DOCUMENTARY | SEVEN WORLDS , ONE PLANET
John would inch closer to the birds to get those probing shots.” He enthuses: “John is an exceptional cameraman, because he could just sit still in the cold for two hours without looking at or filming the birds. Only when he felt that they were comfortable would he do this.” Curious camera angles can also be observed in Asia, which is the second episode in Seven Worlds, One Planet , produced by Emma Napper. This episode includes Sumatran rhinos, of which there are fewer than 70 left. In ten years, they may no longer exist, so they’re kept in a secret location behind fences within the Way Kambas National Park. Napper reveals: “We wanted to tell the story of her [the rhino] singing and then reveal that she’s in captivity. The Asian jungles are so dense that if these rhinos want to find a mate, they have to sing. It’s like a song of a whale, an amazing, haunting sound. There had been just one recording made of them singing before. But when we got there and got out of the car, it was the first thing we heard – and it was loud.” Filming this confined animal wasn’t as easy as you’d expect. She’s heavily protected, so the crew weren’t just able to wander into the fenced area with her. Napper says: “We could film her from outside the fence, if she decided to come close, but we wanted to get lots of different shots of her walking through the forest to create the image that she was searching for a mate. To do that, we built a camera system that was a bit like the spider cams they use for broadcasting football matches. It was a cable dolly that could fly through the forest, We built a camera system that was a bit like the spider cams they use for football matches
but also go up and down. Most cable dollies are rigged quite high and that wouldn’t have worked, because she’s an exceedingly tiny animal.” She jokes: “I’m 5ft 2in and she’s shorter and a bit hairier than me, so a big cable dolly would have looked ridiculous.” Napper also worked on the Australia episode, which captured the continent’s most elusive and much-persecuted wild dog, the dingo. A mother dingo is seen hunting kangaroo on the wide-open grasslands to provide food for her pups. But Napper reveals that these chases can cover many miles and are often unsuccessful. “It’s really hard to film dingoes and filming them hunting has hardly ever been done before, because they’re such skittish animals. They’re so afraid of humans. It took us 18 months to just find somewhere where we might have been able to capture dingoes hunting. And then weeks and weeks and weeks in the field of trying to get these dingoes to accept us, to be near enough to film them, and it all came down to this one animal – which I always find quite strange, to be so reliant on one animal, because obviously that animal doesn’t care about our pursuit of success. Anyway, she chose to accept us close enough for us to film her and I almost feel grateful for that.”
She continues: “For the hunting, in order to keep up with that and be able to get any shots, we had to get a helicopter crew in. Dingoes are far too fast, and they move far too far for our team to be able to keep up with the hunts from the ground. But that was nice, because the scale of that landscape is a part of the dingo story – they have to be so fast and so strong to be able to cover that distance. Showing her, from the air, with all those wide shots, is what her life is all about. Somewhere, in all of that area, she’s got to catch up with kangaroos that can see her for miles and are faster than her.”
MORE THAN A POST FROM FILMS AT 59
Films at 59 provided camera kit and advised location teams, particularly for specialist requirements. It rigged the GSS systems, which were commended by producer Fredi Devas, because they enabled his team to capture albatrosses flying above waves as they were sailing the Drake Passage. “It’s the roughest sea in the world. We had water spraying over the sides of our yacht, which was buffeted about, but our camera operator was still able to get stabilised shots with the GSS.” For the post, Films at 59 provided Avid cutting rooms, Baselight grade and Flame finishing, which included noise reduction and picture enhancements. It also created and QC’d all of the 100+ masters in both HDR and SDR for UK TX and BBC studios distribution. George Panayiotou, business development manager, says: “With 170 shoots over three years, it was a challenging yet rewarding production to be involved with.”
IMAGES Producer Emma Napper on location in Asia
26 DEF I N I T ION | FEBRUARY 2020
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