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. ”
Starring new Captain America actor, Anthony Mackie ‘Shark Beach: Gulf Coast’ takes the plunge to discover why one of nature’s most perfectly evolved predators are becoming a huge problem in his native Gulf of Mexico.
Born and raised fishing the waterways of New Orleans, Anthony Mackie explores the growing rumors that shark encounters may be on the rise in the Gulf of Mexico. With a team of shark experts Anthony sets off to explore the latest science that may help both humans and sharks coexist in the great state of Louisiana.
"The Falcon" and "The Winter Soldier" star helps kick off Nat Geo's "Sharkfest" with the new show 'Shark Beach with Anthony Mackie' click here to view more
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.
One Planet. Seven Years. A story not yet written. The most visionary, ambitious, and technologically challenging undertaking that has ever been attempted. A colossal project documenting how the Earth’s most vulnerable habitats, and the animals living there, will evolve in the coming years. Returning with compelling, insightful, documentary films for the next seven years. We are at a pivotal moment in history, with time running out if we are to prevent the irreversible effects of climate change. Over seven years we will monitor iconic locations across the planet. These are the ‘canaries’ of our changing world. Each represents a unique change happening across the planet. Their fates hang in the balance, hinging on our ability to change our ways. Some locations are heavily protected, others will experience pioneering schemes to rebuild the habitats, others could be lost forever. There are winners and losers, positive changes, and reasons for hope. Calling on the NHU’s extensive global network of scientists, conservationists, and witness camera operators we’ll tell the story of each environment and its key animal species via the people that know and experience them most intensely and vividly. These stories have not concluded, there is still time, and we bring stories of hope and the amazing people helping fight these challenges. This is Changing Planet.
Listening in on the ocean's orchestra - view clip here
Steve Backshall joins Professor Steve Simpson in the Maldives. The Professor has devised a system that uses the sounds of the reef to help restore them.
Whilst on a dive, testing out Prof Steve Simpson's new reef sound recording equipment, Steve Backshall gets told off by a territorial clownfish - view clip here
Scientists’ experiment is ‘beacon of hope’ for coral reefs on brink of global collapse
Recordings of healthy fish are being transmitted to attract heat tolerant larvae back to degraded reefs in the Maldives
The struggle to save coral reefs as they face a 50% decline, bleaching events, and the hope of resilient survivors for long-term recovery - view clip here
An underwater experiment to restore coral reefs using a combination of “coral IVF” and recordings of fish noises could offer a “beacon of hope” to scientists who fear the fragile ecosystem is on the brink of collapse. The experiment – a global collaboration between two teams of scientists who developed their innovative coral-saving techniques independently – has the potential to significantly increase the likelihood that coral will repopulate degraded reefs, they claim. The first use of the combined techniques, to repair damaged atolls in the Maldives, will be shown on the BBC One TV series Our Changing Planet, co-presented by the naturalist Steve Backshall.Hailed as a potential “gamechanger”, the hope is that the technique could be replicated on a large scale to help preserve and revitalise dying reefs.
“All corals in all ocean basins in the world are under pressure,” said Prof Peter Harrison, a coral ecologist at Southern Cross University in Australia. Quite a large number have died in some reef areas. So we’re going to end up with big spaces of new real estate for coral larvae, but very few coral larvae being produced because so many adults have died.”
He has pioneered a form of “coral IVF” that involves capturing millions of spawn from “heat-tolerant” reproductive coral after it floats to the sea surface or, alternatively, surrounding coral that has withstood a bleaching event with a cone-shaped net.
“If you breed from heat-tolerant corals that can survive heat stress in the laboratory, the larvae of those corals also have higher heat tolerance than the larvae of other corals,” said Harrison. The gametes (reproductive cells) then merge together, fertilise and form coral larvae in floating “nursery” pools, which protect them from predators and prevent them from getting lost at sea. “If we don’t support the process of natural selection by focusing on the survivors, we’re going to lose everything.” This technique, Harrison added, can produce 100 times more coral colonies than would naturally occur on a reef with the same number of larvae: “And we’re working out ways to get it to about 1,000.”
To attract the larvae to settle on a degraded reef, the scientists are broadcasting recordings of fish noises that were captured near a busy, healthy reef. “We’ve done this and restocked degraded reefs with fish,” said Steve Simpson, professor of marine biology and global change at the University of Bristol.
“Working with Peter is the first time we’ve tried it with corals. It maximises the chance that the coral larvae being released find somewhere to live – somewhere that they will then restore the reef habitat.” Coral larvae, he has discovered, can detect sound according to the way the hairs on their bodies move, and so can be “tricked” into swimming towards – and settling on – a typically silent, unhealthy reef. “It’s like sowing a field that will become a forest again,” said Simpson. In the lab, the larvae were particularly attracted to the low-frequency grunts, croaks and rumbling sounds made by territorial fish, which can protect coral growing on the reef. “We have discovered that coral larvae hear their way home as babies, before they then choose where to live for up to 1,000 years.”
“They look very simple, and they don’t have ears or a brain, but coral were probably among the earliest animals cueing into their soundscape and dancing to the beat.” Time is running out for coral reefs across the planet.Scientists recently announced that the world is experiencing its fourth planet-wide coral bleaching event since 1998, with 54% of reef areas in the global oceans experiencing heat stress high enough to turn its colourful coral white. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has suffered its worst bleaching on record, with about 73% of the 1,429-mile (2,300km) reef affected.
Backshall initially found the idea of using the soundscape of a busy reef to entice the tiny coral larvae to a denuded area “just bananas.”
“To see that happening – to take these gametes into the sea, play them the sounds of a healthy reef and see them actively start swimming towards it – it is probably as close to a eureka moment as I will ever have,” he said.
He fears, however, that if global temperatures rise by 2.5C or 3C, then “coral reefs are doomed”, regardless of these new techniques: “If we continue business as normal in terms of anthropogenic climate change, I don’t think it’s going to matter what we do. “Tropical reefs are right on the frontline. But if we can keep our levels of temperature increase across the planet down to 1.5C, then there’s a chance – and then these methods will absolutely be part of a positive future.” The world is “very gradually” waking up to the enormity of the global climate emergency, Harrison said. In the meantime, he and Simpson are “just trying to buy time for corals”.
“If we can keep enough reefs alive through the next two or three bumpy decades to be able to recover, we’ve then got the reefs for the future, once the climate is under control. People say that coral reefs might be the first ecosystem we could lose, and I like to think that, therefore, they are the first ecosystem we can save. If they’re on the brink, and we can save coral reefs, we can save anything. And they become a beacon of hope”
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 has recently invested in a new Gates underwater housing; the ‘Deep Komodo’ to use in combination with his RED Komodo 6K camera.
GATES DEEP KOMODO, RED KOMODO CAMERA & LENSES
* RED Komodo 6K camera brain + cards
* Atomos Shinobi SDI monitor
* Gates Deep Komodo housing for Red Komodo
* Gates SP60 6" glass dome
* Laowa EF 12mm f/2.8 Zero-D
* Laowa EF 15mm f/4 Wide Angle Macro
* Laowa EF 60mm f/2.8 2x Ultra Macro
* Laowa EF 24mm f/14 2x Macro Probe (Cine) + Gates underwater MLA60 macro lens adapter
* Nikon ED AF Micro Nikkor 70-180mm 1:4.5-5.6 D + adapter
The Earthshot Prize has been designed to find and grow the solutions that will repair our planet this decade. Warming temperatures, pollution and harmful fishing practices are having a devastating impact on our oceans, but our three ‘Revive our Oceans’ finalists for The Earthshot Prize 2022 have developed solutions so that our oceans can thrive.
Human activities and the climate crisis are decimating underwater seaweed forests. The team at SeaForester utilize an ingenious solution: “green gravel”. Unlike trees, seaweed needs no soil or fertiliser. Seaweed spores are seeded onto small stones and scattered into the ocean. The stones latch on to the underlying reef, the seaweed grows and multiplies, spreading across the ocean floor.
To read more about the SeaForester project please click here
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.
