AQUA is a cinematic audio visual experience blending the most spectacular reef footage in the world with the immersive sounds of contemporary dance music.
The goal of AQUA is to expose a young, international audience to the plight of one of the world’s most treasured World Heritage icons, and tell the reef’s story as never told before - its evolution, its complex history with humankind, its ecological wonder and the uncertain future it now faces.
AQUA brings together Australian filmmaking team Toni Houston & Bettina Richter of Wish Bone Films with acclaimed natural history filmmaker Tina Dalton and Emmy Award-Winning Cinematographer David Hannan. Its soundtrack fuses the renowned percussive world beats of Europe’s international chart-topping DJs Safri Duo and the chilled ambient textures of top Australian talent Endorphin. AQUA’s scientific expert is one of the world’s most eminent coral scientists – Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg – from the University of Queensland, Australia.
From the birth of the Earth through to the genesis of the Great Barrier Reef after the last Ice Age, AQUA takes the audience on an immersive and sensory experience unlike any other. Cutting to the frame - with stories unfolding to the beat –
- frenzied mass coral spawning, kaleidoscopic fish, cuttlefish, octopus and sea slugs, as well as the dance of true reef icons such as turtles, whale sharks and courting manta rays. Through the use of archival material, dramatisation and visual effects, AQUA also reveals the fraught relationship the reef has had with humankind, from Aboriginal Australia to colonisation, war, industrialisation, tourism, pollution, global warming and climate change.
Set to the music of three of the biggest selling DJs worldwide, AQUA’s coverage is infinite and its boundaries are limitless. AQUA is aimed for every format – cinema, television, live performance, 3D, a live streaming educational website and DVD & Blu-Ray.
AQUA is intended to celebrate the wonder of the Great Barrier Reef, but also alert the world to its perils. The reef – a true Australian icon, and one of the most important ecosystems on Earth - is emblematic of all we are set to lose if we do not radically curb our CO2 emissions.
Underwater image by Lucy Trippett