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I survived out of the abyss10/5/2023 ![]() ![]() By feel, Cameron located the release of his buoyancy vest and slipped out of it, beginning what divers call a ‘blow and go,’ a free ascent to the surface. Up in the control room, the sound effects mixer realized something was amiss when he heard the sound of Cameron’s helmet being popped off and all the expensive electronics inside flooding with water. At the bottom of a 7.5 million gallon tank, in the dark, thirty-five feet from the surface, Cameron really was in trouble. ![]() Cameron tried to rouse his support divers, using up the rest of the air in his lungs, saying, ‘Guys, I’m in trouble.’ As Keegan writes: ‘Cameron made the sign for being out of air, a cutthroat motion across the neck and a fist to the chest. ![]() Giddings, who was nearly deaf from a diving-bell accident 20 years earlier, didn’t hear him. His helmet microphone was still linked to the underwater PA system, so Cameron called out to underwater cinematographer Al Giddings, who was filming nearby. With all of his extra weight, and no fins, there was no way for Cameron to swim to the surface. The AD had forgotten to give him a warning alert. Startled, he checked his pressure gauge, which read zero. One day, a few weeks into production, Cameron was talking Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio through a shot when he took a breath and got no air. Since he tended to get absorbed in his work, he told his assistant director to alert him when he’d gone an hour without a new fill. The filmmaker could go for roughly 75 minutes on a single tank of oxygen. He was also weighted with an extra 40 pounds of equipment so he could walk around the bottom of what was known as ‘A Tank’ with his camera. (The tank was so big it took the crew five days just to fill it with water from a nearby lake.) While doing underwater filming, all of the actors had safety divers (known on the set as ‘angels’) who would hover nearby, wearing long fins, able to swim over and provide air if anything went wrong. During the ‘Abyss’ shoot, Cameron spent much of his time filming underwater in a giant concrete bowl in South Carolina that held 7.5 million gallons of water. ![]()
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