Jeff Kurr knows a thing or two about sharks.
During his two-plus decades with Discovery Channel's Shark Week, the LA-based filmmaker has captured some of the most ground-breaking and dazzling footage of these feared creatures of the sea. This year, Kurr focuses his attention on the great white shark's return to our shallow waters and sandy beaches in "Great White Invasion."
To get psyched for Shark Week 2011, we sat down with Kurr to discuss all things cautious sharks, endangered sharks, and even a few frisky sharks.
What first motivated you to film sharks?
Well, very early on I thought, 'I'd really like to do that some day.' And lo and behold, through fate, luck, and being blessed, I had an opportunity to work on a Shark Week show way back in '91. It was pretty successful and I was offered another show, and another show, and here we are 20-something years later and still doing it. It's the best office in the world, to swim with sharks. It's an incredible job and I'm blessed to have it.
What has most changed over the 21 years that you have been filming sharks?
Well, it's been an incredible voyage, if you will, because really in the last 21 years we have learned so much about shark behavior and it's really due to all the great new technology out there. Filming the program "Ultimate Air Jaws," which was on Shark Week last year, we used a camera that shoots 1,000 frames per second. What that allowed us to do was to slow down the attacks by great whites from one second of real time (footage) to 45 seconds or a minute actually on tape. It allows you to see incredible detail from these sharks that you can't see with the naked eye ... you can literally count the teeth ... it's phenomenal.
During his two-plus decades with Discovery Channel's Shark Week, the LA-based filmmaker has captured some of the most ground-breaking and dazzling footage of these feared creatures of the sea. This year, Kurr focuses his attention on the great white shark's return to our shallow waters and sandy beaches in "Great White Invasion."
To get psyched for Shark Week 2011, we sat down with Kurr to discuss all things cautious sharks, endangered sharks, and even a few frisky sharks.
What first motivated you to film sharks?
Well, very early on I thought, 'I'd really like to do that some day.' And lo and behold, through fate, luck, and being blessed, I had an opportunity to work on a Shark Week show way back in '91. It was pretty successful and I was offered another show, and another show, and here we are 20-something years later and still doing it. It's the best office in the world, to swim with sharks. It's an incredible job and I'm blessed to have it.
What has most changed over the 21 years that you have been filming sharks?
Well, it's been an incredible voyage, if you will, because really in the last 21 years we have learned so much about shark behavior and it's really due to all the great new technology out there. Filming the program "Ultimate Air Jaws," which was on Shark Week last year, we used a camera that shoots 1,000 frames per second. What that allowed us to do was to slow down the attacks by great whites from one second of real time (footage) to 45 seconds or a minute actually on tape. It allows you to see incredible detail from these sharks that you can't see with the naked eye ... you can literally count the teeth ... it's phenomenal.
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