Your Custom Text Here
Mark’s Underwater Archive Library is now LIVE!
Please click here to view a selection of footage filmed in the Maldives across three trips during February, March and May 2024.
RAW 5K and 6K footage shot on RED Gemini and / or RED Komodo underwater is now available for licensing.
emily@sharmancam.co.uk +44(0)7876 694477 for details.
Three years in the making, 20 years after the Academy Award-winning March of the Penguins, ‘Secrets of the Penguins’ will tell a brand new, world-first story on the charismatic, plucky and sentient birds at the other end of the Earth. Using newly developed technology, world-class scientific research and unprecedented access, National Geographic will unlock the secrets of the species that make their home in surprising and challenging landscapes around the world.
Over three episodes, the series unlocks previously untold stories and revelatory behaviors from global penguin societies, quick to feel love, hate or fear. Antarctica’s strong, powerful but sensitive emperors battle to survive on the dangerous front line of climate change. The street-smart African and little blue penguins live in cities, deserts and beyond, relying on tenacious and “talkative” adolescents to forge new paths into the unknown. Powerful modern themes emerge among the macaronis and chinstraps of wild South Georgia, from strong female leadership to diversity, crime and extreme bravery. Their moving narratives will astonish and inspire, showing penguins to be more like us than we ever realized before.
“In the Secrets series we try to forge an even more intimate and emotional connection with nature – to illuminate how these amazing creatures think, how they feel, how they communicate, how they function as complex societies and cultures”
The new series will be released on Disney+ and the National Geographic channel. No release date has yet been announced, but it’s likely to be Earth Day (22 April) 2025.
Explores the wonders, mysteries, and fragilities of the Americas, the largest landmass on Earth, as well as extraordinary, untold wildlife tales that will resonate with millions of people all over the world.
“BBC Studios Natural History Unit’s epic 10-part tentpole event series for NBC in association with Universal Television Alternative Studio, “The Americas”, will be narrated by actor, producer and writer Tom Hanks with music by Hans Zimmer.
Debuting in 2024 and marking the first time acclaimed actor, producer and writer Tom Hanks will narrate an unscripted entertainment series, “The Americas” will also feature music by two-time Oscar winner Hans Zimmer. This incomparable project will employ revolutionary filmmaking technology that will showcase the wonders, secrets and fragilities of the Americas – Earth’s largest landmass and the only one to stretch between both poles – and reveal extraordinary, untold wildlife stories that deeply connect with millions around the world.
“The Americas” is executive produced by renowned Emmy and BAFTA Award-winning wildlife producer Mike Gunton (“Life,” “Planet Earth II,” and “Dynasties”) for BBC Studios Natural History Unit, the world’s largest production unit dedicated to wildlife filmmaking, in association with Universal Television Alternative Studio, a division of Universal Studio Group. ”
Mark has just returned from Six Senses, Laamu Atoll out in the Maldives where he was capturing the coral bleaching event which is now sadly underway.
During his stay Mark filmed the following footage:
Bleached coral reef (fixed position lapse time shots to go alongside pre-bleaching shots captured in February + tracking shots of widespread bleached area)
Juvenile Picasso Triggerfish (sequence material)
Manta Rays
Octopus hunting (sequence material)
Turtles (Hawksbill and Green)
emily@sharmancam.co.uk +44(0)7876 694477 for details.
Click here to view the NOAA coral reef watch bleaching heat stress maps and alert levels in the Maldives.
Maldives bleaching alert levels issued 29 April 2024
The Maldives corals bleached in 1998 and 2016 and are bleaching again now.
From the Emmy Award-winning team behind Our Great National Parks comes a revealing look at the secret network of connections that unites us all and sustains our planet’s most magical phenomenon: life itself. Narrated by Academy Award-winner Cate Blanchett, this docuseries spans the globe to showcase the extraordinary creatures and ecosystems, great and small, that work together to help restore and sustain Our Living World.
The underwater footage below was filmed by Mark and features in the third episode of Netflix's new wildlife documentary series "Our Living World". Cocos Island, a volcanic island in the eastern tropical Pacific about 500 km southwest of mainland Costa Rica is a known haven for endangered hammerhead sharks, but scientists still aren't sure how and why so many sharks navigate across swathes of ocean to convene there every year. Watch hammerhead sharks swim in 'cyclones' around ancient volcano below:
"We don't really know how these sharks are doing this," Ben Roy, the series producer of Our Living World, told Live Science. "We know that they've got sensors in their heads and we know that these sensors pick up on the magnetic signature of these cool volcanic rocks."
The island formed when lava erupted from an ancient underwater volcano and solidified, until it eventually rose 3,660 meters above the seabed.
The episode followed a young female hammerhead shark as she left her coastal nursery and travelled 300 miles across the Pacific Ocean to the volcanic oasis, where scientists think the sharks assemble to relax, socialize and find a mate. The female instinctively knew the way to Cocos Island thanks to electromagnetic signals emanating from hardened volcanic rocks on the island's slopes.
Mark and his family have just returned from eight weeks in the Maldives where they were hosted by Six Senses, Laamu Atoll
During his stay Mark filmed the following footage:
Coral reef (establishing shots, fixed position lapse time shots, spawning at full moon)
Uninhabited tropical island (aerials from drone)
Seagrass meadow (including juveniles inhabitants and aerials from drone)
Turtles (Hawksbill and Green)
Manta Rays (including ultra-sound scanning)
Sharks
Dolphins
Clark’s anemone fish colony
Please contact mark@sharmancam.co.uk and / or emily@sharmancam.co.uk for further details should you have any footage requests.
Mark was also filming for the The Maldives Underwater Initiative (MUI) a team made up of resort marine biologists and three partners, the Manta Trust, Blue Marine Foundation and the Olive Ridley Project. The MUI team pursues marine conservation goals, through research, guest education and community outreach, with the overarching aim of protecting Laamu’s natural resources.
The MUI team are based at the Sea Hub of Environmental Learning in Laamu (SHELL) which is a multi-use space, designed for education and immersive marine conservation experiences - in time, Mark’s footage will make up a set of short films which will document the MUI team’s latest projects.
Earthsounds travels to spectacular habitats, including the Queensland rainforest, the Antarctic ice shelf, the Namibian dunes, tropical coral reefs and more. Discoveries and rarely heard recordings from the series include snow leopards singing love songs, the intimate chatter of ostrich chicks from inside their eggs, musical spiders, walrus’s underwater courtship calls and more. But it’s not just animals that make unusual noises; the series also captures the mesmerizing secret sounds of our planet, including the hum of deserts, drinking trees, and the mysterious buzz of the Northern Lights. Narrated by Tom Hiddleston.
Captured over an extraordinary span of 1,000 days across three and a half years, "Earthsounds" unveils our planet in an unprecedented light—a realm teeming with unexpected, unfamiliar, and previously untold sonic narratives that have eluded us until now. This groundbreaking series meticulously documents over 3,000 hours of audio, employing state-of-the-art technology to capture our world in entirely new dimensions.
Mark +44 (0)7779 227307 mark@sharmancam.co.uk
Emily +44 (0)7876 694477 emily@sharmancam.co.uk
Copyright 2025 © Mark Sharman / Deep End Media Ltd.
