PRODUCTION NOTES
Sunken Treasure was shot on location in Slovenia and Croatia with modified infra-red camera gear and underwater cinematography. The karst cave depicted has never before been photographed underwater. The profile on the production phase, by No Film School, can be found here:
Craig Baldwin provided the film prints of Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, and we spent an afternoon in his fantastic archives at Other Cinema.
In 2013 the first infra-red shoot in a karst cave outside Ljubljana was made possible by a Kickstarter campaign and took place as part of a residency at D'Clinic Studios in Slovenia. We traveled 5 hours underground by boat through a series of subterranean lakes, to visit the “Crystal Mountain”, a massive, half-collapsed chamber of shadows, echoes and deep chasms crowned with glittering stalagmites 20 feet high. Graffitti from Roman explorers decorated the entrance. Visits to this deep section of the cave are limited, and we were the first women ever to venture there.
The second phase of production was in Rijeka, Croatia in 2017 as a guest artist of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, RIjeka. Here I learned to scuba dive at Marco Polo Dive Center under the tutelage of Predrag Sneler, and had the assistance of veteran diver Nicolletta Storelli in the underwater shoots.
I returned to the caves for another shoot with sound recordist Ana Jurcic. With the help of the museum shop I built an extension pole for the camera housing so that I could shoot underwater in the cave lakes.
