Freediver Ant Williams reveals how Apple is bringing more intimacy to filmmaking

Ant Williams is a world record holder in the treacherous extreme sport of freediving. But if you step inside his home at Torquay on Victoria’s surf coast, you wouldn’t know it.

Ant Williams swims under the ice in Iceland during his world record breaking dive - an experience that Apple as documented in a series created for Vision Pro.

Ant Williams is a world record holder in the treacherous extreme sport of freediving. But if you step inside his home at Torquay on Victoria’s surf coast, you wouldn’t know it.

“My wife and I really made a conscious decision to not make it all about us. We wanted to make it about the kids,” Williams says, referring to his 18-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter.

“There’s nothing in the house that says free diving at all. All my gear is out in the shed.”

And yet, Williams has found himself an unexpected star of Apple’s new immersive film series Adventure that has been created specifically for its Vision Pro spatial computer. 

The 15 minute documentary tracks him journeying to Iceland and plunge into the Arctic’s frigid waters as he attempts to shatter the world record for swimming the longest distance under ice in just one breath.

As his crew cuts holes in the ice with chainsaws and marks an 182m track, you feel like you are there. Then he dives into the black water, and you find yourself also holding your own breath.

Ant Williams prepares to enter the frigid Arctic waters in Iceland in an attempt to break a world record.

Apple’s immersive video has created a new film technique that captures content in sweeping 180-degree, 8K resolution recordings.

Not since the anamorphic lenses that gave rise to formats like Cinemascope, capturing epics like The Robe and Ben-Hur in extreme widescreen, has technology attempted to wow audiences in the same way.

“It allows people to do what film was always intended to do, which was to transform you to another world, into another life, and completely take you from an ordinary world to an extraordinary world,” Williams said of Apple’s new video format.

Freediver Ant Williams, whose world record journey was captured in Apple's immersive video in a series created to be viewed on Vision Pro.

But that heightened level of intimacy has its limits - and Williams’ Ice Dive documentary is the longest in Apple’s Adventure series, lasting 15 minutes. And in those 15 minutes, Williams is literally facing life or death.

The day before filming, he had a chat with the documentary’s director Charlotte Mikkelborg, underscoring how high the stakes are of what he is attempting to achieve.

Mikkelborg asked Williams how far he thought he could swim. “I’m going to go for it,” he replied.

“I’m going to swim the world record and it’s going to end one of two ways. It’s going to end with me coming up, big smile on my face, or it’s going to end with me blacking out at the bottom and someone is going to have to find me - and that’s not going to be pretty.

“I actually thought that’s how the film was probably going to get made and then we were going to have to do some way of storytelling around the failure. I told the director there was 97 per cent chance that’s how it could end.”

Then there is Johnny Sunnex - who is responsible for Williams’s safety during the dive - who looks straight on into the camera, recalling how when he was on another crew, a freediver died.

Free diver Ant Williams with his safety diver Johnny Sunnex after breaking the world record for swimming 182m under ice - the longest distance using a single breath.

“Charlotte married the two narratives - my story around wanting to break this record, and my safety diver Johnny’s story, which I’ve known for years but that moved me around what I was going to do actually myself. His story was more powerful. To weave those stories than create that sensitivity, that’s an interesting challenge in such a short window for a filmmaker.”

The film ends with Williams diving into the water. Sunnex is going from each of the safety holes that have been cut into the ice, looking for Williams and becoming more and more visibly worried. The audience only sees black water.

“The camera equipment was quite large. It wasn’t able to follow me at the speed that I was going to swim. So that meant there was a camera that filmed me starting, around the halfway mark and then then above the ice to capture the ending.”

And stop reading now, if you don’t want a spoiler.

Ant Williams emerges after breaking a world record for the longest swim under ice using a single breath.

There is triumph as he emerges from ice, Sunnex drops to his knees on the ice to embrace Williams, who is told that he has broken the record.

But it was only last month that Williams found himself able to watch the documentary on a Vision Pro with his family also able to view it.

“My wife cried. My daughter teared up. My son was playing it more cool but even he was even blown away. We were all just clearly moved by the experience.

“My daughter competes in taekwondo. I take her to all the competitions and stuff, and she does really well. She watches the film and the first thing she says - I can’t remember the exact words - but she says ‘you’re actually an athlete’.

“She’s like ‘it’s always been about me and my competition - that was so weird watching you do a sport’. It was phenomenal.”

And that’s what Williams said was the power of the immersive format.

Ant Williams breaks the world record for the longest dive under ice using a single breath. Photo Lead: Michael Allin.

“It did make me wonder if people would have a sense of a closer affinity for people who appear in the film, whose stories are told. You have had this very intimate experience … you’ve almost gone through it together because you were so more emotionally engaged - more so that you might otherwise allow yourself to be in traditional film formats.”

Williams will share more about his experiences at a free event at Apple’s Sydney store on March 15.