The darkest depths of the ocean have been lit up properly for the first time by a film crew to unveil fascinating formations and creatures which have never been clearly seen before.

The team of 51 crew and scientists which has been filming up to three miles below the ocean surface stopped off in Bermuda at the end of last week after almost a month at sea.

Using light three times as strong as that previously used, and super high-definition film, the team making Voyage Into the Abyss, say the ocean floor, which is permanently shrouded in darkness, will be seen by audiences as never before.

The 40-minute film, which was shot from a submarine, will be shown on giant IMAX and other large screen films when it is released next year.

Chief Scientist on the shoot, Dr. Richard Lutz of Rutgers University, admitted he still doesn't know what some of the formations the team have filmed are, even after seeing them clearly for the first time.

Their research ship Atlantis arrived in St. George's for a two-day stopover on Thursday following nearly four weeks of filming along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge after setting off from the Azores.

Alex Low, one of the producers, told The Royal Gazette: "The shooting has gone extraordinarily well. This will be the first time the deep ocean has been imaged in a way that an audience can appreciate.

"Some of this has been seen before on video, but this will be the first time it has been really well lit and really well imaged in high resolution.''

Dr. Lutz, director of the Center for Deep Sea Ecology at Rutgers University, said: "The really exciting thing we have done is that for those of us who have made countless dives, we are seeing things we've never seen before in this environment because it is a world of total darkness that we have lit like never before.

"We are seeing three times what we've seen before and we're seeing it with more clarity. The excitement for us from a scientific standpoint is we've seen things we've never seen before and experiences a world we've never been able to experience before.

"And we have seen things that are still beyond explanation. We saw a Chinese chequerboard formation that we've known about, but we've never seen it so clear. We're trying to do experiments to find out what it was and we still don't know what it is.

"Morphologically, it is like a trace fossil 350 million years old, which is a tremendous amount of time to have a consistent morphology. It is a fundamental symbol of what we don't know about the deep ocean and it is telling future generations that that the most exciting discoveries about this planet and the universe have yet to be made.

"Part of the excitement we are trying to instil in this film is not just about the known, but also about the unknown. We're working to create a truly compelling visual experience of a part of the planet that exists in perpetual darkness.

"The clarity and fidelity of the giant screen is the perfect way to do this. Even deep-sea scientists have never seen the deep as clearly as as the team is now able to capture and present it on film. It is remarkable.''

Filmed using giant screen IMAX technology, the team captured images of submarine volcanoes, shipwreck gardens, biolumnescent creatures and giant ocean predators.