Shooting Scenarios: The Loneliest Whale

Shooting Scenarios is a column that takes a single scene and breaks it down cinematographically, looking at the shooting logistics, creative challenges, and camera gear deployed.

"You never forget your first time seeing a whale," director Joshua Zeman says in The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52. His was as a kid working on a sailing ship. But the impetus behind this documentary came years later, after he read about a solitary whale that couldn’t communicate because his call was at a different frequency from every other whale: 52 hertz. Dubbed 52, he’d been roaming the ocean for decades, his song unanswered.

Though heard on hydrophones, 52 had never been visually spotted by scientists. Zeman decided to try. Through Kickstarter, he raised enough money for a seven-day expedition with a crack team of whale biologists. "That’s very much part of ethos of the film," Zeman says of the Kickstarter campaign. "This is not a slick, glossy NatGeo or IMAX film. We took all our scrappy, independent-film skills and applied them to that huge IMAX–NatGeo setting."

The Loneliest Whale follows this expedition and also weaves in segments on our historical fascination with whales, 52’s discovery in 1989, whale songs, and how whales are now being threatened by underwater noise pollution.

The following four-minute scene captures a turning point in the expedition. After three futile days, the scientists finally manage to tag a blue whale with a tracking device. Their hope is that other whales might lead them to 52, since he’s likely swimming with a pod in search of food. Cinematically, the scene utilized two Canons, a drone, a GoPro, and a "whale cam." Dramatically, it shows everyone’s relief that this impossible quest just might work. […]

Published in Documentary magazine on July 15, 2021.