The Story of the Shoot

We were in a small boat in False Bay, near Cape Town, South Africa, filming for Great White, Deep Trouble. The water was full of sharks, attracted to nearby Seal Island, home to some 84,000 fur seals.

By now the crew and I knew that a fleeing seal can provoke a great white into a dramatic airborne attack. And I wanted to document it for our viewers.

To do so, we figured all we’d have to do would be to tow a decoy of a seal. The shark would do the rest. The problem: How would we know when a strike was imminent so that we could alert the photographers and cinematographers?

Well, when you work for the National Geographic Society, you go to the wizards in the photo-engineering shop and have a remote-imaging system built—in this case, a bodyboard cut into the shape of a seal and mounted with a lipstick-shaped camera. The camera would transmit live video, via wire, to our boat.

Once the decoy was deployed, I covered my head with a dark cloth so I could see the video monitor. Everyone on the boat was tense. Anticipating an attack, I had the command “Roll!” half-formed in my mouth. The boat was rocking. I felt as if I were underwater as I watched the air bubbles trailing our decoy.

Suddenly the screen filled with the open jaws of a great white. I screamed “ROLL!” and immediately heard the click and whir of motor drives and film magazines. In a few moments it was over.

We had gotten the shot.

—John Bredar, producer

Hear the full story of the shoot. And don’t miss photographer David Doubilet and Jaws author Peter Benchley’s groundbreaking great white coverage in the April 2000 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazine.