MURFREESBORO — He's focused his lens on the
boulevards of Nashville and the streets of Florence, Italy, so the logical next
step for newly minted MTSU grad Phillip Dixon of Goodlettsville, Tennessee, was
underwater.
Dixon, who just
received his bachelor's degree in electronic media communication from MTSU in
May, is currently aboard the Exploration Vehicle Nautilus, a 64-meter research
vessel operated by the Ocean Exploration Trust, as a video intern on the 2014
expedition season in the Gulf of Mexico.
The ship is equipped
with remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, that can explore the sea floor and send
back live video via satellite feeds for remote science education. There's also
a live studio on board the Nautilus to allow interactive interviews, and Dixon
was the subject of one Tuesday afternoon as the ship approached Gulfport,
Mississippi.
"As soon as I
found out about it, I didn't waste any time applying for it," Dixon said
of the internship opportunity, where he joins longtime EMC professor Mary
Nichols, a veteran member of the Nautilus' video engineering crew.
"I've never
been on a ship before, and I'm prone to motion sickness," he explained.
"The first day was pretty bad, but since then I've been fine. I enjoy
being out here."
While he's aboard
until July 5, Dixon's tasks include installing, wiring and routing cameras and
monitors all throughout the ship and operating the remote cameras on the ROVs.
Interns aboard
Nautilus clearly "do much more than make tea and coffee and scrub the
floor. They're right up top in all the action," said Nia Hâf Jones, the
science communication fellow on the Nautilus and the marine awareness officer
at North Wales Wildlife Trust, headquartered in Bangor, Gwynedd.
"I could leave
this ship right now and have a bigger knowledge base than I ever had,"
added Dixon, whose knowledge base already is quite extensive. He recently
completed an internship at NewsChannel5 Network and worked with MTSU's EMC
Productions, where he most recently served as director for music event
coverage.
Dixon also directed
"Streets of Florence," a short documentary shot for an EMC study-abroad
class that took the "Best Artistic Direction" prize at the 2013
ArtLightenment Film Festival and was screened at the 2014 Nashville Film
Festival. He's prepping it now for more festival entries as well as for
possible public television broadcast.
"One of my
classes at MTSU was video engineering — most schools don't even offer that —
and the teacher had a list of stuff that he said he needed to learn on his
first job, and he used that to teach us," Dixon said.
"Being on the
Nautilus is great because you learn everything from top to bottom, from putting
the camera in to operating it, so it's a great importunity for anyone who wants
to do video engineering."
Professor Nichols
echoed Dixon's comments during an unexpected live appearance Tuesday evening,
when Jones and another crew member, research assistant Mackellar Violich,
convinced her to step from behind the camera and chat for a moment.
"I have a skill
that's useful out here, and there's so much technology on this boat. I'm not
the engineer who put it in, but I'm the grunt who … knows where all the bones
are buried," she joked of her duties on Nautilus. "It's helpful that
they don't have to break somebody new in every time.
"Imagine all of
this technology on a bouncing, bouncing, bouncing rowboat! There are thousands
of cables back there, and they jiggle loose, and we have to go back there and
figure out which one it is. We get it all figured out eventually."
Nichols, a respected
documentarian and video engineer, is retiring at the end of this academic year
after 23 years with MTSU. She's taught video production, media law and
multi-cam truck production at the university and is in her 16th year of working
with Nautilus expedition leader Dr. Robert Ballard, renowned for discovering
the wreck of the Titanic as well as the German ship Bismarck.
One of the ship's
stops was of special interest to Dixon. This Nautilus Gulf of Mexico trip
included dives on the wreck of the German U-boat U-2513 in the deep waters off
southwest Florida known as the Dry Tortugas.
"My favorite
experience so far was the U-boat yesterday (June 16), which also was the
hardest day," he said. "During the dive, the iris control on the
video controls how bright it looks, and we wanted a certain level to get a good
consistent picture. We had clouds going in and out, and I was having to
constantly bring the light up or bring it down to show want we wanted!
"Shipwrecks and
submarines underwater are really cool to me, though, so I was happy it was on
my watch, even though it was a tough job. The thing for me is capturing great
images, things that haven't been seen before or might not be seen again."
You can watch the
video from the discovery of the U-2513 at http://youtu.be/h6UVMzJNJRI.
You can learn more
about the E/V Nautilus and its adventures, including live and archived videos,
anytime at http://www.nautiluslive.org.
You can learn more about MTSU's Department of Electronic Media Communication at
http://www.mtsu.edu/emc.
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