‘Ocean’ with David Attenborough is a documentary film that captures the scale of life in and above the world’s oceans. The film highlights the ocean’s ecosystem and showcases unique filming and cinematography, including footage of industrial bottom trawling, the largest mass coral bleaching event in history, and the largest albatross colony on Earth at Midway Atoll in Papahānaumokuākea, Hawaii.
Attenborough, who turned 99 on May 8, 2026, narrates the film and presents the pressures the world’s oceans face as climate change and industrial activity threaten their biodiversity.
The world’s oceans cover nearly 70% of the Earth’s surface, but scientists and explorers have seen less than 0.001% of the deep-ocean seafloor, which is about the size of the State of Rhode Island.
‘Ocean’ won the Critics’ Choice Documentary Award for Best Cinematography in 2025. The film was directed by Keith Scholey and produced by National Geographic, Silverback Films, and Open Planet Studios, in association with All3Media International.
Underwater filming
‘Ocean’ features one of the most detailed looks at plankton and coral, with motion-controlled coral-feeding timelapses and a tow-camera to film traveling dolphins and tuna during the open-ocean scene.
Doug Anderson, Director of Photography, who filmed the underwater footage for ‘Ocean’, said people sometimes think that filming first means a mad new invention, but that’s normally not the case.
“Usually it’s loads of little things lining up. Better cameras, being in the right
place, enough time, enough luck and people prepared to keep trying,” said Anderson. “Ocean probably could have been filmed before in theory, but nobody had actually managed to do it.”
Scenes like the bottom trawling, bleaching and the albatross colony footage hadn’t been done before in the way Anderson did them.
“One of the main reasons was that unsuprisingly, the people who scallop dredge or bottom trawling have historically been reluctant to have cameras record what their gear is doing to the seabed,” said Anderson.
Anderson says that filming a lot of these firsts was timing and scale and just getting there, and no one thing really tipped the scale; it was all cumulative. “Cameras are better in low light, more stable, smaller, easier to tow, easier to leave out for longer with lower amps and better batteries. Anderson motion control was probably their biggest unlock in filming.
“Once you can repeat moves to fractions of a millimeter and remove tiny vibrations, you suddenly start seeing structure and behavior that otherwise just disappears,” he added.
Making plankton visible
Anderson said ‘Ocean’ brings the smallest underwater things to life, and tiny floating creatures like plankton are difficult to film.
“Tiny depth of field, subjects moving unpredictably, currents, bits drifting through frame — all the things that make underwater macro hard just get amplified,” said Anderson. “For a lot of the plankton work, we ended up moving away from conventional underwater filming and built bespoke in vitro systems instead.”
Anderson says one of the biggest unlocks for filming the tiny plankton was using.
custom Kreisel tanks—circular flow tanks normally used for delicate plankton and jellyfish—that let him suspend the organisms in very controlled water movement rather than having them smash into surfaces or vanish out of frame.
“We combined that with motion control and back projection systems. Back projection basically meant we could shoot real environmental plates separately and then play those backgrounds behind the subjects while maintaining complete control of the flow, lighting, and camera movement in the studio,” said Anderson.
Motion control
Anderson said resolution gets all the attention, but underwater stabilization and control are probably more important. “Everything underwater moves — camera, subject, water column, vessel. If you can stabilize enough of those variables, people stop looking at “nice pictures” and start seeing behavior,” he said.
For the reef work (Tropical and Temperate), Anderson built a bespoke three-axis underwater motion-control system that allowed them to repeat camera movements underwater with what Anderson calls ‘extreme’ precision over long periods. “That sounds simple, but underwater it’s incredibly difficult — buoyancy changes, drag changes and tiny shifts all become visible.”
Their motion control system allowed them to create controlled moves through reef environments and motion-controlled timelapses while maintaining framing that would normally be impossible underwater.
For the open-ocean sequences, they engineered tow-camera systems to isolate movement and make shots feel deliberate rather than reactive. “We were keen to inject cinematic urgency into the open ocean part of the film, and the shots of dolphin and tuna got us there,” he said.
“The tow cam was probably the most fun bit of tech we designed and built for the project, though it was the hardest to get through customs – it looks like a missile, and we certainly got a few raised eyebrows from customs officials!” said Anderson.
Telling the oceans’ stories
Anderson said filming ‘Ocean’ felt different, and that boiled down to scale and intent. “I’ve done loads of ocean films, but this one felt less about just making beautiful pictures and more about showing processes and showing bits people maybe haven’t wanted to look at before, and that includes the ugly as well as the beautiful. Dark and light. But hopefully it is still a film full of hope,” he added.
Anderson said the technology wasn’t really there to make prettier pictures, but to use it to show something that otherwise wouldn’t have been seen or to experience a story differently.
“The plankton scale, controlled flow environments like the Kreisel tanks and repeatable motion control meant we started seeing interactions and behaviors that are effectively invisible to the naked eye because they happen over tiny distances or long periods of time,” he added.
Telling stories about how marine environments work, and therefore how we should protect them in totally new ways, is what we’ve been able to do,” said Anderson. “Stable motion-controlled reef imaging means viewers can actually understand the spatial relationships between tiny animals and their environment. That creates a feeling of biodiversity and species richness.”
Anderson says the images also serve as a contrast to the wanton destruction caused by bottom trawling. “Once the audience understands the importance and delicate complexity of the seabed in a natural state, our hope was that the bottom trawling would seem as unsustainable as we believe it to be,” said Anderson.
Science and filmmaking
For the past 30 years, Strong has worked on blue-chip films such as ‘Planet Earth’, ‘Blue Planet’ and ‘Frozen Planet’, and says those films use a very traditional approach to technology that makes them feel “observed”.
“The thing about ‘Ocean’ is that we’ve created a unified style across the film and we wanted the film to feel as though you are part of it, like you are standing with the albatross or with the fishermen on the beach,” said Strong.
“A film’s job is to affect positive change in the world, so from the very start, the very first conversations, we’re working with scientists, indigenous communities and impact groups to ensure the filmmaking respects those ecosystems and communities,” said Strong.
The question Strong suggests we should ask ourselves about ‘Ocean’ and films like it is: what do we really want to achieve through these films?
“That has to be the goal, and then you work back from that to, okay, how can the film highlight that? How can the film work towards that? How can it shine a bright spotlight on that subject that will bring over a billion people’s attention to it and compel governments and agencies to enact changes that will have a positive impact?” said Strong.
“I want ‘Ocean’ to be the first film of a new generation of impact campaign films that are of a standard and a quality that is global and can sit in the cinemas, happily alongside other cinema features,” said Strong. “It entertains, of course, but it also educates and elicits passion, education, and change.
“I want ‘Ocean’ to be the start of many films like this,” added Strong. “There’s not much I would change in it, but there’s a lot I would do in the next film.”
‘Ocean’ with David Attenborough streams on the National Geographic Channel, Disney+ and Hulu.
