360 degree experience - Behind the scenes

This video shows Lucy Blue and Philippe Cousteau setting up a film experiment using a revolutionary camera that captures continuous all-round video images.

Once the camera was placed on the sea bed, it was operated remotely from the boat in an attempt to capture the behaviour of lionfish on film, undisturbed by divers. The lionfish is an invasive predator which is devastating local fish populations. It was anticipated that the filming would shed light on their highly successful hunting technique.

In the event, the lionfish decided not to perform in front of cameras and proved elusive - hence no lionfish on the film. The team were, however, rewarded on other film shoots with sharks and seals (see clips on the right).

The 360° panoramic video camera has 11 individual video lenses which record simultaneously. The lenses are housed in a "dodecahedral" camera head, encased in a waterproof plastic surround.

The camera is kept on the sea bed using dive weights and is permanently connected to the boat. A cable feeds images back to a viewing engine where the "blending" of all the camera image streams takes place in real time. Once this process is complete and the film is captured on a hard drive, stitching software creates "sphere movies" showing the whole environment in motion at once.

Visit this specialist camera website to learn more about the technical specifications of this 360° camera.