Professor and Students Film Documentary on University's Marine Field Station

The Retreatcaptures the perspectives of scientists as rising sea levels threaten a Rutgers research site

Marine scientists in Tuckerton, N.J., are witnessing firsthand how rising ocean waters one day will permanently shut down their research station.

The researchers share their thoughts on eventually losing this critical hub of marine and coastal research in Marine Field Station: The Retreat, a 10-minute documentarymade by a Rutgers University-New Brunswick professor and his production crew of film students and alumni.

Released in 2024, the documentary features three Rutgers scientists - ecologists Thomas "Motz" Grothuesand Lisa Auermullerand oceanographer Oscar Schofield- as well as the Rutgers University Marine Field Station, a facility of the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences within the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. The station, which serves as a working lab where graduate- and postdoctoral-level research is conducted year-round (the space is occupied by researchers about 69 hours a week on average), sits across from the Little Egg Inlet in the Mullica River-Great Bay estuary.

"We know with sea level rise, water isn't just going to come and go," Auermuller said in the documentary. "It's going to come and stay. And so, what we know as of today's high tides and where the water is, that it's going to be the permanent condition moving forward."

Thomas F. Lennon, director of the Documentary Film Labwithin the Rutgers Filmmaking Center at Mason Gross School of the Arts, produced and directed The Retreat. Lennon, who won an Oscarin 2007 in the documentary short subject category and has four Academy nominations, said he is always on the lookout for real-world projects for his students.

Lennon recalled reading a 2020 articlequoting Auermuller on how the station is exposed to rising waters and more extreme flooding events and how researchers at the facility needed to ask themselves whether they had to pull up their stakes and move inland.

"She said, basically, 'How can we be telling the general public to take this seriously if we're not? We have to lead by example,'" said Lennon, an associate professor at Mason Gross. "And I thought, 'Wow, that's a good story.' And I started recruiting and scheduling students to go there."

Shooting of the film, which began in 2021, required multiple trips to the marine station and negotiating other logistical hurdles, including organizing a seminar on drone cinematography and working with gimbal stabilizers to shoot footage from a car.

As we got close, you could smell the sea air and then you start to see more birds and wildlife. The students would sit up and you'd see their eyes widen. It's an incredible place - all of us felt it.

Thomas F. Lennon

Director of the Documentary Film Lab

"We went there a bunch of times, driving with different students," Lennon said. "As we got close, you could smell the sea air and then you start to see more birds and wildlife. The students would sit up, and you'd see their eyes widen. It's an incredible place - all of us felt it."

When it came to interviewing the scientists, Lennon said he and his film crew had to figure out "how to draw out the best from them, and how to help mediate and translate the language of science into the language of film."

He said, "Science, which is all about precision, and film, which is all about emotion and impression, and making all that work - that was the challenge, and I wanted the students to really feel that and be tested by that challenge."

"In addition to the technical aspects taught in the class, I hope, and believe they did, learn the value of approaching science content carefully," said Grothues, director of the marine field station. "Our language can be pretty dense and nuanced."

In addition to recruiting more than 20 students to help make the documentary, Lennon tapped recent Mason Gross graduates, including Kimberly Hansen, who served as the assistant editor. 

"I was on the moon and in euphoria because this is what I really wanted to start getting into," she said. "It was just a really cool experience to be out in the field and learn about all these things. I was like, 'Wow, I'm not watching a documentary, I'm making one.' That's insane."

Hansen, who graduated in 2022 with a bachelor of fine arts degree in digital filmmaking, took a documentary film class taught by Lennon during her senior year. As an associate producer and camera operator for The Retreat, Hansen shot film on site and slept in housing near the station.

Hansen, whose hometown is Carteret, N.J., works at Rutgers as a media assistant who helps make instructional videos for the academic media production unit of the Office for University Online Education Services.

"I'm still learning," the 25-year-old said. "I'm talking to professors and people who are experts in their field, and I feel like that's really important for me as somebody who's interested in documentary filmmaking."

Hansen's involvement with The Retreatled her to a freelance job as an assistant editor on the production of Give It A Shot, a feature documentaryby director Vaishali Sinha that follows scientists in India and the United States who are developing a male contraceptive.

"I definitely feel The Retreatreally helped me prepare for this bigger project later on," said Hansen, adding that the Rutgers film project "required a lot of work and understanding how documentaries work - and it prepared me to have an interview with this director and to talk about with her project."

Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub, a Rutgers-led consortium of 13 institutions whose mission is to conduct research to develop effective, evidence-based responses to coastal climate change risks, supported the film with funding from the National Science Foundation.

The documentary took several years to complete, said Lennon, adding that the primary purpose of the Documentary Film Lab "is pedagogical."

"We want students to be working on film projects, under pressure, as in a work environment," he said. "You can think of the Documentary Film Lab as something of a bridge between school and the world of work. But filmmaking is really time consuming, the film major is very intensive, and students are hard to book. So, we moved slowly, but I'm proud to say that the entire film was shot by students - the sound recording, too."

Lennon added, "Giving students opportunity - that's our job."job."

Grothues, who described the filmography of The Retreatas "gorgeous," said he hopes viewers "get a sense that science is an endeavor filled with mundane but important logistical challenges, such as locating and staging field work from outlying stations, and that these will reflect the challenges to come for commerce and commonwealth, but also that managing these should consider not reaction but response as considered mitigation, preparation and addressing of their root causes."