Images by Lara Lau

Shooting
They shot for five weeks in the Caribbean, the Grenadines, the Virgin Islands, and Mexico to create an ambiguous locale, not wanting to link a gruesome shark tale to any local businesses, they said, a la Jaws and its fictitious New England summer rental town of Amityville.

Still, Kentis insists they weren't anticipating a huge release or anywhere near the notoriety the film has received after being picked up by Lion's Gate Films at Sundance.
Kentis filmed with a Sony Mini DV VX 2000 and Lau with a Sony PD 150, both weighing about three pounds. Comparable cameras are listed for around $3,000 on Sony's website, but Lau noted she was looking forward to shooting her next project (not wanting to say what it was for fear of "jinxing it") with a Panasonic high-definition 24P digital video camera that rents out at over $1,000 per day.

Having decided not to do an audio mix without additional funding and limited to the sounds on location, they knew getting good audio during filming was going to be crucial. They used two primary mics, one mounted to the PD 150 and the other, a rented Sennheiser overhead mic, was boomed from above to keep the dialog in agreement with the overall sound of the environment and to give it texture, which would be flat if recorded solely from the camera's location. Also, without a centrally placed mic, an actor's voice can suddenly drop off if he turns away.

Kentis built a camera casing to film in the water and used a wide-angle lens to get the underwater footage. You often need to be very close to what you are filming underwater to get a clear picture and need a wider frame than one provided by a longer lens; he explained, "Anything with a long lens you are too close and you get all that exaggerated bumpiness from being in the water."

They viewed footage on monitors in whatever hotel room they happened to be staying in at the time and used a laptop to do film capture from the PD 150's memory stick. From the PD 150 they made print-outs in order to match water and sky for certain scenes and to match all the subsequent filming with the original shark footage. As Kentis put it, "It's much easier to direct people than sharks."

Editing
Kentis, a professional Avid editor who mainly cuts movie trailers for big studio releases, edited the footage for about a year in the morning, at night, and on weekends in consultation with Lau. And although they have now completed the digital video-to-film transfer, the movie they showed at Sundance was directly output from Final Cut Pro® 3.

The film cost them about $120,000 to make - and that's without having done a prohibitively expensive audio mix on a sound stage, a film transfer or a high-end makeover, all of which they are doing now that the project has been underwritten.

Primarily interested in bringing out the colors that were already there, they didn't apply too many filters in FCP in post-production, but have been going through a New York-based lab, Heavy Light Digital, for color correction - mostly with Adobe® After Effects®.

The audio mix entails recording sound effects, equalizing the original dialog and production tracking, and adjusting all the levels and outputs for stereo surround sound.
Now it seems the real work has begun: "Chris and I are the entire production, anything that has to be done, whether legal, publicity, marketing, any technical finishing, we're doing everything, literally," said Lau.