Mark Sharman is an underwater cinematographer specialising in underwater camera work for film, television, natural history and visual-effects productions. His recent work has included filming underwater VFX plates for an upcoming BBC Science programme (due to broadcast in December 2026).
Shooting Underwater VFX Plates: Capturing the World Before the VFX
For an underwater cinematographer, this creates a fascinating challenge:
How do you capture real underwater footage that gives a VFX team everything they need to build the finished shot? This is where underwater VFX plates come in.
What is a VFX plate?
In simple terms, a plate is photographic footage that becomes one of the building blocks of a visual-effects shot. It might contain an environment, a section of seabed, rocks, vegetation, water movement or an empty area of the frame. The VFX team can then add digital characters, creatures, environments or other elements to that original photography. The audience may never see the plate on its own. Instead, it becomes part of something much bigger.
“The interesting thing about shooting plates is that you’re often filming something that isn’t actually the subject of the final shot. You’re creating the physical world for something else to exist in”
That requires a different mindset from conventional underwater wildlife cinematography as you're filming for what comes next.
When I'm filming wildlife, I'm generally looking for behaviour. I'm watching the animal, anticipating its movement and trying to put the camera in the right place at the right moment. With VFX plates, the thinking changes. There may be no animal at all. There may not even be an obvious subject. Instead, I'm thinking about what the VFX team will need later. Where might the digital subject appear? What will the camera movement be? How much space needs to be available within the frame? What environmental details will help establish scale, depth and perspective? And perhaps most importantly: Does the footage give the VFX team enough information to make their work believable?
Underwater makes everything more complicated
Water creates a constantly changing environment. Light behaves differently. Visibility changes. Particles move through the water column. Vegetation responds to currents. The camera itself is affected by buoyancy and movement. Even a seemingly simple static shot can contain an enormous amount of environmental information. That's actually one of the great advantages of shooting underwater plates. The real environment gives the VFX team something that can be difficult to reproduce convincingly from scratch: real water, real light and real movement. The challenge is capturing it in a way that remains useful once the digital elements are added.
“Underwater is never really static. Even when you’re holding the camera still, the environment is moving around you. You’re dealing with currents, changes in buoyancy, your own position in the water and the movement of the camera within that environment. After years of working underwater, you learn to anticipate those things rather than simply react to them. You start to understand how a current is going to affect a camera move, how a small change in your position can alter a composition, and how to make that movement work for the shot. For VFX plates, that becomes particularly important because the camera movement needs to be controlled and repeatable. The aim isn’t necessarily to make the camera static — it’s to make the movement intentional”
Light becomes part of the visual-effects language
Underwater light has its own visual characteristics. Colour is absorbed with depth. Contrast changes. Sunlight filters through the surface. Particles catch the light. Shadows and caustics move with the surface above. All of those things become part of the photographic reference. If a digital creature is going to be placed into an underwater plate, it needs to feel as though it exists within the same physical environment. That means the VFX team needs more than a pretty background. They need the light, atmosphere, texture and movement of the real underwater world.
“The more authentic information you can capture in camera, the more you give the VFX team to work with. You’re not trying to do their job — you’re giving them a really strong photographic foundation”
Scale is especially important underwater
Underwater environments can be deceptive. Without familiar reference points, it can be surprisingly difficult to judge the size or distance of objects. A rock formation can look enormous from one angle and relatively small from another. A seabed can appear much closer or further away depending on visibility and water conditions. For VFX, establishing scale is critical. The relationship between the camera, the environment and whatever is eventually added digitally has to make physical sense. This is one of the reasons underwater cinematography is about much more than simply operating a camera in a housing.
Bringing underwater experience to VFX
After more than 20 years working as an underwater cinematographer, I've developed an understanding of the practical realities of filming beneath the surface — from movement and buoyancy to light, visibility, wildlife behaviour and the constantly changing underwater environment. Those skills are valuable far beyond traditional wildlife cinematography. Whether the camera is being used to capture a real animal, a human story, an environment or photographic plates for a visual-effects sequence, the fundamentals remain the same: Understand the environment. Control the camera. Capture the detail. And give the story something real to build on. For productions using visual effects to extend or transform underwater environments, that photographic foundation can make all the difference.
Mark Sharman works with production companies and VFX teams to capture underwater plates and environments for visual-effects productions. Mark is available for underwater VFX projects worldwide - please feel free to get in touch:
Mark +44 (0)7779 227307 mark@sharmancam.co.uk
