Ward native directed filming of 'Whale Wars'
Season finale airs Friday night on Animal Planet
By Laura Snider (Contact)
Thursday, August 20, 2009

John Mans, of Boulder, films Capt. Paul Watson on the deck of the Steve Irwin just before being swept across the bow by a 40-foot wave. Mans worked as director of photography for the second season of "Whale Wars," a reality TV show that follows the battle between the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and a Japanese whaling vessel in the Southern Ocean.
If you watch it

What: The season finale of "Whale Wars," Season 2

He's filmed wild wolves in Minnesota, elephants in the Sahara and hurricanes on the Gulf Coast. But he'd never abandoned his camera on a shoot, fearing for his life, until he took the director-of-photography job for the second season of "Whale Wars," a reality TV show that follows the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's battle to block the whaling operations of a Japanese ship in the Southern Ocean.

The season finale of "Whale Wars" airs on Animal Planet at 7 p.m. Friday night.

Mans, who now lives in Boulder, was filming below deck -- watching the thin hull bend and flex as the Sea Shepherd's ship, the Steve Irwin, hit one iceberg after another -- when he reached his personal limit.

"This is the reality: That ship, the Steve Irwin, that thing should never even see an iceberg," Mans said. "It should never even come close to an iceberg."

The Steve Irwin has a zero-ice rating, meaning the hull is not designed to smash through icebergs. But in the second episode of Season 2, the vessel's captain and Sea Shepherd founder, Paul Watson, piloted the boat into ice-choked waters in passionate pursuit of the Nisshin Maru, a Japanese whaling boat that claims to kill whales for research purposes.

"We were absolutely and completely in solid, thick ice," Mans said. "The steel would just flex in like four inches. It was really scary. I just kept remembering that our executive producer down in L.A. had said, 'Don't do anything that's going to get yourself killed.'"

So Mans, fearing a breach in the hull and not wanting to be stuck below deck with a handful of other people and only one ladder out, bailed. The decision was so unusual, that the producers left Mans' voice in the final cut of the episode to build the drama and illustrate the danger.

"This is where my commitment ends. I am not drowning in the ropes," Mans voice says in the episode called "The Flexibility of Steel." "Camera's on. Good luck, and don't risk your life. Seriously. We're gonna need to abandon this ship."

Mans' decision left an impression on the pop-culture pundits.

"In the 16 years I've been watching reality television, I can never remember a camera operator putting down his or her camera and leaving because the cast's actions threatened their lives," wrote Andy Dehnart, who critiques television for Salon, Wired, The Advocate and msnbc.com, in his blog "reality blurred." "Of course, since there was footage of this, the crew didn't drown nor abandon ship; eventually, they found a way out, but not before they donned their survival suits and walked around the ship looking horrified."

Capt. Watson -- one of the original members of Greenpeace and an advocate of direct-action tactics to protect the environment -- put the Steve Irwin and its crew into dramatic situations with real risk over and over during its tireless pursuit to block the Nisshin Maru from killing whales. The Sea Shepherds rely on throwing stink bombs at the Japanese boat, boarding it and attempting to disable it -- anything to keep the crew from killing a whale.

"Before, they were always scared of the Sea Shepherds," Mans said. "But this year they showed up with some pretty serious defensive weapons. .. Now they aren't scared of us, and they're going to come after us. We really had to figure out what we were willing to do as a camera crew."

Even so, Mans hasn't ruled out working on the show again next year.

"The producer and me and the sound guy -- we had 60 years of filmmaking experience between us," Mans said, "and this was the most compelling raw footage that we'd ever seen."