Now that we had our main character, we needed to film the little thing. Christina Karliczek Skoglund, an expert underwater filmmaker, was challenged to capture the sea rabbit on camera.

One of the sea rabbit’s biggest problems was the weather. To film the daily life of this creature, we had to spend hours underwater. Essentially a glamorous underwater slug, the sea rabbit moves at a snail’s pace. To get the best photos of the sea rabbit living its normal life, Christina needed as much time underwater as possible. But using a traditional scuba diving setup, most divers can only spend an hour underwater. Fortunately, Christina had her own specialized rebreather diving system, a setup originally developed by the military, which recycles the air exhaled by the diver. This allowed Christina to spend more than four hours below the surface at a time, eating lunch on the support boat before heading back down for another stint in the “underwater studio.”

The second challenge of filming the Sea Rabbit was its size. Not being much bigger than a snack-sized chocolate, we needed some serious macro lenses to show off this slug in all its glory – but to get the most out of these lenses, you need lots of light. The large underwater lights had to be carefully positioned. The balloons were attached to the lighting system on the surface, then slowly deflated to allow the equipment to sink into the sea. Divers were then able to carefully position the lights on the seabed. Finding open areas of sand to place two lights and a tripod for the camera, while avoiding damage to the corals, was no simple task. The currents, sunlight and visibility of the ocean all had to be perfect for the sea rabbit to look its best on camera.

In challenging conditions, Christina and the dive team captured some incredible moments. To complement their efforts and properly showcase the sea slug, giving it the close-ups it deserves, we knew we had to go further. So we decided to build our own miniature reef in a specially adapted saltwater tank by the sea. Under Peri’s expert guidance, we were able to briefly move a sea slug into the tank, to capture shots perfect “heroes” in extreme close-up, which simply would not have been possible on the open sea.