Marine & Wildlife Filming

Here is how the work lines up. Marine and wildlife filming in New York covers a remarkable range of habitats for a single state — the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island, the Hudson and East rivers, New York Harbor, the Long Island Sound, the Jersey side of the Bight, the Hudson Valley estuary, the Catskills and the Adirondack High Peaks.

Here is the layout. Marine sequences run from humpback whales now feeding often inside the New York Bight off Long Beach. The Rockaways, through grey seal haul-outs on the South Shore, bottlenose dolphins, sea turtles and bluefin tuna runs off Montauk and the Hamptons, to underwater work in Long Island Sound and Block Island Sound and harbour camera work around the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and Gateway National Recreation Area.

Here is how the work shapes up. Wildlife subjects have white-tailed deer and red-tailed hawks across the Hudson Valley, coyotes that have moved into Pelham Bay, Inwood Hill Park and the outer boroughs, peregrine falcons nesting on Manhattan skyscrapers, bald eagles wintering along the Hudson and Delaware, the spring warbler migration through Central Park and Jamaica Bay's Floyd Bennett Field wetlands, and the black bears, beavers, river otters and recovering moose populations across the Catskills and Adirondacks.

Here is how it adds up. Our crew works with skilled New York wildlife cinematographers credited with PBS Nature, National Geographic and BBC Natural History work covering the Atlantic flyway and the urban wildlife of the metro region, and is supported by underwater ops dive-rated for the cold Atlantic conditions off Long Island and the brackish waters of the Hudson estuary. We set up permits through the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment, the National Park Service for Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Gateway and Fire Island National Seashore, the U.S.

Here is the run-down. Coast Guard Sector New York under Homeport for any marine event planning, NYS Parks and DEC for state lands, and the Central Park Conservancy for any park-administered locations. Underwater packages deploy RED Komodo, ARRI Alexa Mini LF and Sony Venice 2 cinema bodies in Gates and Subspace housings, with long-lens 600mm and 800mm kits, remote camera traps, hide systems and macro rigs rounding out the inventory.

Our team briefs shoots on seasonality — humpback feeding June through September, fall raptor migration through Bear Mountain in October, deer rut in November, winter bald-eagle concentrations along the Hudson — and aligns shoots with the thirty-per-cent New York State Film Tax Credit and ten-per-cent NYC uplift where eligible.