Aaron on the dive deck of the Turks & Caicos Explorer II

It was madness. But it was a grand madness.

Four weeks of shooting, countless hours of footage, dozens of new friends and so many twists and turns along the way that we could have shot right up to the point we stepped on the ground in our respective hometowns.

When we started talking about scripting during pre-production, I have a distinct memory of telling my Liquid Assets teammates that these shows would write themselves. I believed that. What I didn’t expect was how many layers those stories would have.

From dealing with the fallout of Hurricanes Hanna & Ike to exploring brand-new, unmoored dive sites…learning how to play blackjack in a casino and taking astute advice from an 83-year old dive sage…filming the captain catching a longliner in the illegal act and putting out a boat fire simultaneously…documenting a crew dealing with each others’ vices and simultaneously depending on their strengths…capturing on tape some of the rarest and highly elusive animals in the Caribbean…two words: Dengue Fever…breaking my standing rule of absolutely-positively-no-seafood by eating conch penis on camera…being allowed into the lives of some of the finest diving professionals I have ever met…it was endless.

The people of the Turks & Caicos Islands are like nowhere in the world. I was spiritually brought to my knees many times by their sense of generosity and community. They are a people supporting each other in the toughest of times, relying on themselves and not their government to rise from the devastation of natural causes. They are a proud nation, as they should be. They truly are beautiful by nature.

Now comes the most difficult rung in the ladder – deciding which stories and threads make it to broadcast. It’s a journey that will take me from Boston to Las Vegas to Detroit and back again.

Thanks to everyone who came on board – crew, guests, all of you. Every single person played a role in this.

Late one night during the 3rd week of shooting, I was down in our makeshift studio (the crew of the TCEXII was generous enough to loan us their crew lounge for a month) and I was going over the dailies with our DP Mark Santa-Maria. It was at that moment – looking over what we had in the can even before shooting had wrapped – that I realized what groundbreaking footage we were sitting on. Tired and taxed as I was, I got a shot of adrenalin when I stewed on the notion that what we were working on – and what we had already captured – has no predecessors. I have never been so proud to be a part of a project as I have been this one.

I could go on. But I won’t. You’ll just have to wait for the final product.

-Aaron Faulls