Shoreline would not be complete without showing our viewers how we brought you the incredible images and stories from along our coast.
Our journey to film Shoreline around the entire coast of South Africa was an incredible experience for our crew. We met incredible people, saw beautiful places, and learnt about so many amazing inhabitants of the shoreline that we knew so little about!
Shoreline on land
Shoreline is filmed using a high definition Sony video camera. Our team travelled along our rugged coastline for many months, and sometimes overcame tough obstacles along the way.
Weather was a constant concern for the Shoreline crew, although sometimes it was bad weather that we wanted to film! The extreme windy conditions at the Alexandria dune- fields near Port Elizabeth were testing for the crew and their equipment, as was sudden rainstorms in remote areas of the Wild Coast, trapping the crew and their vehicles on numerous occasions.
Sometimes the stories we were telling required much energy to be expended. This was certainly the case for the experiment on iron smelting in the traditional Zulu way of 500 years ago. To melt the iron ore to make metal, the Shoreline team had to keep hot coals alive for a full day by taking turns blowing on them with fire bellows. Now that’s dedication!
The highlight for all was witnessing the huge leatherback and loggerhead turtles laying their eggs along the beaches of Sodwana Bay. Turtles are very sensitive to light and disturbances, especially while digging their nests in the sand. If they are disturbed in the slightest at this point, they may desert the nest and the precious eggs would be lost forever. While turtles start laying, they go into a kind of trance, and are not as easily disturbed. We filmed the egg- laying process with an infra- red camera, so as to not disturb the turtle with bright lights.
Shoreline in the water
We could have not given our coast justice without showing you the incredible life under the waves.
We bring you fascinating underwater shots of diamond mining off Port Nolloth, sand- sharks at Langebaan, a shipwreck in Table Bay, cat- sharks at De Hoop Nature Reserve, the Tsitsikamma snorkel trail, Knysna seahorses, mangrove swamps on the Wild Coast, ragged- tooth sharks at the Aliwal Shoal reef, sharks nets of Durban’s beaches and the indigenous fish- traps in the Kosi Bay lakes.
In May 2009 we had the amazing experience of filming a small group of coelacanths in a cave off Sodwana Bay. This was not an easy task as coelacanths are very elusive fish, living in pitch-dark caves up to 700m below the surface. Together with Triton Dive Charters in Sodwana, we first attempted this in August 2008, however the coelacanths were nowhere to be found. It was almost a year later that we were successful in finding coelacanths.
Like filming on land, filming under the water is dependent on weather, sea and tidal conditions and visibility. An example of this was the La Cybelle shipwreck, lying at the bottom of Table Bay near Cape Town. We planned to film this wreck underwater from December 2008, and after re- scheduling countless times waiting for conditions to be right for diving and filming, we only managed in May 2009 to film the wreck of this slave ship.
Shoreline in the air
We are very familiar with the outline of South Africa, but not often do we have the opportunity to view the incredible beauty of the coast from the air, or the detail of coastlines, beaches and other natural seascapes.
We have been extremely fortunate to be able to use the same aerial filming system that was used on the Planet Earth series. The Cineflex heli- gimble, mounted on the nose of a Euro- squirrel helicopter is the ultimate tool for our HD production. We were able to get rock solid images even when zooming in to an area from hundreds of metres up in the air.
Jack also made use of air travel- accompanying Peter on flights to and from his previous home in Johannesburg to filming locations! He became quite the flying expert, and even accompanied the team on boat trips, although he did not quite enjoy that part of being ‘Shoreline Jack."
| Producer | Jaco Loubser |
| Director | Sanet Olivier |
| Director of Photography | Christopher Lotz |
| Underwater camera | Falk Eggert |
| Sound recordist | Kenneth Grant Wells |
| Environmental Consultant, Photographer and Researcher | Claudio Velasquez Rojas |
| Camera Assistant and behind the scenes camera | Farrell Saunders |
| Production Assistant,fixer and driver | Xolani Gumbi |
| Principal Editor | Jaco Laubscher |
| Editor | Wim Steytler |
| Sound Editor | Stef Albertyn |
| Scriptwriter | Tom Eaton |
| Music composer | Grant McLachlan |
| Graphics | Steph Botha Nick Burgers |
| Production manager | Tracey Bruton |
| Researchers | Anita Meyer Lisba Vosloo Siphesihle Molefe |
| Illustrator | Adeline Wilkinson |
| Additional Camera | Shamiel Albertyn Bernt Weber |
| Additional Camera Assistant | Leith Morkel |
| Additional Sound Recordists | Sebastian Dunn Tony Bensusan Deon Kroon |
| Additional Production Assistant | Lee Farrell |
| Website Design | Steph Botha |
| Website Content | Tracey Bruton Jeannie Hayward |
| Website development | JGH Internet |
