Picture Perfect Nature: Here’s How BBC’s Wildlife Documentaries are Made
Augustus Czar D. Hernaez │ STAFFER │12 STEM-B Our Lady of Piat
BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation)’s wildlife documentaries immerse their viewers into the wilderness with their breathtaking high definition footages of animals in the wild and its intimate aerial shots of landscapes and bodies of water.
What filming equipments does BBC’s team use?
BBC’s filmmakers use various specialized pieces of equipment to make their immersive wildlife documentaries, and these equipments have continued to improve and evolve over the years.
Among the earliest nature documentaries ever made was a BBC nature documentary series called “Zoo Quest” in 1954 which was filmed with a lightweight 16mm camera as insisted by presenter Sir David Attenborough, a choice for which he was sneered at by the BBC film department, which deemed his plan on how to film the series as “amateur”.
David Attenborough’s choice to film with a lightweight 16mm film camera, as opposed to the much larger 35mm film camera, which was the standard for BBC at the time, traded off camera resolution for mobility. This allowed him and cameraman Charles Lagus to more easily capture shots of places, people, and animals up close in the jungle, which would’ve been extremely difficult to accomplish with a stationary camera that’s bigger than its operator.
In 2002, BBC switched from film to digital HD cameras to capture footages for the Planet Earth series. This switch introduced them to the Cineflex Heligimbal, a stabilization tool for a helicopter-mounted camera. “The heligimbal delivered the smooth sweeping scenic shots that defined the epic look of that series. It also let them film individual animals from a kilometer up in the sky and zoom way in to follow them without the noise of the chopper scaring them off.” according to Vox.
The technology provides a high degree of stabilization for the camera with its sophisticated gyroscope design by recalibrating its rotation in real-time, essentially isolating the camera from the movements of the helicopter. This allows camera operators to control the camera’s view and zoom in without losing any stability. The Cineflex Heligimbal can only be used for digital cameras because it requires separating the camera’s lens from its data storage, which cannot be done with a film camera because its filmstrip cannot be separated away from its lens.
Cameraman Martin Dohrn uses the Frankencam, an elaborate rig that allows the wide-angle lenses to move in any direction, which is operated with remote controls. This contraption is used to film tiny insects in higher detail. “Any hand-operated camera would cause a shaky picture at such a scale — not to mention scaring the insects off.” According to the BBC.
How does BBC Film Wildlife Footages?
BBC’s wildlife filmmakers go through great, and at times, risky lengths and unconventional methods to film footage of wildlife.
They travel to remote areas all around the world to catch wildlife footage, they set up tents to stay in and film predators hunting prey, animals fighting for territory and food, birds diving into the sea to catch schools of fish among other things for long excruciating hours.
John Aitchison, a camera operator, set up a mini tent and stayed inside for 8 hours under the scorching hot weather in Bird Island in South Georgia to take footages showing the declining population of the grey-headed albatross for the nature documentary series “Seven Worlds, One Planet”
To film nocturnal animals, BBC has often turned to infrared cameras. It requires setting up infrared lamps which emit light with wavelengths that are invisible to humans and a wide range of animals. That infrared light bounces off the scene and into the lens to form a monochrome image, which is all invisible and undetected by the animals being filmed.
A BBC nature documentary series titled “Spy in the Wild” uses animatronic spy cameras to secretly record the behaviors of animals in the wild. Like in Rajasthan, where temple langurs have taken in a plushie monkey with a spy camera embedded in it as a member of their family. They all seem eager to recognize it as their own as seen when one of them tries to babysit it and all of them seemingly mourn its “death” after it fell from a tree.
How are their Sound Effects made?
Besides the cinematography that went into filming the wildlife footage and the state-of-the-art technology and equipment, an often overlooked element in these wildlife documentaries plays an integral part in keeping its viewers immersed: the sound effects.
Foley artist Richard Hinton has been making sound effects for various nature documentaries such as “Bears” from Disney, “Our Planet” from Netflix, and of course, BBC’s series “Planet Earth” and “Frozen Planet”.
Hinton uses a wide range of items, from scrap materials to everyday products, to produce the sound effects in the aforementioned series. Take the sounds of spider footsteps on leaves, for instance, can be convincingly mimicked with the faint ruffling of entangled magnetic audiotape.
Sounds recorded with the footage are often unusable; splashing and ruffling sounds made by the animals are usually hampered by sounds from the outdoor environment, or the animals in question are sometimes too small for their movements to make any sounds at all.
