Tuesday, June 08, 2010

This is the most surreal event I have ever posted to the blog: Guillaume Nery base jumping into an underwater sinkhole!



This is a jaw dropping event filmed so beautifully that you want to see more. There is a long shot of the diver "falling" in slow motion into the hole with a composition so overwhelmingly dangerous, you have to come away thinking how amazing the human body is.

This stunning video of world champion freediver Guillaume Nery base jumping underwater into Dean's Blue Hole will take your breath away.

Dean's Blue Hole is the world's largest underwater sinkhole, plunging 663 feet to the ocean floor in a bay west of the Bahamas. Nery, accompanied by freediving cameraman Julie Gautier, dove straight to the bottom, struck a pose, and then climbed his way back out.

[Link]
My director friend, Esther, sent me this from the Huffington Post. (I designed the poster for one of her movies that won a technology award at the Boston International Film Festival.)

9 comments:

Martin Gmür said...

Yea - Guillaume is one of the best freediver worldwide and the one with the coolest videos on YouTube. He did very nice videos of his constant weight world record dives and a great BMW commercial.
By the way Guillaume is within his training workouts also a fast finswimmer ;-)
That is his blog: http://guillaumenery.over-blog.com/

About the Dean's Blue Hole
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean's_Blue_Hole

regards
Martin

TedBaker said...

Martin - Seems you know some stuff about this... A question: Why didn't Guilaume remove the weight belt at the bottom? Was it "theater"? (Excuse the expression because if so, it was magnificent!) Or is there some sort of physiological reason?

Amazing video and an incredible feat.

Martin Gmür said...

Hi Ted
well I don't know much about that video. But it is fore sure fiction. But a very very good one :-)
The BlueHole is 202m deep. Guillaume personal best is -115m, as far as I know. Nobody on earth is able to do such an effort tog go to -202m an back to sureface unassisted.
However Guillaume is definitely one of the top five freediver worldwide.

Trev said...

Unbelievable.

TedBaker said...

I was going to comment that I thought 200-odd meters was beyond what I believed human limits to be... Spectacular, none the less.

Anonymous said...

Yahoo reported today that it was real that it was manufactured.

Tony Austin said...

Whether it is real or if he took intermittent breaths, what they created is stunning. There were periods of him falling that tot he sea floor that were long enough for me to be amazed.

Anonymous said...

C'mon how can one/float 1300 feet, 433 yards in 4 minutes. Obviously manipulated. I wonder what his next trick will be.

Martin Gmür said...

From Guillaumes blog:
This video is a FICTION and an ARTISTIC PROJECT, I don't claim to have reached the bottom of the hole (202m) without rope and fins, as the world record in no-fins discipline is 95m.
We made this movie to show another approach in freediving videos.
We wanted to express the strenght of the elements water-earth-air and the sensations of freedom, harmony, exploration.

All the shots were made on breath hold by Julie Gautier.

We directed and edited the movie ourself, Julie and me. Jerome Espla (Poisson Lune Productions) was the gradder of the clip (color corrections...).

The music is from ARCHIVE - you make me feel.
The camera is a Canon 5D mark II