There is a moment on every shoot I have learned to dread. It can happen at any time during a planned shoot. The weather has turned, or the current is too strong to hold a frame, or the animal we flew across the world for has decided it would rather be anywhere else but where we shoot. Everyone is tired. The hard drives are half empty. And the money is already gone.
Nobody talks about this when it comes to pitching ideas.
When someone asks what it costs to produce an underwater film, they usually think of a camera, an underwater housing, and a nice holiday somewhere warm. I understand why. From the outside it looks like we get paid to go diving, and some days it feels that way. But the number I have to say out loud when a client asks for a budget has almost nothing to do with the camera and everything to do with the things you cannot see from the surface.
So, for once, let me tell you about what you can’t see from the surface and what the numbers really mean.
The camera is the cheap part
People fixate on the gear. It is the visible thing, so it feels like the expensive thing.
And don’t get me wrong, it’s not cheap at all. A body like the Sony FX3 sits around 4,000 to 4,500 euros. Put it in a Marelux housing, and you add roughly 2,500 to 3,500 more before you have bought a single port. Then you need a dome, a flat port for macro, a Weefine monitor so you can actually judge focus at depth, a pair of Weefine lights, arms, floats, spare batteries, and the frame to bolt it all together. A rig we would trust on a paid job lands somewhere between 10,000 and 18,000 euros once it is complete.
Then you build a second one. Because if the first one floods on day one, the shoot does not stop. The client still expects a film.
So yes, the gear is a big investment. But if the camera rig were all there was to it, then every dive center with a decent setup would be a film company. They are not. The camera is maybe fifteen percent of what a proper production costs. The rest is everything that happens around it.
The rig is only half the metal we carry
Before any of us picks up a camera, we are divers, and dive gear comes with its own cost.
Regulators, rebreathers, computers, wings, drysuits or wetsuits for the water we are in. All of it per person, all of it serviced every year whether we dive a hundred days or ten. Servicing is not optional. It is the difference between gear you trust and gear that fails.
The gear that keeps us alive costs about as much as the gear that gets the shot. Nobody counts this when they picture the price. We count it on every job.
The footage has to live somewhere
We shoot RAW, and RAW is brutal on storage. A single dive can fill a card that costs several hundred euros.
We copy every card twice to different drives before we go to sleep because you can never trust one single copy of footage that you crossed an ocean to get. Then it comes home and it never leaves, because a client might come back in three years, and losing a master is not a mistake you get to make twice.
So we are not buying storage once. We buy it again on every film, and the pile keeps on growing endlessly. Drives, SSDs, backups of the backups. It is one of the least visible costs in this business that is climbing fast.
What you pay for before anyone gets wet
A film exists on paper long before it exists in the water.
The pre-production phase is crucial for every successful film. We come up with an idea, then work out the story, the shot list, the location, the season, the tides, the permits, the flights, the freight, and the fallback plan for when the ocean doesn’t play along. Usually, this takes weeks. Weeks of work are not free, even when they happen at a desk with a coffee going cold.
Then we need to get to the location. Underwater films happen in places that are expensive to reach, because that is where the water, the reefs, and the animals are. Komodo, Malapascua, the Maldives, the Coral Triangle. Even for a small crew, the flight costs add up, and excess baggage for camera gear and housings usually costs us several hundred additional euros. Overweight cases full of glass and metal that we cannot leave behind.
You can never 100% predict what the permits will cost. Some places wave you through. Others charge marine park fees, filming permits, and local fixer costs that can climb into the thousands. You do not always know what to expect until you are on location.
None of this shows up on screen. All of it shows up on the invoice.
The safety diver gets paid whether or not you get the shot
Another cost that surprises people every time.
On a real production, at least one person in the water is not filming anything. They are watching. The safety diver tracks air, depth, current, and the freediver who is holding their breath for a shot that might take twelve takes. That person is essential, and they get paid for the full day whether we come up with THE shot or not.
You are paying for time and risk, not for footage. The boat costs the same on a bad day as on a perfect one. Charters runs anywhere from 300 to 800 euros a day (depending on the location), more for something bigger or further out. A liveaboard is often 200 to 400 euros per person per day, usually with a week minimum, because that is how you reach the sites that you wouldn’t reach otherwise.
Then there are the people. A good underwater cinematographer might be 400 to 1000 euros a day. Add a safety diver, a producer, a topside operator, and a talent, and a single shoot day can cost more than the camera people mostly worry about.
The housing that floods, and other reasons we carry backups
Water gets into things.
Most underwater filmmakers I know have had a flooded housing incident. A forgotten o-ring, a grain of sand, a hairline crack you cannot see, and a 4,000 euro body is history. If it happens on day one of a ten-day trip, the backup rig is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.
That’s the reason why insurance is also important. Gear insurance, production insurance, and dive and medical cover for the crew. It’s invisible until the day something happens. We pay for it on every job, without regrets.
Redundancy is expensive because the ocean does not care about your schedule. You bring two of the things that can fail, and you price it in, or you gamble on the whole film. We do not gamble with a client’s film.
The ocean tax
This is the cost I find hardest to explain to someone who has never worked in the water.
You cannot direct the ocean or its inhabitants. You can plan for the right season, the right site, and the right tide and still lose three days to a swell that came out of nowhere. The sharks do not clock in. Visibility can drop from twenty meters to two between one dive and the next.
We have stood on a boat at the end of a day with nothing usable on the cards and every euro of that day already spent. It’s not fun, but it’s part of working in and with nature.
The consequence of this for the budget is that it needs to carry contingency. On a good trip we might come home with ten to fifteen usable minutes from ten days of diving. Sometimes less. We don’t consider this a failure. It’s the reality of filming wild animals in an environment that answers to no one. Anyone who promises you a fixed shot list underwater is either inexperienced or lying.
The part you never see
After the shoot, the footage comes home, and post-production begins.
Editing a short cinematic film is not an afternoon. It is days, often weeks, of building a story from fragments, cutting, re-cutting, and cutting again. Then color grading. Then sound design, because raw underwater audio is mostly your own regulator.
Music is another quiet expense. Properly licensed music, the kind that will not get your film muted or pulled from a festival, costs real money, and a library subscription still is not free. People forget this until they get a take-down notice.
Then we’re adding titles, versioning for different platforms, festival masters, and the two or three rounds of revisions every client wants and deserves. Post is where a big part of the craft lives.
So what does one film actually cost
Here is the honest range, and then the arithmetic on one film.
A quick branded reel, shot locally, with a small crew, can land in the low thousands. A short cinematic underwater film done properly, with travel, a real crew, safety, and a full post-production pipeline, usually runs from 15,000 to 40,000 euros. A festival-grade film with an ambitious concept, remote location, and a longer shoot can climb well past that. None of those numbers are padded. They are what the work costs when it is done to a standard that you would want your name on.
To make it concrete, here is roughly how the budget on one of our short films can be broken down.
This is one example, not a price list. What a film costs moves around a lot depending on where we shoot, how remote it is, how many people are in the water, what the story needs, and what the permits come to. The numbers below are here to show you what goes into a production, not to quote you. Yours could land under this or well over it.
| Line item | Cost (EUR) |
|---|---|
| Pre-production and planning | 2,500 |
| Flights and freight (crew of 3) | 4,500 |
| Boat or liveaboard (10 days) | 6,000 |
| Permits and marine park fees | 1,200 |
| Crew day rates (cinematographer, safety, producer, talent) | 9,000 |
| Gear depreciation, backups, rental | 3,000 |
| Insurance (production, gear, dive/medical) | 1,800 |
| Contingency (weather, lost days) | 2,500 |
| Editing | 3,500 |
| Colour and sound design | 2,500 |
| Music licensing | 800 |
| Titles, versions, festival masters | 700 |
| Total | 38,000 |
Notice how little of that is the camera. Notice how much of it is people, time, and the cost of showing up somewhere wild.
Why I am telling you this
Most companies keep these numbers behind a “contact us for a quote” button. I understand that because saying these numbers out loud may cost you the clients that want it cheap.
If you want the cheapest option, you will find it. Someone will always quote you less. But cheap underwater film usually costs more in the end. The footage comes back unusable, or a housing floods that nobody insured, or a dive goes wrong because someone saved money on safety. You still pay. You just pay later.
But if you have read this far, you probably are not looking for cheap. You are trying to understand what you are buying, which is exactly the client we want to work with. You are paying for the days we lose to weather and shoot anyway. For the second rig, just in case. For the safety of our people. For the weeks of pre and post-production that turn some underwater shots into an amazing story.
That is what it costs to produce an underwater film. Now you know as much as we do.
If you want to talk about a project, tell us what you are trying to make, and we will tell you the honest number. Reach out to info@uwlunatic.art, or come see the work at uwlunatic.art first.
Underwater Lunatics is an independent film production company focused on cinematic ocean films.
