Teaser Trailer 3 Is Here!

"Of Shark and Man" Teaser Trailer 3 (Letterboxed Version) from Scarlet View Media on Vimeo.

*Fanfare*

Here it is, the third and final teaser for "Of Shark and Man," and in keeping with the previous two, which you can view here and here, it runs with a separate theme from the film. The first teaser focused on my story, the second on the sharks and this third teaser focuses on the spiritual and most importantly, conservation, issues raised in the film.

Aside from the points alluded to in the trailer, this is also a clear hint at how much closer I am to finding the look I want for the film. I have worked hard on establishing a stylised, cinematic and filmic look for this trailer, I have always wanted this film to stand out, my inspiration for the style of the film is not other shark films, instead it is a host of films from the 70's up to the modern day so for the people interested in this stuff, it was coloured and graded in Da Vinci Resolve 10, with additional look building in Film Convert, with a few extras I will keep to myself for now. It was edited as always, in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 on my custom built Novatech Edit Suite. All footage was shot on location during production using Canon 7D and Sony XD cameras except the shark fin footage which was kindly provided by Shawn Heinrichs, thank you Shawn!

The music is two separate tracks, the first by Before the Beginning entitled "This Memory of You is Immortal" and the second, once again, another Chris Zabriskie track, "I am a Man who will Fight for your Honor."

You will notice that this trailer is letterboxed, if you want to be more technical, instead of the standard 16:9 aspect ratio, this is in 2:35:1, often commonly referred to as Anamorphic. I'll be honest, I never intended to have this kind of look for the film, I only threw it on the trailer initially to see how it would look, expecting it not to work at all but, on the contrary, I love it and I am now seriously considering applying this aspect ratio to the film. Now, I know not everyone likes this look so I, being the nice person I am, I have also uploaded a standard 16:9 version of the trailer;

"Of Shark and Man" Teaser Trailer 3 (Non-Letterboxed) from Scarlet View Media on Vimeo.

Your feedback is important, so please take the time to watch it and comment and perhaps even more importantly, share it on your social media pages, blogs, mailing lists etc. People won't just search out this stuff on their own, they need a friendly nudge. Be that friendly nudge!

If you do decide to comment, please do so here or on the Facebook page but mainly, share, share, share!!! it only takes a few seconds of your time but the benefit can be huge.

Progress on the edit for the film is going well and the first cut is now only missing a closing sequence, a couple of stock footage shots and some UK stuff which will be filmed soon so we're on track and looking good.

Enjoy the trailer and get in touch!

Ultra wealthy pseudo conservation rep claims exploiting the poor is good for them...

Mitt Romney, America's answer to Alan Partridge

When the ridiculously named, American, multi-millionaire, god bothering, Republican party leader hopeful Mitt Romney stunned pretty much every normal human being on the planet with his infamous "Corporations are people, my friend" speech, in which he claimed with an almost straight face that, “Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes?” it belied not only the complete obliviousness to reality amongst America's ultra wealthy elite, but also their blind arrogance.

It was the separation of the vast majority, from the 1% of Americans who control 42% of the country's entire wealth, combined with Romney's smug disbelief that the people in the crowd weren't overjoyed for him and his equally minted cronies, that pissed us off the most and rightly so.

Watch the video here and bear in mind that despite the suave appearance, Mitt Romney is a clown, he is a man who admitted enjoying "firing people" and who in a period of global financial meltdown, made a $10,000 bet with Rick Perry during a televised debate while people all over his country are having their homes repossessed by banks and still, millions of hard working Americans are without access to first (or even second world) health care because they have been fooled into believing that caring for one's citizens is "Socialism" (which they think means "Communism.")

However, I digress, the arrogant belief amongst the wealthy that they are above the law is nothing new of course and a statement of almost Romney-esque stupidity has emanated recently from Singapore.

 This man thinks you're stupid.

The man responsible for this gaffe is the brilliantly named, multi-millionaire, Independent Director of Heng Long, Dr Giam Choo Hoo, who also happens to be Singapore's representative of the blustering, political powerhouse masquerading as an environmental body, CITES. 

If you don't know much about CITES (most people don't,) think of the IUCN, an organisation which utilises global scientific advice to make conservation decisions actually based upon the need for those decisions to be made, then go to the opposite end of the spectrum where decisions are made and fuelled by politics and therefore money, and it is there where you will find CITES.

The Jakarta Post reports that "three marine experts," namely Dr Hoo (ha!), Professor Steve Oakley (Chairman of Shark Savers Malaysia) and President of "Species Management Specialists" Hank Jenkins, claimed "it makes no sense to ban the sale of shark fins."

Before we go back to the pros and cons of shark fin bans debate, this isn't about these people discussing the ways we must move forward to give sharks the protection they need, it is nothing more than a smoke screening exercise in protecting the interests of those at the heart of Asia's shark fin industry.

Look at some of the points raised;

The topic has garnered recent interest here after a string of local supermarkets, such as Carrefour and FairPrice, and hotels like Shangri-La pledged to stop serving or selling the dish.

...Giam, Oakley and Jenkins all claim that prohibiting its trade will not dramatically reduce the number of sharks killed worldwide. They noted that many countries such as Germany, France, Australia and Iceland have long killed sharks for their meat.


Prohibiting the trade in shark fin doesn't necessarily stop sharks being killed, of that we can agree, but doing nothing at all to limit or ban trade all together absolutely guarantees things will get worse for the sharks. It doesn't take a genius to work that out. The inclusion of such magnificently Aryan nations as Germany, Iceland and Australia along with the ever so slightly swarthier France, also smacks of implying the age old race issue relating to the shark fin trade, you know, put in people's heads it's just everyone picking on Asia again...

Even if shark’s fin were banned, these countries would continue to catch sharks for the meat,” said Oakley.

For the most part, historically, these countries only started eating sharks in any numbers after the arrival of the shark fin trade, utilising the unwanted carcasses made available by the new motive to actually target and fish sharks. So that's not true.

Giam armed his presentation with figures from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization: In 2009, 70 percent of caught sharks were by fishermen in developing countries. “From my own research, fishermen in these countries are mostly poor and will eat every part of the shark,” said the former deputy director at the Primary Production Department, the predecessor of the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA).

This is Dr Hoo's "Romney moment," what he's saying here is "without us going to these poor countries and giving them the means to harvest shark, they wouldn't have any sharks to eat, we're helping them, we're making their lives better!"

Dr Hoo, is of course, full of shit. The practise of exploiting the poor and destitute is one of the shark finning industry's most shameful defining traits. The best places in the world to find sharks are often third world countries where, let's face it, big corporations know they can get indigenous people to do whatever they want for the merest of rewards.

Shark fins sell in the US for as mas $1200 per lb, if the industry is so benevolent, maybe Dr Hoo would like to explain why, in certain atolls in Fiji, thousands and thousands of dollars worth of fins are harvested by locals in return for nothing more than a bag of sugar? In more developed ports, the reward is little more, a few dollars maybe. This is not isolated, this is the norm.

As an aside, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation climbed into bed with Monsanto, the food and agriculture world's NAZI party equivalent, who are looking at their own final solution on anyone standing in their way, like, you know, the local farmer down the road with a family to feed, or even you, if you so much as dare to ask just what chemicals they're putting in your food, so I'll reserve judgement on their ethical credibility if you don't mind.

...Shark protectors claim the dish kills up to 73 million sharks each year, with some of them tossed back into the sea to die after their fins are cut off. But Jenkins took aim at the statistics and pooh-poohed this widely held belief. He said the 73 million figure, attributed to marine scientist Shelley Clarke and cited by shark advocacy groups such as WildAid and Shark Angels, had been twisted to suit their needs.

A diversionary tactic and nothing more. Yes, we know that the numbers may be inaccurate and their usage has got somewhat out of control amongst the less informed and louder "shark conservationists" and the lack of credibility of the chief protagonists (Ritter, Watson, Brush et al) has meant that it is used as an argument against the whole concept of shark conservation, if these people who claim to be experts aren't actually experts at all and use misleading data, then everything else you're told about shark conservation must be lies right? Wrong. It's like citing Justin Bieber as your sole reason for not liking Rock n Roll.

In an interview with reporters after the forum, he stuck to his guns: “We’re calling for a temporary ban. Let the shark populations recover, put in place proper management, and make sure that the trade is sustainable before we start consumption again.” 

Translation:

"What we'd really like is for our friends in the industry to get rid of the competition, monopolise the industry, manage the fisheries and establish "sustainability" by discovering there are no sharks left after we've fished them all out, then we'll know that location doesn't have a sustainable fishery because we've killed them all."

Too much? Maybe but a temporary ban? Anything less than twenty years would be utterly pointless and I don't think the big wheels of industry will be happy to wait twenty years before another bumper pay day, do you?

The panelists added that governments need to do more to regulate the trade of sharks. Oakley said this could involve making sure fisheries keep the number of sharks above a mandated minimum level. Sharks could then reproduce at a sustainable rate.

And how do they intend to do that? How do you manage populations of migratory sharks? You can't, this is an absurd statement.

As for Singapore, Jenkins said it could source its fins from sustainable producers. Last year, the Republic imported about 3,500 tons of shark’s fin, 40 percent more than the previous year.

The AVA said Singapore abides by the CITES agreement, under which the basking shark, whale shark, great white shark and sawfishes are protected species and their trade is strictly regulated. It allows only licensed fish dealers to import sharks and shark’s fin."

I've underlined and put in bold the most stupid part of this idiotic paragraph for you just in case

.

 

Can I just list some cold, hard facts which can hopefully be the blue bottle in this giant bowl of arsehole soup?

•  Like a plague of locusts, industrialised fleets, strip mine the ocean of sharks. When one area is depleted, they move onto another area. Local residents, who are often poor and traditionally dependent upon natural resources, are left to deal with the ecological consequences of oceans with no sharks.
•  "Shark finning" only determines how a dead shark’s body is discarded, not how many sharks are killed or whether the shark actually lives. "Shark finning" is not the problem, too many dead sharks is the problem.
• Observer data from longline fishing boats states that approximately 90% of sharks landed are alive and could be returned to the sea alive meaning the majority of sharks caught for the fin trade are targeted and not bycatch
• At the CITES convention in 2010 eight species of shark did not get protections as a result of the shameful decision not to ban international trade in Bluefin Tuna. A decision made for one reason only. Money.
• The sharkfin trade is potentially and already, damaging to economies. A good example of the juxtaposition between destructive and sustainable environmentally reliant commercial enterprise is the island nation of Fiji, where the shark diving industry generates more money annually than the Tuna fishing industry. The major difference of course, being that one encourages, supports and relies upon live animals and healthy environments, the other is solely reliant on dead animals.

The point I am trying to make here is that this is an argument where the social elite, the wealthy and the greedy, whose reliance upon an industry which is ravaging the oceans and exploiting the poor purely to make money for a tiny, select group of men, is entirely dependent upon you, the consumer, providing the demand. They want you, us, to ultimately suffer through the irreparable degradation of our oceans, so they can continue to make their millions.

Or, we could refuse any shark product and instead, choose to support the far more widely beneficial pro-shark industries like shark diving and marine sanctuaries. These pro-shark options benefit us all, the former, destructive option, just makes rich people richer.

It's an easy choice if you ask me.

Update: Shark Savers have issued a response which is well worth reading. It appears Steve Oakley was not in the same corner as Dr Hoo, quite the opposite in fact as we would expect.

My profiles:

Blog request - Shark Conservation

Since I started all this I have received a lot of support from people all around the world, I have made new friends and received kindness and encouragement from people who relate to my story, either because of a shared love for sharks or the desire to get out and do something worthwhile with the gift of life we have been given.

I've said from the off, this is as much about people as it is about sharks and I thought it would be nice to give people the chance to suggest related topics for me to blog, I posted this suggestion on the facebook group (if you haven't already look it up, "From the Office to the Ocean") and quickly received a number of suggestions so here we are, number one in a series of requests.

A good friend of mine, Tom, has asked that I explain the details as to why shark conservation is such an important issue as, during a conversation with his girlfriend, he realised he knew very little about the ins and outs of what is a complicated subject.

So, why is shark conservation so important?

Every separate eco-system is populated with a chain of organisms that operate together, naturally, meaning the "whole" can maintain successful balance, thus ensuring a healthy environment in which all the organisms in the chain can prosper. Imagine each of these eco systems as a jigsaw piece, fix all the pieces together and you have a successful planet.

Of course, in order for each species to "operate" in the manner nature intended, it is imperative that an animal species population does not explode or alter it's behaviour to a degree where its increased number affects everything else in the chain. My friend, Jenna, is insistent that I am unable to explain anything to anybody without using an analogy of some sort...she's right as well so here goes!

Think of an eco-system as a car engine. The engine is built using various parts, fixed together in certain ways so that when petrol is added, the process starts whereby each part of the engine can then do it's job, working together, meaning your car starts to move. Your end goal is to drive your car, you need all it's parts to work together to make that happen.

What would happen if you removed some parts of the engine, put too much oil in or heaven forbid, put diesel in a petrol engine? Would your car work properly, if at all? Would it explode in a ball of flames?

It's a highly simplified analogy but one which illustrates the importance of even the smallest of components in any form of engineered or biological creation.

In every biological eco-system, there is a natural order, more commonly referred to as the food chain. Some unfortunate creature, usually the smallest, has to find itself propping up this chain, it's the vegetarian and it seems that everything else wants to eat it. Sounds a bit unfair really doesn't it but this is the clever bit, for every animal that wants to eat the tiny vegetarian, is an animal that wants to eat that animal and so on and so on until we reach the top guy, nothing messes with him, he's bigger, stronger, more aggressive and usually has really big teeth...Nothing eats him, he is what is referred to as the "Apex Predator."

The role of the Apex Predator in any eco-system is, it can be argued, the most important of all because he makes sure all the animals between him and the tiny vegetarian do not get out of control meaning an animal in the chain gets so overpopulated it devours everything in it's natural diet, removing the predators of the smaller animals meaning they grow in number, devouring everything below them and so on, until only a handful of the chain is left but they don't have anything left to eat because they've eaten it all...you can see where this ends up I presume. Ironically, the biggest, strongest, most aggressive animal in the chain, ensures the survival of everything below it, right down to the bottom of the chain, in fact, he is the vegetarian's greatest ally. Again this is a simple explanation of highly complex biodiversity but it works for this purpose.

Good examples of Apex Predators are the lion, tiger, polar bear, crocodile and of course, the oldest of them all, the most feared of all and the most iconic of them all, the Great White Shark.

Large predatory sharks are the undisputed masters of their domain. Adult Great White, Tiger, Bull and Oceanic Whitetip Sharks have an armoury of weapons which ensure they can do what they do without fear of becoming prey for another animal, unless it's another, bigger shark of course or on rare occasions, Orca.

Bare this in mind, sharks have been around longer than trees, more than 400 million years. When the oceans were created and life evolved within, they needed an apex predator, that apex predator became the large prehistoric sharks, the most famous of which was Carchardon Megalodon, the Great White's older, much bigger, brother. Since there has been widespread marine life on earth, even in its most primitive form, there has been sharks, the only animal to have survived five separate periods of extinction and they're still here...but only just.

Everybody has heard that sharks are attracted to blood, vibrations in the water and like to eat vulnerable juicy fish and mammals but why is this? One of the key roles undertaken by our finned friends is to eliminate the sick and dying in our oceans, sharks love nothing more than an easy, nutritious meal and in doing so, stop the oceans turning into a garbage dump of rotting, dead bodies which in turn causes bacteria which can lead to disease and let's face it, would you want the rain that soaks you to come from a giant cesspool of rotting animal carcasses? I didn't think so...

Another vital, yet less discussed role sharks have, is to keep the gene pool of marine animals strong. Believe it or not, sharks keep animals alive by eating them! That obviously doesn't make sense upon first view but I'll explain. By eating the weaker, sick, genetically inferior individuals of a species, the shark is picking out weak links in the genetic chain meaning the animals they eat, seals for example, who make it to sexual maturity are the smarter, quicker, more agile individuals who then pass their strong, smart genes onto their young, via a willing female. This strong chain of genes means the animals that are breeding are the ones that actually have a chance of creating more animals who stand a chance of avoiding the business end of a shark long enough to make yet more babies and so on. Clever isn't it! Schooling behaviour, camouflage, defence mechanisms, all these behaviours of every marine animal has been influenced by sharks.

As you can see, sharks play a vital role in the health of the oceans, what is it that depends most on the top of a food chain? The bottom of the food chain and in the case of the ocean, the bottom of the food chain is responsible for the oxygen you breathe and the atmosphere of our planet, you don't really want to be messing around with that.
The animals at the top of the food chain are, let's face it, cool. Sharks, lions, tigers, crocodiles, they kick ass right? What's not brilliant about being one of these bad boys?

Unfortunately, there is one big problem with apex predators, they live in a very competitive, rough world and if there were too many of them, they'd eat everything, the food chain would collapse and everything would die which is, in anybody's book, a proverbial fly in the planet's ointment. To combat this, nature ensures that apex predators give birth to few young and that's after waiting years to reach sexual maturity.

If we take the example of the Great White, he's born and although larger than a lot of fish at around two to four feet in length, there are still plenty of bigger fish, including older Great White Sharks who wouldn't think twice about eating him. Junior has to spend the first few years of his life avoiding bigger sharks, learning to hunt fish and other smaller sharks until he's old enough to start having a go at seals and sea lions. As prey goes, pinnipeds (the aforementioned seals and sea lions) are a different ball game all together, fast, agile and clever, Junior better get good at catching them because if he doesn't he's had it. Assuming our young friend manages to get the hang of this pinniped catching business, he's now coming up to the surly, moody teenager stage and about 2.5 - 3.5 metres in length, he spends the first stages of adolescence gorging on blubber rich mammals and learning, sometimes the hard way, that the bigger, older sharks eat first.

Junior is now in his mid to late teens and if he's anything like I was, he's got one thing on his mind and that's the ladies. It's not that easy though because as most ladies will tell you, they often prefer a more mature, stronger male with whom to do the business so he's got to fight his way to the front of the queue somehow and show he's up to the task. It's a good job he's a big strapping lad and he manages it but now he's got to hope his new girlfriend can survive the twelve months she's carrying his pups or it will all be for nothing and he has to do it all again in eighteen months to two years, presuming he's still around then.

So our young friend has had to combat other sharks wanting to eat him, faster prey than him that doesn't want to be eaten by him, bigger sharks warning him to stay away "or else..." and the most dangerous dating scene in the ocean, waiting sometimes up to twenty years just to get his end away and hopefully make some babies of his own! This doesn't even take into account genitally challenged "sport" fishermen, longlines, the floating death traps that are damaged commercial fishing nets, the Chinese, or anti-shark nets, in which the majority of sharks, approximately 90%, are caught inside the netting area meaning they have been swimming amongst bathers and have been caught when trying to return to the open ocean, but hey, I guess we need our shark fins from somewhere right? Yep, I went there...

So what have we learned? In short, that sharks are responsible for ensuring the oceans maintain a healthy balance meaning the oxygen you breathe is coming from a healthy source so in simple terms, not enough sharks means what you rely on to live is being messed with in a very, very dangerous way.

Sharks have a very dangerous enemy, one which doesn't harvest, it devastates, its only intention is seemingly to take every single last living animal on the planet and sell a tiny portion of it's overall mass for large sums of money. This enemy, for arguments sake we'll call it "China," really has it in for sharks. The reason? so they can use their fins to add texture and the cancer causing chemical, mercury, to a bowl of pork or chicken soup, yummy. It is a glib remark above, that which places the blame solely on China, indeed some of the very worst offenders in this mafia funded, blood soaked trade, include Spain, France, America and the UK, however, the fins are provided for what is an Asian delicacy, if shark fin soup did not exist, sharks would not be harvested solely for their fins to the tune of an estimated 40 - 100 million every year. The "culture" excuse doesn't wash with me either, if that were the case, lets bring back slavery, institutionalised murder, rape, torture, incest and all the other groovy cultures that have been eradicated from civilised society yes?

The commercial harvesting of sharks in the last thirty five or so years has led to over one third of all shark species being listed as endangered to critically endangered. Shark fin, shark cartilage and squaline (ladies, check your make up and see if you're smearing dead shark all over your mush) are all by-products of an unsustainable marine annihilation which, if left to continue as it is, will eradicate many shark species and could realistically be the thing that does us all in once and for all, for a bowl of soup, some make up or a cancer cure which doesn't even work because, surprise, surprise sharks do get cancer.

I saw a brilliant T-Shirt the other day which said something along the lines of "Only when we have eaten the last remaining fish on earth and there are no more, will we realise you can't eat money" and it's hit the nail on the head. Organised shark diving operations make more money for local communities than commercial fishing and rely on healthy shark populations. The ocean is healthier, shark numbers can increase and indigenous people make money and can live better lives, what's not to like about that!?

I'm going to put it in the simplest terms. We need a healthy ocean to survive, a healthy ocean needs plenty of sharks. There isn't anywhere near plenty of sharks anymore.

The final thing I will say is that the shark is an icon, sharks are mysterious, beautiful and enigmatic, nature at it's most fascinating and awesome best, do you want to live in a world where you explain to your children that we robbed them of the chance to see these most amazing of animals so some rich people can have some poisonous texture in their chicken soup?

If it's good enough for Slash then it's good enough for you!

If you want advice on how you can help, visit www.officetoocean.com and go to "The Project" and click on "Shark Conservation" and "Name and Shame"

By the way, I will be appearing on the radio tomorrow, Friday 10th, between 4-6pm UK time. The show can also be streamed online from here!

Tom, I hope that's answered your question!