Call of the Wild

From blue-chip specials to long-running series, programming about nature and animals remains popular with viewers and broadcasters.

The makers of wildlife documentaries always face challenges—mainly how to come up with new stories and new ways to tell old stories. Sometimes that means years of camping in the bush in faraway lands or sending cameras in the deepest parts of the oceans; sometimes it means looking right under their noses.

LIONS AND TIGERS AND BEARS, OH MY!
This year’s crop of new wildlife programs demonstrates that well. The subject matter varies from the always-popular big cats and mountain gorillas to humankind itself and the creatures that come out at night in our big cities.

Big, blue-chip projects, years in the making on seven-figure budgets, continue to be popular, as do lower-budget series built around compelling locales and characters.

And the producers promise even more in the not-too-distant future as they begin the difficult challenge of coming up with practical ways to shoot 3D footage in the wild.

So far, 3D is mostly in the planning stages, but wildlife documentarians are cranking out an impressive slate of conventional high-definition product. The difference between old and new in subject matter is perhaps demonstrated most clearly by the BBC’s two new blue-chip wildlife offerings, one on a subject that has been “done to death,” Natural History Unit head Andrew Jackson agrees, and one that has never been explored by the BBC.

Human Planet, an eight-hour mini-series four years in the making, is a study of Earth’s dominant species. “That’s the first time we’ve turned the camera on ourselves and looked at ourselves as an animal,” Jackson says. “There are a lot of people who live on the planet in a way that is very different from what we would normally know in our own lives as we sit in front of our TVs. It looks at how man, as an animal, has adapted to every habitat around the world, some of which are the most extreme.”

Exploring deep and remote locales are two projects from Japan’s NHK—Life Force, six hours on how extraordinary environments have shaped unusual evolutions, and Giant Squid, the first close examination of the elusive deep-sea creatures.

“Life Force reveals six incredible places where nature has allowed eccentric animals, eclectic lifestyles and unorthodox patterns of behavior to flourish through the miracle of natural selection and the magic of evolution,” says Gen Sasaki, the senior producer of NHK’s Science Program Division.

The series, a co-production with NHNZ, France 5 and Discovery, devotes separate hours to marsupials in southwest Australia, tropical fish in Africa’s great lakes, tiny grazers and giant toothless predators in Brazil, monkeys in Japan, lemurs in Madagascar and New Zealand’s flightless birds.

“Life Force is a new type of wildlife documentary that combines the approaches from both science and natural history to investigate how and why unique creatures evolved and survived in certain places,” Sasaki says. “The geographical and scientific approaches using computer graphics, quotes from scientists, latest DNA research, etc., give us a new take on evolution, which is something an ordinary blue-chip documentary could not show.”

Giant Squid, in production with Discovery’s Science Channel, is scheduled to air in 2012. “This multimillion-dollar co-production is aiming to film the elusive giant squid, in its natural habitat, for the very first time,” Sasaki says.

NHK produces both blue chips, primarily for its 90-minute Wildlife timeslot, and more family and youth-oriented series, like the half-hour Nature Wonderland.

CAPTURING THE AUDIENCE
Producers and distributors more closely associated with commercial broadcasters are trending more toward series wildlife and, although they don’t really admit it, they sometimes seem in search of the next Steve Irwin, Australia’s ebullient “Crocodile Hunter” who died while filming a documentary in 2006.

Gary McDonagh, the acquisitions manager at ITV Studios Global Entertainment, has 50 hours of new material anchored by a new series, Chris Humfrey’s Wild Life.

“He’s a real animal maverick kind of guy,” McDonagh says, “a zoologist living in the outback of Australia. He’s a great character. He has a breeding program for animals. It’s sort of a docu-soap following the trials and tribulations of running a park with 2,000 animals.”

McDonagh says audiences are looking for more entertainment value in their wildlife series. “You need great access and great characters,” he says. “That’s the heart of what makes great programming. In the last couple years, we’ve been leaning away from presenter-led shows and toward people who have real passion, who are credible and authentic. On River Monsters that’s Jeremy Wade. Jeremy is somebody who lives, breathes and is all about these amazing river creatures. He’s very authentic and people connect with that.”

ALL WILD, ALL THE TIME
With a full 24-hour wildlife channel to program, Geoff Daniels, senior VP of National Geographic Wild, has several character-led series in the works. In Wild Nights with Mireya Mayor, “We’re following Mireya Mayor, who is an emerging explorer with the National Geographic Society,” Daniels says. “The series goes into some of the world’s most iconic cities to find a different kind of wildlife. It’s the surprising side of the wild, animals taking over our city streets after we go to bed.”

The first three episodes of the hour-long series are set in: New Orleans, where Mayor and some local characters try to catch a 300-pound wild boar; Rio de Janeiro, where the targets are the world’s largest rodent and an ancient reptile; and Miami, where snakes and manatees roam.

“Part of our mission is to look for unique characters and unique stories and ways of telling those stories that really feel contemporary,” Daniels says. “I think what audiences are looking for now are those kinds of experts, like Steve Irwin, those kinds of unique individuals who are passionate about wildlife.”

In the more typically National Geographic vein are three one-off blue-chip documentaries anchoring Big Cat Week, Wild’s first worldwide event late in the fourth quarter of this year: Big Cat Odyssey, Lion Warrior and Leopard Queen.

“It ties into the Society’s Big Cat initiative,” Daniels says. “We’re featuring the work of two of the world’s greatest filmmakers, Dereck and Beverly Joubert. In Big Cat Odyssey they follow the struggles of the lion pride that live right in their backyard in Botswana, drawing on all the work they’ve done over their careers.”

Lion Warrior examines the conflict between lions and the Masai tribe in a time of drought in the region, and Leopard Queen culminates 17 years of work by veteran filmmaker John Varty.

“We’re balancing the portfolio between the big, spectacular blue-chip events that we’ll be doing on a quarterly basis with series with extraordinary talent and characters,” Daniels says. “We’re committed to being not a repurpose channel, but to bringing exclusivity and originality to the screen.”

NHU Africa has just commissioned its third season of The Cheetah Diaries, featuring Annie Beckhelling, the founder of the Cheetah Outreach attraction near Cape Town. “We are up to 39 episodes and we’ve sold it to Discovery in the U.K. and all over Europe and Asia,” says NHU Africa’s managing director, Sophie Vartan. “The Cheetah Outreach organization is constantly expanding and searching for new ways to make a difference in conservation, and The Cheetah Diaries is there to capture all the exciting additions.”

THE THIRD DIMENSION
The wild card in documentary filmmaking these days is 3D, which has obvious attractions, but which poses greater challenges for wildlife than it does to animation, sports events or entertainment television. NHU Africa has been actively shooting 3D on the Okavango Delta in Botswana, where its study of giant crocodiles, Into the Dragon’s Lair, was shot, Vartan says, adding that the learning curve has been steep. “We were using some of the most up-to-date cameras on the market today, and we had to have a completely separate boat just for the camera itself; it’s that big.”

Vartan sets the cost increase of producing in 3D at 50 percent. “To go out into the field and shoot it properly and post-produce it properly takes a minimum of 18 months,” she says. “When you shoot for 3D you have to hold your shots a lot longer, because there is so much information and depth of field in the 3D shot, the audience’s eye has to look around the entire space in the shot. In 2D your eye doesn’t have to explore it so much. Your shots can be quick. If you brought out the 2D version of that film it would look boring and slow. So it’s difficult to get that perfect balance. We’ve decided in our 2D versions of 3D films we are going to have to re-cut them and put in a few extra shots.”

BBC’s Jackson says the Natural History Unit’s long production times have precluded it so far from actually finishing anything in 3D, but he is absolutely interested in 3D and the unit started shooting test footage last year. “We’re seeing about a 40 percent cost to 3D,” he says.

“Most of the stuff we shoot is on the end of a long lens, a long way away. If you put two cameras next to each other, about the same distance apart as your eyes, and you shoot something that’s two or three hundred yards away, you don’t get a 3D parallax. We shot some cloudscapes in time lapse, but to make the clouds look big and fluffy we had to put the cameras 100 yards apart. Natural history only works in 3D when it’s close up. You have to get right in there with the pride or whatever you’re filming.”

Because Discovery, a frequent co-production partner with BBC, is launching a 3D channel next year, Jackson feels an extra push toward the new medium. “We’re looking at an underwater project with Discovery and several other things we might do with them,” he says. “Underwater is perfect for 3D. You can get close and it’s a lovely landscape.”