She used to act in stage plays at Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre. Sharks proved the moneymaker of the pair’s nascent business, with networks taking any footage they could get – especially if the animals appeared dangerous. Together with her husband Ron Taylor she produced some of the most iconic nature films about sharks and other marine wildlife. During the filming of the feature film Blue Water, White Death in 1970 a great white reaches towards the camera operator. ‘Animals in the ocean are as intelligent as the animals on land – you can teach a reef shark a simple trick far faster than you can teach a dog, if you have food,’ she said. The thought of what might be found in those “dark zones” will, undoubtedly, be an incentive for the next generation of shark cinematographers to achieve it – whatever the danger. When the divers and film crews boated into waters infested with oceanic whitetip sharks for the first time, Valerie very calmly thought: ‘I’m not coming back from this’. ‘It grabbed the wrong thing, I did the wrong thing and there was blood everywhere,  but if you’re going to get bitten by a shark, be working for Hollywood when you do.’, A still from the making of Jaws, featuring one of three mechanical 24-foot long sharks. 'I know to keep perfectly still and they'll … The oceanic whitetip is the most dangerous shark species on the planet and have killed and eaten more people than every other shark put together. (Her own most serious injury came later, from diving with more than 40 blue and mako sharks each up to 2.5 metres long. “You could ‘see’ the image you wanted to make, but the technology was not there to make it.”, Ron Taylor shot his first underwater footage on 16mm film, using a wind-up camera in a waterproof housing. ‘My arthritic joins don’t care for the cold waters of Australia, and the pressure seems to take the pain away.’, Pictured: Valerie Taylor with her diving gear and a camera while working with bull sharks in Fiji, Pictured: Valerie Taylor, who is now 84, preparing for a dive in Indonesia. The machanical shark in Jaws with a model swimmer in its mouth in the movie ‘Jaws’. The suit worked, and Valerie was not bitten. Doubilet learned to rely on light, composition and “the decisive moment”. Achetez neuf ou d'occasion et des millions de livres en stock sur Amazon.fr. He almost single-handedly redefined the public perception of sharks. Of more than 1,000 shark species, Taylor says, “only about seven are potentially dangerous. “If you resist sharks they will not bite you,” confirms Doubilet – “but you’ve gotta pay attention.”. In 2009, the skateboarder Rob Dyrdek requested that Cove facilitate a “shark attack” to film for his reality show. The film introduces Ron and Val Taylor diving and filming sharks. In three years of exploring Indonesian reefs, Doubilet saw only three sharks. Cousteau once told a story about working with Luis Marden, a pioneering National Geographic photographer, in the Red Sea in the mid-1950s. Even through the 1960s, the Taylors noticed coral reefs degrading, mostly through overfishing. À ce… So that’s what we did.’, Ron and Valerie Taylor taking the temperature of a live great white shark, A great white shark captured during the filming of Blue Water, White Death in 1970. Taylor notes in her memoir, An Adventurous Life, the Jaws poster doesn’t “show a middle-aged man”. Valerie Taylor knows how to survive a shark attack after 50 years swimming with the beasts of the ocean. Inspired, he made his own underwater camera by stuffing his Brownie Hawkeye into a rubber anaesthesia rebreathing bag. “Sharks would sell, and we had to make a living,” says Taylor. After three weeks of debilitating pain, she was no longer infectious and moved to a rehabilitation ward where nurses would stretch her limbs out to stop them from shortening in a controversial method that wasn’t used in Australia. So what did we manage to agree with the EU. ‘When they bump, you bump them back harder and they gain resp ect for you – they’re intelligent.’. ‘Underwater filming was a great adventure we were the first to do it – it was a discovery.’. Operation Shark Attack - YouTube This is the first Shark Film which aired on the Discovery Channel produced by my father. Lawyers and production managers were sent from the U.S. to Australia to talk through the logistics of filming a 24-foot shark, when the average length of a great white was 14 feet. Shark attack. Valerie said the watershed moment was one of the most incredible of her life which would help them push the boundaries of underwater cinema. Mark Brownlow, executive producer at the BBC Studios’ Natural History Unit, which made Blue Planet and Blue Planet II, describes it as a seminal film for him as a young “shark nut” (though he also makes it clear he doesn’t condone the methods). In his 1953 bestseller The Silent World, co-written with Frédéric Dumas, Cousteau shared photographs of “the beast”, an oceanic whitetip, coming straight for him: “Then I bang his nose with the camera.” In 1956, Cousteau and film-maker Louis Malle made a film of the same title that combined colour footage with swashbuckling bravado, including the on-screen slaughter of several sharks. Valerie Taylor has been diving with sharks since the 1960s, and her work as a conservationist is still inspiring others today. Valerie described the underwater world as ‘alien and full of magic and beautiful colours’, adding that fish are only afraid of humans because they’ve learned to be. But these magnificent animals very rarely threaten humans: so why did dolphins get Flipper while sharks got Jaws? Ron and Valerie became partners in life and work, selling film of their underwater encounters to Movietone for its newsreels (at £25 a pop, good money at the time) then, later, to television channels in the US and Australia. The contribution of shark tourism to the Bahamas’ economy, an estimated $800m over the past 20 years, was instrumental to the prohibition, in 2011, of commercial fishing of more than 40 shark species in Bahamian waters. Even wearing chainmail and baited, it was “hard as hell to get the shark to bite”, says Cove, though “everything worked out great” eventually. Valerie Taylor was born on November 9, 1935 in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia as Valerie May Heighes. World's Deadliest: Great White Shark vs. The desire for shark footage long predates Jaws. Valerie was born on Crown Street in Sydney’s inner city in 1935 before moving to Wellington, New Zealand, where her family lived while her father ran a battery factory. Half-size sets and props meant using some half-size actors, including a man who was hired to swim in a shark cage surrounded by the hungry fish. The potential harms (for example, of sharks coming to associate people with food) are outweighed by the benefits, Doubilet believes – not least by allowing people to connect with a predator: “Tourism dollars save species.”. But these apex predators are now in grave danger. Figure 4. On 8 December 1963, ... (which he was one of the consultants for along with Ron and Valerie Taylor), giant and ancient fossil shark teeth, plus photos and video highlights from many films that he has been involved in. The film proved a formative influence on the film-maker James Cameron and the Jaws author, Peter Benchley. Pictured: Valerie Taylor testing a prototype protective mesh suit. It took more than nine months to film in Durban, South Africa, across the Indian Ocean and in South Australia, and was the most exciting production they worked on, according to Valerie. Exactly one year after his attack, he entered the Australian Spear Fishing Championships in Victoria where he top scored in three of four events. (Ron died from leukaemia in 2012, aged 78.). Baiting to attract sharks in Blue Water, White Death. She married the love of her life, together they pioneered underwater photography with DIY equipment, took up film-making and caught the attention of Hollywood. Valerie Taylor is the Grand Madame of Australian nature filming and to this day a passionate diver and wildlife advocate. He managed to grab the cage before he lost consciousness. Valerie Taylor, Camera Department: Jaws. For as long as humans have been able to photograph the oceans, we have sought to capture their most fearsome resident. Latest attack: Surfer tells of terrifying body-slam. in the ocean are as intelligent as the animals on land – you can teach a reef shark a simple trick far faster than you can teach a dog, if you have food,’ she said. In his memoir, Hass described luring them by pretending to flee – “awakening the instinct in every beast of prey”. 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