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TU/e alumnus wins underwater film competition

The underwater film competition organized by the Dutch Underwater Sports Association is the event of the year for many underwater fanatics in the Netherlands and abroad. Not only did TU/e alumnus Johannes Heldens win the competition with his film ‘The Meteorite’, he was also reminded of the benefits of studying Mechanical Engineering.

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photo Johannes Heldens

Besides a film maker, Heldens is also a passionate diver. “I dive with compressed air. Diving is like walking for me. It relaxes me to the point that I sometimes forget that I’m underwater. In the past it happened that I wanted to start breathing underwater while I wasn’t even wearing my breathing device. It’s my second nature.” Although the Underwater Sports Association covers many sports, from freediving to traditional diving and underwater hockey, shooting underwater photos and videos is generally reserved to divers with compressed air. “For underwater footage, in particular film, you need to be submerged for a longer period of time. That’s pretty much impossible for freedivers,” says Heldens.

On a mission into the future

The underwater photo and film competition has been around quite a while, but at first it was just photos. For a long time, cameras were better at those than at videos, but these days the equipment is much improved. If you watch Heldens’ film, it’s not entirely clear from the outset what he’s trying to convey. “I always leave some room for the viewer’s interpretation. I don’t want to explain everything.” But we wouldn’t be Cursor if we hadn’t asked him about his winning story, which is completely set in the future: “I had a shot in mind of four divers walking towards the water. It felt like a shot leading into a mission, an underwater mission. It’s about everything in nature, including underwater life, moving towards extinction. Then, all of a sudden, a meteorite falls into the water that brings back all of the life. The divers are there to investigate this.”

Johannes Heldens. Photo | Private archive

Heldens clearly saw the added value of his studies while making the film. “I wrote the score for the film myself. At Mechanical Engineering I learned a lot about signal analysis and about how devices are controlled by electronic signals. There’s a lot of overlap with audio signals.” Heldens wrote the music on his PC using virtual synthesizers. “How those process signals is more or less an exact match with signal analysis in Mechanical Engineering. It’s fun to really understand how a certain dial makes a certain sound. Some produces start without that knowledge, turning dials and listening to the result. But I know what’s behind those dials, what’s happening and why.”

Heldens is thinking about staying in this line of work. “I realized I particularly like music, but I’ve always had a hard time making choices. Also back when I was picking a study program: should I do something technical or something involving music? Already back then I liked both, but I chose Mechanical Engineering as I expected it’d be easier to find a job in that field. But maybe I can just do both…” This is not the first time he combined the two. In 2009 he was featured in Cursor’s Home Stretch because he had designed a light and sound show with robots.

Due to technical maintenance of the Cursor website, we are temporarily unable to embed third-party videos. Heldens’ film can be watched on YouTube.

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