BLUE FLASH MEDIA

Charles is a filmmaker, explorer, sailor, diver, and pilot with experience on both narrative feature films and documentaries. He was a producer on the documentaries THE BIG FIX and VANISHING SAIL and has worked as a Sail Master, Boat Captain, and Marine Department Crew on four Pirates of the Caribbean franchise movies. Most recently he was a Boat Captain on Tom Cruise’s upcoming action feature Top Gun: Maverick.

Charles was a Cinematographer, Producer, Sound Man, the Aerial Coordinator, Thermographer, and Director of Clandestine Operations for the Academy Award-winning documentary, The Cove. He filmed the majority of the verité footage in the movie and devised many of the film’s most impactful scenes. He conceived the idea to use thermal imaging and to use cameras hidden in fake rocks to film inside the actual “killing cove”. He secretly penetrated the killing cove 18 times to capture the movie’s shocking slaughter scene. He also filmed the award-winning underwater “Blood Cam” footage.

For the documentary Racing Extinction, he covertly filmed illegal wildlife wet markets, illegal shark fin trade, and Whale Shark smuggling operations in China and South Korea. The film featured his footage from his endangered species whale meat sting operation at the trendy Santa Monica sushi restaurant, The Hump. Charles also conceived the idea to use a modified FLIR C02 camera to capture that film’s startling footage that visualized Carbon Dioxide emissions for the first time. He also planned and orchestrated another successful endangered species whale meat sting in Seoul, South Korea in conjunction with Korea Federation for Environmental Movements and the Seoul Police.

Charles was a team member on several underwater treasure hunting expeditions in Bermuda, the Caribbean, and Venezuela, where he co-discovered the French Fleet of 1678 in Islas Las Aves. He has experience with Edgetech and Imagenex Side Scan Sonar and has used his skills to survey Chewamogon Bay, Lake Superior, mapping submerged old growth logs to be salvaged as rare and valuable timber used for high quality furniture and musical instruments owned by such luminaries as Johnny Cash and The Eagles. 

Charles has a long history of environmentalism starting with building a solar panel in 8th grade. He is an energy efficiency and ocean advocate and a dedicated dolphin and whale activist. He is currently an advisor at Ocean Voyages Institute which successfully recovered over 170 tons of ghost nets and ocean plastic on it’s 2020 Pacific Gyre Expedition using proprietary GPS trackers and a sailing cargo ship which is the largest open ocean cleanup in history. In a former life Charles was a musician and co-founded the major recording label and touring band “The Samples” and was co-founder of The Fox Theatre in Boulder, Colorado.