STEPHEN FRINK
//
I see now how scuba as
a recreational sport and profession became an
important part of your life, but what motivated you
to pick up a camera and become an image-maker?
CRISTIAN DIMITRIUS
//
I was always inspired by
the nature documentaries I saw on TV. What motivated
me might have been the films of Jacques Cousteau
or Stan Waterman and definitely Howard Hall, but
I wasn’t necessarily inspired only by underwater
filmmaking. I remember a documentary about big cats
in Africa by Dereck Joubert, for example. If it had to do
with nature, I was absorbed. I watched these television
shows constantly and imagined myself as the storyteller,
the one having the adventures.
SF
// Did you migrate to filmmaking right away,
early in your career, or did you shoot stills first?
CD
//
I improved my fieldcraft before I moved to
filmmaking. My first camera was a Sea and Sea Motor
Marine II, which truthfully was pretty limiting, especially
compared with the tools I have available to me today. The
dive center I was working for had a Hi8 video camera,
and they encouraged me to take it out on dives with
clients and shoot movies of them as souvenirs. Sometimes
I could sell the videos, and I made a little extra money,
but more than that I was learning to previsualize, to edit
in-camera and imagine what the finished clips might
be. Learning to shoot video wasn’t so hard, but learning
to edit video was ponderous at the start. So I tried to see
it all in my mind’s eye first; this way I could turn around a
video faster and not have to work so hard.
We weren’t shooting many videos at that point, so my
experience remained pretty basic. I also had a lust for
travel. I backpacked because that’s all I could afford, but
for a year I traveled along the Brazilian coast. I made it as
far as Argentina, where I got a job at a biological research
station for a while, and that took me to Antarctica.
Summer is the high season for diving in Brazil, and I
found I could market my skills as a dive instructor and
videographer, at least for those few months every year.
SF
// It sounds like an old TV show we had in the U.S.,
Have Gun—Will Travel. You were the gunslinger for
hire, but your video camera was your six-shooter.
96
|
FALL 2014
IMAGING
//
S H O O T E R
From left: Mythical pink river dolphins in
the Amazon; a freshwater stingray in the
Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland
