I am really excited to announce that our friends over at the Beneath the Waves Film Festival have made their official selections for the 2012 event to be held this Friday at the 41st Benthic Ecology Meeting in Norfolk, Virginia.Now in its third consecutive year, this unique student run science communication event solicits films from anyone, regardless of background, skill level, profession, or location—there is really just one criteria: a good story about the ocean.
“The ocean needs a voice, and we want to provide a forum for people to tell those stories,” says film festival director and University of Miami graduate student Austin Gallagher.
This year the festival received an overwhelming number of submissions, and I was honored to sit on the pre-screening board. Films were screened for exhibition based on 4 categories: Originality, Strength of Message, Clarity of Narrative, and Production.
The official list of 27 marine films for this year’s event spans topics such as plastics, shark conservation, seal biology, deep sea discoveries, as well as films with leading marine ecologists telling the stories of their research. The list of films for the March IMAX event can be found here. The official welcome video, which introduces this year’s films in a unique way, is below.
Beneath the Waves Film Festival: 2012 Intro Video from Triakis Films on Vimeo.
This spring and summer the film festival will embark on the “Shore Dive Series,” a series of touring dates open to the public in the US and abroad that will screen even more films that were submitted in addition to those selected for the Virginia event. Confirmed dates thus far include Seattle (July 13-15), Portland (July 20-22), and Los Angeles, CA (August 10-12), a west-coast tour in collaboration with the ocean/shark conservation organization PangeaSeed’s “The Great West Coast Migration.” For more information, see the film festival website.
I am very impressed with your work and attention to integrity. I am building a small shark starting point on the noted web site and your thoughtful approach and fairly rigorous support of your positions was refreshing. I hopefully will send some traffic your way. Things are very far from complete – if they ever will be – Any how I took far too much time reading your posts.
In order to help you folks out in NC the only bar-b-que worth eating is Alabama Bar-b-que. Now that dreamland is a chain, a dark time is upon us. We really don’t have Florida derived Bar-b-que (because we are mostly all Yankees) unless you count sonnies which is substantially better than starving to death.
Luck