Seven Clean Seas came to TDR FILMS with a challenge most environmental organisations face: how do you make a cleanup system feel like more than a machine doing its job. The OTTER, their nearshore vessel removing plastic from Tanjung Benoa’s coastline, is genuinely impressive engineering. But footage of a machine pulling waste from water risks feeling clinical, informative but forgettable, the kind of corporate video that gets watched once and never shared.

The brief was to find the human story sitting underneath the technology. Not just what the OTTER does, but who it actually affects, the crew running it daily, the workers at the TPS3R facility turning collected waste into economic value, and the village community whose coastline depends on the entire system working. This is the same discipline behind our approach to documentary production more broadly, shooting across a working cleanup operation and an active waste facility came with real constraints most productions never face, tides, boat schedules, facility hours, and building enough trust for people to speak naturally on camera rather than performing for it.