Amfebious Productions, Inc.
Over and Underwater Digital Video Services

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Tiger Hunt - The Elusive Sumatran
The Daring Efforts to Save Indonesia's Last Tiger

This one-hour award-winning documentary was completed in the fall of 1998. It aired, and continues to air periodically, and internationally, on Discovery Network's Animal Planet. We were contracted by Wide Angle Productions, a subsidiary of Tremendous! Entertainment, as Director of Photography and Sound Recordist.

Deep in the jungles of Sumatra, Indonesia lurks a creature so elusive that it had never been filmed before in the wild. That was before Amfebious arrived. Over the course of 3 months, Gary and Dominique staked out areas for filming in league with a team of researchers from the Sumatran Tiger Project and Tremendous Entertainment. It took perseverance, patience, and tenacity to capture on film this evasive creature.

The Sumatran Tiger:
The endangered status of the Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae) has been well established. The Javan and Bali tigers were lost forever through ignorance and neglect only a few decades ago. According to the best sources available, there are only 400–500 Sumatran tigers remaining in the wild. Poaching is ongoing and uncontrolled, and forest disturbance is continuing to divide these populations into even smaller fragments. The smaller the population, the greater its vulnerabity to poaching and environmental catastrophe. The sumatran Tiger Project, headed by Dr. Ron Tilson of the Minnesota Zoo, is researching the tiger, its habitat and what can be done to ensure its survival.

Location: Most of the filming took place in Waycambas, a national park in the south eastern corner of Sumatra, Indonesia. This is the base camp of the sumatran tiger project. Investigations of tiger attacks took place in south western mountains of Sumatra.
Capturing the first ever footage.
We designed 6 remote camera units to place in the jungle. We used Sony VX1000 cameras and placed them in custom made waterproof housings. We then attached Trailmaster infra-red remote control units. These sensors projected an infra-red beam across jungle trails.
When a creature passes the sensors they brake the beam. The control unit, in turn, triggers the camera to turn on and begin recording.For nearly a year, we recorded a wide variety of jungle fauna. Everything from sunbears to civets but still no tigers. One camera was lost when an Elephant ripped it from its mount in a tree and smashed it. Two other cameras were lost to the heat and humidity. The wires were chewed often by small critters. Finally, just after a morning rain, a female tiger crossed a path in front of one of our cameras. Here is the first ever recorded video of a Sumatran Tiger in the wild.
Awards:
Tiger Hunt recently won the Gold Award at the Houston International Film Festival in the category of Science and Research.

Tiger Hunt continues to air on Animal Planet. Watch for it. Here is a sample of the show.
Tiger Hunt Show VIDEO
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