Apnea Media Base

The Freediver is a beautifully shot story of tragic love, the world of extreme sports and power of the human spirit. Greece, A talented young woman is plucked from obscurity and brought to a idyllic island where she is trained by a mad scientist to become the undisputed Freediving champion of the world. She forsakes the nurturing love of her man to pursue a dream.

During the filming in Greece, Hannah Stacey (Stunt Double for Camilla Rutherford) set two new British freediving records.

Sébastien Nagel, real-life chairman of the world freediving agency AIDA, is a key character in the movie, however portrayed quite unflatteringly. Watching an early sneak review of the film left him quite angry about the depiction of himself, and reportedly the agency has initiated an official lawsuit (August 2004). He later retracted all his objections and apologized.

The film was aired for the first time at a sneak preview for the world freediving elite at the team world championship in Vancouver in August of 2004. It immediately caused major controversy in freediving circuits, because of storyline critique of the real AIDA agency depicted in the film. Apparently, the freedivers themselves found the film's depiction to be unrealistic. It was reported that during many of the films dramatic highlights, parts of the audience were giggling.

http://www.thefreediver.org/
http://www.divernet.com/profs/0904free.shtml

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Description from 24fpsProductions.com:

Project Description

A one-hour documentary, shot on high definition video, about the extreme sport of free diving, produced in collaboration with Air Sea Land Productions, for the new Rush HD channel.

Program Synopsis

Free diving was once a means of gathering food. It's now an extreme sport in which the human body is pushed to record depths, and sometimes to the point of blackout, while diving on a single breath of air. We followed Annabel Briseno, a 52-year old grandmother, on her weeklong quest to break world records in four free diving disciplines. The story is both jubilant and harrowing. As the week unfolds it becomes clear that a world record in free diving is a precarious agreement of mind, body and sea that sometimes collapses violently. The serene beauty of high definition underwater footage is juxtaposed with the dangers of a sport in which the body must utilize survival reflexes to succeed. In the end, Annabel's story is one of camaraderie and trust, not only with fellow divers, but with the sea.

"This film provides the best window into the freedivers underwater world ever done. From the safety aspects and physiology to triumphs and tragedy, this dramatic film depicts in a very real manner why we freedivers are passionate about our sport."

- Matt & Annabel Briseno

Location

The documentary was shot in Kona, Hawaii with supporting footage shot in Miami, Florida.

Description from www.imdb.com:

Free diving was once a means of gathering food. It's now an extreme sport in which the human body is pushed to record depths, and sometimes to the point of blackout, while diving on a single breath of air. We followed Annabel Briseno, a 52-year old grandmother, on her week long quest to break world records in four free diving disciplines. The story is both jubilant and harrowing. As the week unfolds it becomes clear that a world record in free diving is a precarious agreement of mind, body and sea that sometimes collapses violently. The serene beauty of high definition underwater footage is juxtaposed with the dangers of a sport in which the body must utilize survival reflexes to succeed. In the end, Annabel's story is one of camaraderie and trust, not only with fellow divers, but with the sea.

Written by William Kearney

This article reviews the basic properties of breath-holding in humans and the possible causes of the breath at breakpoint. The simplest objective measure of breath-holding is its duration, but even this is highly variable. Breath-holding is a voluntary act, but normal subjects appear unable to breath-hold to unconsciousness. A powerful involuntary mechanism normally overrides voluntary breath-holding and causes the breath that defines the breakpoint. The occurrence of the breakpoint breath does not appear to be caused solely by a mechanism involving lung or chest shrinkage, partial pressures of blood gases or the carotid arterial chemoreceptors. This is despite the well-known properties of breath-hold duration being prolonged by large lung inflations, hyperoxia and hypocapnia and being shortened by the converse manoeuvres and by increased metabolic rate. Breath-holding has, however, two much less well-known but important properties. First, the central respiratory rhythm appears to continue throughout breath-holding. Humans cannot therefore stop their central respiratory rhythm voluntarily. Instead, they merely suppress expression of their central respiratory rhythm and voluntarily 'hold' the chest at a chosen volume, possibly assisted by some tonic diaphragm activity. Second, breath-hold duration is prolonged by bilateral paralysis of the phrenic or vagus nerves. Possibly the contribution to the breakpoint from stimulation of diaphragm muscle chemoreceptors is greater than has previously been considered. At present there is no simple explanation for the breakpoint that encompasses all these properties.

Explore the ocean floor from your living room! - The seafloor is real but you don't get wet!

Description from www.abc.net.au:

'The way we've approached free diving I think we've been doing it all wrong. We've inhaled when we should have exhaled which is what a lot of animals do.'

'It seems the way the animals do it is the right way.'

'And that requires a huge mental shift in the way we think about diving.'

Description from www.abc.net.au:

Swimming — so graceful, so relaxing, so hard to break a world record. If only someone would invent a device you could attach to your body that would make you look really weird but help you swim a lot faster. If only.

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A novel and improved swimmer propulsion device of the type having a resiliently positioned fin which is adapted to oscillate and thereby develop fluid flow.

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The diving response includes cardiovascular adjustments known to decrease oxygen uptake and thus prolong apnea duration. As this diving response is in part characterized by a pronounced decrease in heart rate (HR), it is thought to be vagally mediated. Methods: In five professional breath-hold divers (BHDs) and five less-trained controls (CTL), we investigated whether the diving response is in fact associated with an increase in the root mean square successive difference of the R-R intervals (RMSSD), a time-domain heart rate variability (HRV) index. HR behavior and arterial oxygen saturation (Sao2) were continuously recorded during one maximal apnea. Short-term changes in Sao2, HR, and RMSSD were calculated over the complete apnea duration. Results: BHDs presented bi-phasic HR kinetics, with two HR decreases (32 ± 17% and 20 ± 10% of initial HR). The second HR decrease, which was concomitant to the pronounced Sao2 decrease, was also simultaneous to a marked increase in RMSSD. CTL showed only one HR decrease (50 ± 10% of initial HR), which appeared before the concomitant Sao2 and RMSSD changes. When all subject data were combined, arterial desaturation was positively correlated with total apnea time (r = 0.87, P < 0.01). Conclusion: This study indicates that baroreflex stimulation and hypoxia may be involved in the bi-phasic HR response of BHDs and thus in their longer apnea duration.

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