TED Features Alumnus, Underwater Filmmaker
Check out the above video of underwater filmmaker Mike deGruy’s talk during TED’s The Mission Blue Voyage, which brought together ocean experts to share their knowledge over a four-day adventure to the Galapagos Islands this week (April 10-14). deGruy, a 1975 NC State graduate and zoology major, owns the Film Crew, which makes films for the likes of PBS, BBC, National Geographic and the Discovery Channel. He’s been shooting the oceans for more than 30 years and has been described as “one of the world’s greatest underwater cameramen.” In the talk featured on TED, he shares how he became fascinated with octopus at age 5 or 6, and he describes what it’s like to go deep into the water and explore the mid-water community. Interspersed with his comments are clips of the deep waters shot by his company.
NC State magazine profiled deGruy in a cover story in 1992. Included in the profile was deGruy’s first-person account of the time a shark nearly ripped his arm off and killed him. Read the account after the jump.
That was one of those situations when I was completely unprepared for what unfolded. I had taken some time off from graduate work at the University of Hawaii to be manager of a marine research lab, and I was scuba diving with a friend in about 60 feet of water at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. It was a reconnaissance dive to find out what research might be done there.
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