To All Seagulls,
Who gave us wings and dream,
And tought to fly

The idea of the #Seagull appeared in 2011, when our team was training for the shooting of the Princess of Whales Project. Dress-rehearsal took place on the Lazurny quarry near the town of Nizhny Tagil, Urals, Russia. We were immediately charmed by this place – unusually clear water, blue ice over your head, looking like the sky. Green giant pines that disappeared under the water during the quarry flooding – a submarine forest, in which there were even clearings! It was a real lost world.

The following year, the dive center DivExpert flooded plane AN-2 on one of the terraces of the quarry, and we quite clearly realized what we needed to take. We decided that we will hung the aircraft on lift bags under the ice, and will pull it on a long rope with the help of a off-roader, and then the aircraft will be flying over the forest and Natalie Avseenko will swim around. This was to be the adaptation of the ideas of Richard Bach and Saint-Exupery. On the role of the pilot, we unanimously chose Natalie’s husband, the famous traveler Alex Korovin. Then the working title of the project was born – the #Seagull.

But our plan was destined to fail. We were not able to come to Lazurny in that year or the next. In the summer of 2015 Alex died. He did not come back from his journey. And yet just a month Natalie’s mum died from cancer.

In winter 2016, Viktor and I came to Natalie for a visit just to chat. We did not expect something – Natalie was very depressed, she was not able to work.

But when the conversation came the idea of the project on the Lazurny quarry, her eyes suddenly lit up. “Let’s do it, – she said. – I will do this project in memory of Alex.”

In February, we announced a fundraising company at Russian site Boomstarter. “The #Seagull is a project where a person will fly like a bird under the ice” – the brief description read. – “The Seagull is a way by which we will try to tell about the most important and highest in human life, that gives it meaning.”

We have collected the amount necessary for the trip of our group just in four days. The fact that we have received such support from others – not only our fans, but also strangers, meant that the project is needed. It was very inspiring, but also imposed a great responsibility.

We promised to those who supported us, that the results of our work on the project we will publish in the network so that everyone could see it. We have fulfilled our promise: we organized an exhibition in Moscow (Thanks Elena Marshall!), where photos from the project were presented.

As we promised, photos of the project are publicly available in the gallery on our website here.
The trip also feature movie and documentary film, which can be viewed by clicking on links or directly on our YouTube channel.