The director of Cage Dive Gerald Rascionato first tried filming the movie on the Tweed Coast, but the camera was rocking too much in the water and you couldn’t see anything, he said. He did some research and found that 2010’s The Reef was filmed in Hervey Bay. That’s where the humpback whale footage early in the movie was filmed.
It was “a miracle”, he said. He was location scouting in Hervey Bay when the whales happened to swim by. “I had the camera with me.” He decided he’d film the whales “just in case”. He said: “Months later when I brought the actors no whales came at all”. So he cut in the location scout footage of the whales with the actors.
They did some ADR (additional dialogue recording) for the movie, the director said. Sound editing is important for films: one sound director at the Gold Coast Film Festival said that without sound editing a movie can sound like a third rate school play. For the sound, at first it was all camera audio on Cage Dive, but there was a lot of splashing and the director couldn’t hear the dialogue so they did ADR.
He said this involved getting the actors back into the mindset of being stuck in the ocean.
He liked the idea of having a full score for a movie (music), but didn’t mind not having it in Cage Dive. Mr Rascionato said Paranormal Activity had no music and still got scares, so that was the challenge, he said. He used sound design to enhance moments and tension: like a jump scare when the jet plane lands in Adelaide.
He didn’t want a lot of the story scripted. He started with a blueprint and there was a lot of improvisation. The story made its way in the editing room, he said. He said the structure was like a puzzle. They spent four months editing Cage Dive.
He used a handycam to film the scenes in LAX, so that way they got around filmmaking restrictions.
As far as favorite books went, Gerald Rascionato liked Ken Follett’s White Out, a thriller about the theft of a deadly virus from a lab in Scotland.
He liked Raw by Scott Monk, which is about a teenager sentenced to three months to The Farm for a break and enter charge.
He also liked We Don’t Need Roads: The Making of Back to the Future Trilogy by Caseen Gaines.
And he liked George Lucas, A Life, by Brian Jay Jones about the creator of Star Wars.

– copyright Simon Sandall.