How everethyng started“We are not getting enough money from this diving centre, but it gives us a lot of fun”, Arthur C. Clarke was sitting in his wheelchair and looking at the storming sea. We visited his place at Sri-Lanka in January 2000. By that time I’d been running recreational diving club in Moscow and started to film natural history documentaries.
This trip to Ceylon was made specifically to film a movie about this great thinker and underwater treasures he found on this tropical island. I was standing next to him and couldn’t believe that I finally met the guy who heavily influenced my view on life. Arthur C. Clarke moved to Sri Lanka in 1957.
He was not really SCUBA diving fan as I was, but he supported a diving centre founded by a friend of him, Hector. Being techno-optimist, Arthur always believed in great future of humanity, happy coexisting of technology and ecology. This idea is the basis for all my future activities.
4 years after this meeting, being driven by that idea, I founded SCUBATLON – a training course for certified SCUBA divers, who want expand their knowledge of marine biology and improve their skills in order to be nice to the underwater environment.
At the same period of time, I was invited to set up an underwater service for the first oceanarium in Moscow. They were about to open and needed a team of divers who could take care of the fish. I invited Anna, who also is an experienced underwater filmmaker and former molecular biologist to work with me there. It was a short period of time when we worked there, about 3 months. But it told us a lot about a great interest in marine biology which general public have and unfortunately, oceanarium couldn’t satisfy this interest.
So, we decided to make our own project. The idea was the same: technology should bring people closer to nature without harming it. We decided to make a 3D stereo underwater video of coral reef inhabitants. It seemed easy — we already had lots of experience in underwater filming.
