Sterling
Everything that makes a halibut worth eating happens before anyone sees it. So the film starts where no one looks: inside an egg, through a microscope, at the moment a heart begins. Then it follows the same light out to the fjord and into the kitchen. Sun on water, the shine of silver. The care is the product.
Two things made this film. A wild halibut is almost impossible to shoot well, so the underwater footage was filmed in a large tank at Ålesund Aquarium. We lit it with big lamps and waited for night. Underwater light only works if the water moves, so it breaks instead of sitting flat, so we stood on a tiny float and rocked back and forth for two hours at a stretch to make the waves. Second: the whole film is lit by bouncing a hard source into a wall of foil, for a rippled, silver, water-on-metal look, named, of course, after Sterling. It runs through everything, the fish, the food, the light on the keepers' arms.
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