HOLLY RYAN - El Agua Mágica
Directed by LEVI CRANSTON
On a magical island, A woman is gifted with precious jewels…
To shoot this film, director Levi Cranston, had the genius idea of shooting on the tiny island off the Sunshine Coast called Old Woman Island. To do this…. it would require an immense amount of preparation and luck.
Old Woman Island (OWI), is 2km from the mainland, surrounded by reef, sharks and covered in prickly pear. Sharp and difficult all round. To get on the island we would need to get everything over by boat and on high tide. When we were planning to shoot, the tides would mean we would get our first high tide at 7am - day 1. The next tide with enough water to get close enough to the island would be the following day at 3pm. This meant we would have to stay overnight.
An overnight stay with the crew, bound by tides
So the small crew of 6 loaded up the boat and jetski captained by mine & Levi’s fathers & disembarked on our over night journey. We packed a yoga matt each and just enough food & water to carry us through the baking sun and chilly evening.
This wouldn’t be comfortable but every single member of the crew was ready for our most bold shoot to date.
To get from the boat, everyone needed to swim in with all supplies needed. We settled on buying these big oil drums which were watertight and we crammed everything including equipment in, put it on an inflatable donut on surfboards & swam it across.
Honestly, I was very glad when everything made it onto the island in 1 piece. Especially Holly (Client) and Iris (Talent) who were meant to wait on the mainland for the jetski to collect them. However, they decieded it was taking to long and decided to swim the 2km stretch with their waterproof backpacks….. We just got on the island ourselves when we sent the Ski off to collect them when they emerged from the other side of the island. Packs in hand… Our faces dropped with the sheer tenacity…
Iris would later take up spearfishing. She’s obviously not afraid of the ocean.
The shoot went fantastic. The biggest hiccup came at the end of the first day when I went to shoot the sunset image above. Consumed by the fading light and the threat of the moment passing. We rushed to the top of the hill and I placed the camera down on a high-hat. Mituation awareness was clearly low as a squatted down to operate the shot straight into a cactus….