The Skeena
A pair of Vancouver Island divers played key creative roles in a new National Geographic series that features the giant Pacific octopus found right here on the West Coast. Comox Valley cinematographer and diver Maxwel Hohn, alongside Campbell River octopus expert and diver Krystal Janicki, worked on The Secrets of the Octopus, narrated by Paul Rudd and executive produced by James Cameron, which premiered April 21 on Disney+. We spoke with Hohn about his experience working on the series with these remarkably bright and curious creatures.
“They’re incredibly intelligent, and they’re so much different than people, yet they still have a very similar sense of curiosity.”
Maxwel Hohn
Cinematography was always a passion for Hohn, growing up as a teenager on the Island. After high school, he took off travelling for a few months, which quickly turned into ten years abroad. “I had worked all over the place as a scuba diving instructor from country to country, and everywhere I went, I had a camera in my hands,” Hohn told us. “I just slowly progressed, getting better and better as an underwater filmmaker, and eventually I started to get noticed by larger productions like the BBC.”
Hohn was contacted by producers, Australian-based SeaLight Pictures, for this series after his stand-out work on the Island of the Sea Wolves, which he described as his “absolute dream project.” The Netflix documentary series about sea wolves on Vancouver Island went on to win four Daytime Emmy Awards last year, including one for Hohn’s cinematography.
He then signed on to The Secrets of the Octopus to work on an episode focusing on the giant Pacific octopus, the world’s biggest octopus, found in the temperate waters of the Pacific coast. But Hohn knew the episode wasn’t complete without the help of the local ‘octopus whisperer’ – Krystal Janicki.
Janicki, a local painter and diver, appears on-screen and also narrates part of the episode with Paul Rudd. “She’s great on camera and then she’s also got this incredible connection with the marine life that exists here, especially with octopuses. She’s known as the octopus whisperer in this area,” Hohn said.
The 30-day filming process required “a lot of time and patience” to find the right ‘hero’ character, he explained. “Every octopus has its own personality. Some are quite shy, and this one just happened to be very curious and just adopted us into its environment. It would actually come out of its den each time we got in the water to greet us, and would crawl on top of our cameras and on top of our backs while we’re diving,” he said. “It was pretty cool.”
“I’m hoping that from a series like this, people just learn what we’re coexisting with and, hopefully, in turn, they protect these environments more and become more curious about what kind of wildlife surrounds us here in British Columbia.”
Maxwel Hohn
What stood out to him, he told us, was “just how gentle and curious these creatures can be. They’re incredibly intelligent, and they’re so much different than people, yet they still have a very similar sense of curiosity,” he stated.
“I’m hoping that from a series like this, people just learn what we’re coexisting with, and hopefully, in turn, they protect these environments more and become more curious about what kind of wildlife surrounds us here in British Columbia,” Hohn said.
The Vancouver Island film team was assisted by local divers: Tynan Callesen (Safety Diver), Shannon Groenewegen (Safety Diver), Manfred Lippe (Dive Supervisor), Russell Clark (Dive Supervisor), and Roger McDonell (Skipper), plus additional support from the Campbell River dive store, OceanFix.
National Geographic’s Secrets of the Octopus is streaming now on Disney+. Keep an eye out in 2025 for Hohn’s next project, a CBC series called Shared Planet, focusing on stories of people and wildlife coexisting together all over the world.
