught between the camera and a rock or the reef.

It's a very big and awkward thing to handle and very difficult to move when there's currents.

And that's one of the reasons we have a large crew.

We have usually seven divers down there with us and we need all those people to move the camera.

Now, tell me a little bit about what goes into the whole process, but where do you start when you first get the idea to do, for instance, under the sea?

What what's the first step that you do?

So the first thing was deciding on the locations and then a very detailed list of the animals that were interested to film.

And then based on that, I would write a story about what happens in that part of the world and what things are going on in the ocean in that part of the world.

We always have local experts out with us to help and very often marine biologists to not only help guide us to the right location, but to help keep us honest in our filmmaking so that the behavior that we are portraying or that we're showing is real behavior and not something that is just, uh, that we sort of make the story happen the way we want it to.

We want it to be real behavior.

So we had been told that if we go to this location, we'll find these very, very tall, long garden eels.

Sure enough, they were there.

But when you swim over a sandy patch of garden eels, they get scared and they go back down.

What we did is we just set up on the same garden eels and stayed there for hours and hours and hours and over multiple dives and over several days.

And then I realized once they were acclimated to the lights, then the next problem was the sound that the camera made.

And so the only way to acclimate them to the sound of the cam was to turn it on and I would go down and turn the camera on, let it run for 5 seconds, then turn it off, wait till they came back up, then turn it on for 5 seconds, let it run and then turn it off.

And each time it's, you know, $60 every second that it's running.

So it's an expensive thing.

And then wait until I had one shot left on the camera, and then I'd turn it on and let it run.

And by then they'd acclimated to the sound enough that they were less likely to go back down.

Each time I turned the camera off, I'd have to wait about half an hour for them to come back up.

But if you look at the funniest look at the film, you'll see I think there's three shots or maybe four shots of garden eels in the film.

And each time you look at the shot, that's spectacular at the beginning, but they're all slowly going down and you won't notice it unless you look.

But they're actually going down.

Before you even shoot it.

You write.

The story.

I not only write the story, I write a detail version of the narration before we ever start filming.

So before we film an animal doing anything, the narration is already written.

The thing is, though, that the fish don't always take direction well.

We come back from an expedition and the fish have done something entirely different, often haven't taken direction at all.

Sometimes they do things that are amazing and surprising, and so I end up rewriting the script every time we come back from an expedition, and the next time we go out, we have a more evolved version.

And that script continues to evolve until at the end of the last expedition, I'm polishing the script up as the boat's heading to the dock.

Is there a certain instance you remember in this film where what you wrote was clearly not what it turned out to be when you went diving?

Well, there was probably many of those those cases, but many times it was a pleasant surprise.

In some cases, we had surprises, you know, where an animal just didn't show up.

And that's totally predictable.

But we had things happen that we didn't expect and that was, those often make the best parts of the film.

For example, we're diving on the Great Barrier Reef, where we expected to film pretty corals, but we didn't really expect to get much animal behavior and these jellyfish started drifting through the area and sea turtles would start just started coming up off the reef and feeding on these huge jellyfish right in front of us.

And I had seen that behavior about 30 years ago in the Caribbean.

I had not seen it since.

And the next time I saw it 30 years later, I had an IMAX 3D camera in my hand.

And so that was that was a wonderful moment.

Just as the adventure exists under the water, the exotic travels into remote areas of the South Pacific, offer the team some unexpected introductions.

So the crew.

One of the great joys of being here is interacting with the local Papuan villagers.

What These locals are unaccustomed to visitors and intrigued by the filmmakers.

Most enjoy the attention, but some get a little shy.

Back at the ship, curious locals approaching dug out canoes, carrying fresh fruits and vegetables.

Most indigenous people of Papua New Guinea practice subsistence farming, growing and hunting just enough food to feed their families.

What they cannot make, they must barter for with other communities and outsiders like the Under the Sea Film crew, the villagers exchange fresh pineapples for on board staples such as rice, ramen noodles and a favorite for kids caramels.

The locals get sought after packaged goods, and the crew looks forward to meals with freshly grown ingredients.

Watching the serene beauty captured by the crew combine with the peaceful music, you are transported into an otherworldly experience.

Although the Coral Triangle did not disappoint with its vibrant colors and breathtaking marine life, it currently faces threats from overfishing and climate change.

With our attention to this area, future filmmakers may not be as fortunate as Howard and his crew in documenting its abundance.

What do you hope audiences gain from watching the film on that level?

Well, I think the most important thing that audiences will gain from the film is an appreciation for how beautiful the environment is and how wonderful the animals are.

Our primary goal is to make people fall in love with these critters and the environments that they live in.

And if we accomplish that, then they're going to care more when they learn about the effects of climate change or overfishing or any of the myriad environmental problems that our oceans face.

Having said that, the film does have some discussion of the effects that carbon dioxide are having on the ocean.

And one of the things that that we talk about is ocean acidification.

And everybody knows that there's an issue with climate change and global warming.

But what people probably don't know, or at least most people don't know, is that increased carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere is changing ocean chemistry.

And that might have very serious consequences that are not directly related to climate change.

Animals that build their skeletons out of calcium carbonate may be affected by the increased acidification of the ocean, and that means they'll have a harder time building their skeletons.

Mollusks will have a harder time secreting their shells, and that could change pretty dramatically the makeup of the ocean ecology.

So what can we.

Do to help prevent that in the future or at least lessen it?

Well, the same issue applies to climate change.

Reducing carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere will hopefully mitigate some of the effects of climate change and and even more directly will affect this ocean acidification process.

Unlike climate change, the world climate is warming up.

It would be warming up whether we were here or not because we're coming.

What we were recently in an ice age and now the temperatures are warming up.

We're exacerbating that situation rather dramatically by pumping these large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

But if we weren't here, temperatures would still be rising.

It's very different when it comes to ocean acidification.

The changes in ocean chemistry are caused entirely by people putting carbon dioxide in the ocean.

That wouldn't be happening if we weren't here.

So it's and it's it's a much more direct effect.

So reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere is the way to to alleviate that problem.

In search of rare footage of hidden creatures.

The halls traveled to far off locations such as New Guinea, the Great Barrier Reef, South Australia and Indonesia, areas so remote that scientists are constantly discovering and documenting new species there.

Is there some animal or species that you have yet to see that you're just that's like on your bucket list of one of those things you've got to see before all is said and done?

Well, there's lots of animals, actually.

There's, you know, odd things like ribbon fish and and certainly the the Mount Everest of animals to be seen and photographed by divers or giant squid.

A few years ago, in fact, in the film Deep Sea 3D, we filmed Humboldt Squid, which is a very large squid.

They get to be succeed in over £100.

But the giant squids are really, really huge and no divers yet seen one.

It's going to happen, you know, it's just a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

But divers will eventually film one, and that's certainly the holy grail of underwater film.

That's funny, my nine year old he said.

I said, what should I ask?

He said, Ask him about squid, because they're very difficult to find.

And I said, Are you sure?

He said, You ask them.

So he will be glad to know.

If you like squid, he'll he'll like under the sea 3D.

We have three different species of cuttlefish in the film which are relatives to squid, and they're they're absolutely spectacular.

The animals change colors, their skin texture changes.

They flash all kinds of different colors, and they're just very, very interesting animals.

Now, for the novice or occasional diver who can't venture all the way to Papua New Guinea or South Australia to go diving, is there a place closer to home and to the states that you would recommend to see some of the more vibrant coral or to see some of the more vibrant animal life that if they were only going to go diving for a week, you would say that's the place to go.

Well, the first couple of films we made in IMAX 3D were filmed right around North America, and we did that primarily because we wanted relatively simple logistics.

And having run out of those subjects, we moved on to places like Indonesia.

But in Hawaii, they're spectacular things to be to to see underwater.

You can go on a very simple sport diving trip to see green sea turtles and manta rays off the coast of North Carolina.

We filmed sand tiger sharks on a sport diving boat, which were just wonderful.

Well, you've got the flower banks not so far from here, south of of of Texas, south of Galveston.

And we've did some filming.

We did the coral spawning sequence that was in Deepsea 3D, you know, the flower gardens.

And there's lots of other things to see down there.

And that's pretty close to home for you.

And of course, the Bahamas.

Of course, at the end of any big project, the big question is what's next?

I don't know.

We're we're doing a little bit of scouting and thinking real hard and talking about it and regrouping.

And we're scouting locations.

We recently were in Alaska.

We considered doing a film in Alaska.

The water, it's very cold up there with pretty much killed that idea.

But Alaska was a consideration or we're talking about we're going to the Maldives and in January.

So we'll be scouting that location and we're just going to spend the next year diving in different parts of the world and trying to find another story and another idea for a film.

The best part is it's endless, right?

There's lots of ocean out there.

Well, thank you.

I cannot wait to bring my boys to under the Sea.

I'm sure they'll want to see it again and again.

Like all of your other films.

I hope you enjoy.

Thanks a lot.

It's a wrap.

Under the Sea 3D.

It's a wrap in Indonesia.

The Halls, accomplished documentary.

Filmmakers, divers extraordinaire, husband and wife.

As the year 2010 passes, I can only imagine what far off body of water or for that matter, underwater creature will capture their attention and become the focus of their next 3D adventure that coming up on the next A-list.

What's it mean to be green and how does a community get there?

Join me next time as I sit down with green activist Majora Carter.

I'm Allison Leibovitz.

See you soon