How this puffer fish revealed the Great Barrier Reef’s full glory (2024)

Nick Robinson, director and cameraman of Puff: Wonders of the Reef, explains the challenges of filming marine life that is too small to be seen with the naked eye.

What was the genesis of Puff: Wonders of the Reef?

I’ve made quite a few films over the years on the Great Barrier Reef, and it was often the macro shots that hinted at a world that was amazing but was hard to actually film. We would get glimpses, but you couldn’t really capture it properly. Bioquest, who are cinematographers based in Port Douglas, had developed these complex camera systems to do all kinds of focus-stacking and time lapse and remote control stabilised heads, that allowed us to film the tiny things. Seeing that that technology was available, I wanted to make a film about the micro-worlds of the reef – sort of like a Serengeti on a micro scale. So we set out and pitched that idea to Netflix of doing this crazy thing, this journey of a fish that reveals the micro-worlds of the Reef.

So a few years ago, this movie would’ve been impossible to do?

Yeah, a lot of techniques had to be developed for it, and Bioquest had been filming little creatures on the reef for that whole time and developing ways of doing that – some of it is [filmed] in tanks, some in field, but a lot of it is these crazy motion-controlled rigs where you use a joystick to move the cameras around. And it requires a combination of skills because they also have to have really good animal husbandry skills: some of the tanks are about as big as your hand because some of the creatures are invisible to the naked eye. To see coral reproducing or going on its first journey, these are specks that you’re following, and from specks up to creatures about the size of your thumb, which is the size of our hero fish.

And you built your story around this tiny hero?

It was the first time anyone had wanted to make a hero out of a fish, and I don’t think a lot of people appreciate that fish have personalities, so I thought it was a really good thing to do, to see that these fish have little quirks and they get up to stuff, they have plans they enact every day. I thought that would be a real eye-opener for people, to have a hero fish that you can get attached to. I think anyone who owns a fish tank probably knows that, but to the general public I think it’s a really interesting view of the world.

It doesn’t need to be Pixar to be able to relate to fish.

No, and that was the big challenge. It was like, we’re following in Nemo’s footsteps, and Nemo’s amazing: we had to somehow make this fish amazing without it speaking or saying anything. Part of the challenge was choosing the right fish.

Did you have to go through an intensive audition process to find your lead?

We did, it was actually a really cool thing to get into. To find the hero fish, we tried a bunch of fish and they were the obvious contenders that everyone knows – the Nemos and Dorys and that kind of thing. We thought OK, we could do those. But it turned out after just looking at a bunch of fish, it was a really ordinary fish, one that divers don’t normally look for. The puffer fish that became a hero, the sharp-nosed puffer fish it’s called. The issue with most fish is that they would dart away from the camera – you’re usually filming the back of them because they’re afraid of you.

But the puffer fish is a natural movie star?

It turned out these puffer fish, they hover, they move slowly, and they’re not afraid of people because they’re poisonous, so they don’t have too many predators on the reef. So they weren’t afraid of big things like us: in fact, they’re really curious, and would come up to the lens and check you out and come up to your mask. We hadn’t noticed before, but it wasn’t until we put them into the tanks and tried to follow these fish that we realised these puffer fish were almost cartoon-like, and obviously super-clever and happy to hang out and play and live normally, not in fear. They wouldn’t go and hide as soon as you put a big camera and a diver in front of them.

Is the angle you’ve taken – of following this one fish character – providing an emotional centre that some other nature documentaries might lack?

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I love all kinds of documentaries, I love the Blue Planet [series] and all of them. But the Great Barrier Reef is possibly one of the most overdone subjects there is, so to try and find a different angle on it, I thought was a really good thing to do. To have people connect with a fish, with all the work we do trying to convince people to protect the oceans – if they could connect with a couple of these characters that are oceanic creatures that you don’t normally in a documentary connect with, they just swim past the camera. Making the focus a little fish and giving people a sense of the trials and tribulations of one tiny creature among the billions that live there was a good and novel way to do it, and also to appeal to both audiences: try and bring kids to this mission to save the planet.

Puff: Wonders of the Reef is on Netflix from December 16.

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