Dan Beecham

I am an underwater cinematographer, operating from bases in Cape Town and the UK. I'm an owner/operator of a range of specialised underwater filming equipment including Gates and Nauticam underwater housings for RED digital cinema cameras, and specialised rigs such as pole-cams and tow-cams.

I offer a wide range of expertise to shoots, with experience as a drone operator, skills in motion control time-lapse work, as well as long lens work. I am equally comfortable and experienced working with large animals in dynamic situations such as bait balls or other feeding events, as with technical underwater shoots involving rebreathers, underwater time-lapse gear and macro scope systems, in order to cover intimate behavioural sequences from every angle.

For two years I worked full time on the BBC NHU series 'BLUE PLANET 2' under the camera bursary scheme. I spent over 500 days in the field for the series and was awarded a BAFTA award as a part of the core camera team. More recently my work has been for productions including;

‘Sentient’ / ‘Queens’ / ‘Epic Adventures with Bertie Gregory’ - Wildstar Films for Disney+

‘Earthsound’ - Offspring Films for AppleTV

‘Frozen Planet II’, ‘Edens’, ‘Mammals’, ‘Planet Earth III’ and ‘The Americas’ - BBC Studios

‘Great Migrations’ - Plimsoll Productions / Nat Geo

‘Au Plus Pres Des Requins’ - Bonne Pioche Productions

‘Great National Parks’ - WildSpace Productions

BBC 'BLUE PLANET 2'

From early 2015, I embarked on two intensive years of shooting, spending over 500 days in the field for the long-awaited follow up to the BBCs 2001 series, 'The Blue Planet'. My assignments took me from the frozen far north to film feeding whales, to some of the most remote and pristine atolls documenting life on coral reefs.

BBC Studios; ‘Seven Worlds, One Planet’

From 2017 to 2019, I went out on a number of shoots for the ‘North America’ and ‘Antarctica’ episodes of the BBC series ‘Seven Worlds, One Planet’. My work on this series took me to some interesting - and very varied - locations, filming creatures great and small, with each shoot presenting some very different challenges.

Plimsoll Productions / Nat Geo - Hostile Planet

For this production I worked in the fjords of northern Norway to document some extraordinary feeding behaviour for the ‘Oceans’ episode of this National Geographic series.

BBC 'SHARK'

For the 2015 BBC series 'SHARK', I worked both behind and in front of the camera. I worked on the 'tow-cam' sequence in Cape Town, a shoot involving spending many days at seas attempting to capture seals, dolphins and sharks in pursuit of a custom-made 'tow-cam' system as well as appearing on camera working underwater filming great white sharks.