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Caldwell: Diving for dollars

Bert Caldwell
Staff writer
August 30, 2007

Guy Zajonc talks about the first minutes of a dive in the film Dive! Manned Submersibles and the New Explorers. Video: Watch excerpts from Dive Video reports Watch video: Deep Seekers

Guy Zajonc, founder and chief executive of DeepSea Ventures, is trolling for investors.

The bait is "Dive! Manned Submersibles and the New Explorers," a 22-minute 3-D film shot last year off the Washington coast. Zajonc expects the 3-D format to capture the fancy of museums, science centers and other venues that are always searching for unique attractions.

Mitsubishi and Samsung already make 3-D-ready televisions, he notes, suggesting a home market is not all that far in the future.

The Chinese are discussing a 3-D television channel.

Zajonc hopes Dive will be the portal into that market. The production combines a computer-animated tutorial on the capabilities of submersibles with footage from DeepSea's expedition to two wrecks 1,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean about 50 miles off Cape Flattery.

The hulks turned out to be fishing trawlers, small fish as shipwrecks go but enough for Zajonc's purposes. A veteran of dives to the Titanic and German battleship Bismarck, he says DeepSea is after media content, not treasure.

After working on several deep sea expeditions for other companies, Zajonc last year founded DeepSea with sons Taylor and Austen as historian and photographer, respectively. The other partner is former pilot Janet Gaddy, the project coordinator.

For Dive, the company worked with Nuytco Research Ltd. of Vancouver, B.C., which provided two submersibles, the Deepworker 2000 and Aquarius.

The 3-D photography and production was handled by Lightspeed Design of Bellevue.

So much for the credits. The business proposition looks something like this:

A film like Dive takes about $250,000 to produce. DeepSea owns 50 percent of the final product.

If the company can sell the rights to show Dive to six to eight venues per year over the next three years, the video will return about $600,000.

Dive is already showing in the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa, Fla., which Zajonc says is considered an industry trendsetter. Other museums in Minnesota, Texas, Iowa and Ontario, Canada, want a look.

DeepSea has also signed a distribution agreement with K2 Communications of El Segundo, Calif., which will show the film at the October Association of Science-Technology Centers convention where Dive will be available.

A single film, however, is just a start.

When museum officials are approached about Dive, Zajonc says, "One of the first questions they ask is 'What's next?'"

That's where the new investors come in.

Zajonc proposes to return to the offshore targets to do a follow-up video explaining in depth how explorers locate shipwrecks using historical evidence - Taylor's job - and technology like the side-scanning sonar. A third production might focus on wrecks with particularly interesting stories to tell.

He envisions other projects as well, not all diving-related. Anatomy exhibits, for example, are extremely popular now. A film that shows how the displays are prepared would be a good companion attraction.

"We always have the burden of producing something people really enjoy seeing," Zajonc says.

DeepSea investors would not be passive. For their money, they become "Citizen Explorers" with the opportunity to dive themselves, a lure that has already snagged a 79-year-old woman Zajonc met on a Titanic expedition. She wants to dive again.

DeepSea needs three more just like her with $15,000 to invest. They would recoup their money if the company sells film from the dive.

Zajonc sells the company as an investment, and an adventure. His candid pitch:

"The odds of coming back alive? Excellent. The odds of getting your money back? Fair."

Business columnist Bert Caldwell can be reached at (509) 459-5450, or at bertc@spokesman.com.

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