Great Lakes Untamed (3 part docu-series)
TVO / Smithsonian
Role: Director of Photography
Carved by the retreat of a two-million-year-old glacier, North America’s five great lakes – Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario – form the largest freshwater ecosystem on Earth, holding one quarter of the world’s ‘surface fresh water’. This watershed is unmatched for its incredible wildlife, landscapes and human importance. It is our ‘Amazon’.
TVO Original Great Lakes Untamed takes us on a journey through this constantly evolving world that shapes the lives of millions of animals, plants and humans. As wide as the Atlantic Ocean this giant watershed is now revealing new mysteries; rocks that glow-in-the-dark on Superior’s shore; Canada’s longest underwater cave system beneath the Ottawa River; and fish that feed in the sky and those that sing. Here, life has adapted to an extreme climate on land and underwater in order to survive. You will see never-before-filmed footage of freshwater cod singing beneath the ice to find a mate, flying squirrels that glow in the dark, beautiful salamanders that use plants to breathe, and the last wolverines in eastern North America.
Led by veteran BBC nature documentarian, Ted Oakes (Planet Earth Live), and his co-directors, Jeff Morales and Nicholas de Pencier (Anthropocene, Manufactured Landscapes), Great Lakes Untamed is an international collaboration between broadcasters from five countries. Filmed by a team of North America’s foremost nature cinematographers working over two years, Great Lakes Untamed is the first definitive natural history ever produced on this vast watershed.
Source to Sea
In Episode 1, Source to Sea starts at headwaters of Lake Superior and takes us on a 3,000 km tour of the Great Lakes all the way to our planet’s largest estuary, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, home to 14 species of whales. Along the way, you will discover the amazing relationship between beavers and wolves that regulate the flow of clean water into the Great Lakes. The flow of water is a trip not everyone has survived. Clear water reveals newly discovered shipwrecks beneath the Straits of Mackinac which connect Lakes Michigan and Huron. Here extreme storms and unpredictable currents make this one of the most dangerous waterways in the world. For the first time you will see loons and even owls hunting fish underwater. The greatest lakes on Earth are threatened by a voracious invader, the giant Silver Carp.
The Big Freeze
With Episode 2, The Big Freeze reveals how animals, people and the landscape have been forged by snow and ice in one of the world’s most extreme and unpredictable environments. Here the changing climate is creating one of our planet’s most powerful ‘polar vortexes’, life-threatening blasts of super-chilled air, ‘ice tsunamis’ and storms that create the world’s largest freshwater waves. You will see ravens demonstrate remarkable intelligence manipulating wolves and bald eagles to feed on deer trapped in ice. A Canada Lynx hunts in ‘Lake effect’ snow drifts for snowshoe hares and ruffed grouse buried in icy caves. A river otter teaches her pups how to find fish under the ice. And two human free-divers explore the bizarre extraterrestrial world beneath Lake Huron.
Marvels and Mysteries
The final Episode 3, Marvels and Mysteries, shows us how life and the landscape of the Great Lakes have adapted to the incredible changes in temperature that arrive each year. You will see monstrous lake sturgeon swimming upstream to spawn, moose diving 20 feet deep to feed on plants, the world’s first images of inland wolves hunting fish. The series also show scientists using lights to foil invasive lamprey eels that have nearly destroyed millions of native fish.