Sea Turtle movie being filmed at Gumbo Limbo

In a new ocean feature, Big Wave follows the extraordinary odyssey of a loggerhead turtle. THE TURTLE SONG is co-produced with Film and Music Entertainment.

The film tells the story of a young turtle, who follows in the path of her ancestors. Born on a beach in Florida, she spends the next twenty years riding the Gulf Stream and swims around the entire North Atlantic before returning via the Azores and Caribbean back to the beach where she was born. Her chances of survival are just one in five thousand. “The film is for family viewing,” says executive producer Sarah Cunliffe. “It’s a spellbinding adventure but its subtext/underlying message lies very much in what is happening to our oceans. She survives being caught in a gill net, pounded by violent storms and ultimately comes face to face with the effects of global warming.”

“This is one of the most ambitious productions we’ve undertaken,” says Big Wave Director, Nick Stringer, who has just returned from four months filming along America’s East coast, the Bahamas and the Azores. “Ocean films are notoriously difficult and with a delivery scheduled for September ‘08, we’re under the gun. So far we’ve been very lucky. There were no hurricanes in Florida this year and we’ve found most of the creatures we hoped to film from socializing sperm whales in the Azores, to dramatic scenes of bottlenose dolphins feeding along the seabed.”

With nearly half of the world’s loggerhead turtles born in the southeastern US, Stringer has set up a special marine studio at Gumbo Limbo Environmental Complex in Florida.  “For the hatchling and juvenile scenes we’ve been filming both in the wild and in a series of special tanks we’ve built to recreate different ocean environments” says Stringer. “The largest is 20 feet in diameter and the smallest is just a few inches long. At Gumbo Lmbo they rescue turtles from the little hatchlings right up to fully mature adults, so we’ve been able to film some key scenes with them in the studio.”

“Telling the story of one turtle has brought many challenges but it has also liberated us stylistically and made it a much more personal and emotional story,” says Stringer. “We’ve been using the first fully HD lipstick camera and it’s allowed us to get right down to ground level and track with the young turtles as they crawl down the beach and into the water. It’s brought a really intimate and energetic perspective, enabling us to capture and experience the early life of the turtle as never seen before.”

The production will be recreating a snowstorm on the surface of the ocean, an underwater harbour scene, and using visual fx, a giant supertanker carving through the water. “Some of the most challenging filming has involved the hatchling turtles. No longer than your little finger, they spend their early days hiding in sargassum weed that floats on the surface of the ocean. To try and reconstruct the ocean surface, the light and movement was a particular challenge. It involved an elaborate set-up of wave machines, ripple tanks and extreme patience!” says Stringer.

Stringer returns to the Turtles journey in November, to film the young turtles travelling on the Gulf Stream towards the North Atlantic.

“It’s an epic journey, one of the most remarkable in the natural world. From the moment she leaves her nest her life is in jeopardy. Even as she runs to the water she runs the gauntlet of ghost crabs, she survives being smashed against cliffs in a storm and nearly dies at the hands of fishermen. Her chances of making it back to the Caribbean and to the beach where she was born are just 1 in 5000.....and in her twenty year life journey she will also have to survive destruction of habitats, global warming and the plundering of fish stocks on the high seas.”

Directed by Nick Stringer, produced by Sarah Cunliffe of Big Wave and Sam Taylor of FAME, co-production partners include Films 59 in Bristol, Tradewind Pictures in Germany and Allegro Films in Austria.  The film is distributed by Sola Media.

The film is planned to be in cinemas in about a year and half’s time and will be a spectacular natural history adventure as one turtle battles to complete the ultimate journey back to its beach in Florida and bring another generation of loggerhead turtles into the ocean.