Nature Up Close and Personal

October 2007

It’s all about the story.

That’s what wildlife-documentary filmmakers and the people who finance them say when people start talking about all the hot new video technology that seems to be dominating the genre these days.

But they’re quick to add that the latest macro lens, high-speed camera, data-storage device, CGI or whatever can deliver new visuals can make the right story even more compelling.

“The latest technology is a must in the blue-chip-documentary business,” says Carl Hall, the managing director and founder of Parthenon Entertainment. “We’ve concentrated on doing much bigger specials using all these bits of kit that are almost standard now. It’s what you need in your bag of tools when you’re out on location. That’s our competitive edge at the moment, to make those big blue-chip documentaries.”

Hall emphasizes, “None of this technology will make you a good filmmaker or make it a better film, but it will get you closer to the action. If you’ve got a good story line, all these extras let you live the experience. People want the immersive experience. They want to be in amongst the wildlife, not on the end of a crazy lens, where you’re only seeing it from one angle. Remote cameras, balloons, planes, hidden cameras, whatever you can do to get in on the animals’ action without changing their behavior, then you’re onto a winner. Those programs are the most successful ones.”

Producers are always pitching new ways to see previously told stories, says Geoff Daniels, the senior VP of development and production at National Geographic Channels International.

“My reaction is that those things are great, but they still have to serve a story,” he says. “The most spectacular example of that is In the Womb: Animals. That was done by Pioneer Productions and it looked at the development of dog, dolphin and elephant in the womb, from beginning to end, using the most incredible new CGI, modeling, macro photography, all the whistles and bells. A special like that took something that people intuitively know, or maybe have seen in bits and pieces, and used these technologies to give people insight and access to hidden and secret places in natural processes that they really have never seen before.”

An issue in using cutting-edge technology is always cost, says Daniels, who limits its use to the high-end, blue-chip documentaries. “We’re only going to do four to eight of those a year,” he says. “The subject has to drive it. We have to, as a broadcaster, determine if we’re looking at a story that has the legs and the potential to be an event, that’s going to justify the cost.”

In the same vein, Mark Reynolds, the head of factual for Granada International, says, “The story comes first. We have to feel there is a strong narrative and that we’re going to be told some new information or see some revelation that we haven’t seen before. That’s where the technology comes in. We can’t just retell the same old stories. People are looking for what they haven’t seen before.”

Reynolds cites several recent projects that required new kinds of cameras to convey their stories successfully. For The Queen of Trees, filmmakers had to show how a microscopic wasp egg grows within the fig on a giant fig tree in Africa, and then emerges to pollinate the tree it depends on. “How,” Reynolds asks, “do you really [tell] that story? How can you find the macro camera technology to show that tiny size and what it does inside the fig seeds?” In the case of The Queen of Trees, the filmmakers came up with a custom-made camera. Last year’s Monster Crocs, which documented herpetologist Romulus Whitaker’s search for crocodiles longer than 20 feet, used CAT scans to show their physiology. And the Deep Jungle series used remote cameras, heat-sensing cameras and CGI to explore the wild. “Deep Jungle was completely driven by technology and the researchers in the field,” Reynolds says.

IT’S A SMALL, SMALL WORLD

But bringing to bear the best technology to tell one of those stories doesn’t simply mean picking up the latest hardware. When the blue-chip documentary filmmaker Mark Deeble was prepping for The Queen of Trees, his challenge was how to magnify the wasps that were at the heart of the story and show their natural behavior. Deeble, who works with his wife, Victoria Stone, from a base in Cornwall, England, had high-definition cameras supplied by NHK, one of the partners in the project, but he wasn’t able to get the image quality he was seeking.

“The story we wanted to tell was about the relationship between the fig tree and its tiny pollinator,” Deeble says. “The wasp itself is about a millimeter long. Most of the wasp’s life cycle takes place in the confines of a wild fig, 50 feet up a tree.”

Two challenges Deeble faced were achieving the resolution that HD required and overcoming internal camera vibration, which could be detected at the high magnification needed.

“In the end, we went for some ancient Zeiss Luminar lenses,” Deeble says. “We scoured eBay to find a range of lenses. We ended up with about eight. We tested them and three or four were really good. They’re tiny, so we had special adaptors made up to mount these on the HD cameras. They gave extraordinary resolution.”

To overcome the vibration, Deeble built a camera rig on a heavy iron plate, locking the camera in place and moving the fig and wasp to the lens. “We were getting the head of the wasp, about two-tenths of a millimeter across, to fill the frame and get natural behavior. The life cycle of the fig wasp is about six weeks and the behavior we wanted to film lasted only about five seconds. In wildlife filming, you’re always adapting something to try to get the image you want.”

LIFE FROM ABOVE

In the groundbreaking series Planet Earth, a BBC and Discovery Communications co-production, high-definition video and special cameras brought animal behavior to the small screen in a way never seen before. “In Planet Earth, the aerial filming was very important in shooting on high-definition video, which gives a cinematic look,” explains Neil Nightingale, the head of the BBC’s Natural History Unit. “With video you can separate the camera head from the recorder, which means you can have very lightweight, gyroscopically controlled camera mounts. This has given us a completely new perspective on animal behavior because we’ve been able to be a thousand feet away on the end of a very, very long lens with animals not knowing we’re there. We can film things that would have been completely impossible [before]. For example, a wolf hunt in the tundra had never been filmed from start to finish because you just cannot keep up with wolves except in a helicopter. But in a helicopter you could never zoom in to a close-up on a wolf. Now, with a high-definition gyroscopically stabilized lens you can do that, and the wolf isn’t even aware that you’re there.”

For Parthenon’s Hall, successful use of high-tech video techniques means incorporating them seamlessly into the story, not flaunting them. “I don’t think anybody is buying the programs because they’re full of gizmos and tricks,” he says. “What you’ve got to do is get them in there as seamlessly as possible, so they look great, without them being noticeable. The more seamless the technology, the better the program is.”

UNOBTRUSIVE GIZMOS

Bug Brother, Parthenon’s hour-long close-up of the microscopic life that inhabits our homes and bodies, achieves that seamlessness by careful matching of images and use of CGI to make transitions from conventional video to images from a 3-D scanning electron microscope.

“We used normal Sony 900 cameras and then we used an endoscopic lens kit that allows a full-size camera to be used, but the lens comes off and goes on a long pole,” Hall explains. “We could track across the surface of the floor. It’s a tiny but fantastic quality lens. We used a lot of that sort of stuff to zoom [in on] the big world where we would use the normal camera, then we would zoom in as far as we could go, match-frame it with the endoscopic camera and then, when we’d zoom in on the fibers on a cushion, we took that last frame into CGI and the CGI took us from that to the microscopic world. Totally seamless.”

For Bug Brother, a takeoff on the reality series Big Brother, Parthenon brought in an average family—mom, dad, three kids, a dog and everything that lives on them. “And it’s bloody horrible,” Hall jokes. “Cereal weevils on their breakfast cereal. Meanwhile in the closet there’s the little beetle making holes in the clothes. It was just 24 hours, like Big Brother. The cameras were there observing everything that was going on in this one house over 24 hours.”

The microscopic work, done by Mona Lisa Production in Lyon, France, represents a real breakthrough, Hall says. “For the first time, you’re getting a three-dimensional view. “You can turn the sample around inside. They were doing fleas on a hair, going 360 degrees around the hair of a dog.”

Also on Bug Brother, Hall used a new 4,000-frame-per-second camera. “It effectively records everything for about 40 seconds at incredible speed,” Hall says. “Unlike film, you don’t have to pour enormous amounts of light on the subject to get it. We used that in Bug Brother and in some high-speed cheetah chases, at a 500- to 600-frames-per-second level. That looks stunning, all in HD.”

Caroline Hawkins, the executive producer on the popular Oxford Scientific Films program Meerkat Manor, now in its third season, says the success of the show has allowed OSF to upgrade its video equipment every year. Meerkat Manor was the first successful filming within a meerkat burrow using fiber-optic cameras, according to OSF. The film crews were housed in specially built sheds in Africa’s Kalahari desert, where they stayed until the meerkats became habituated to the presence of humans in their territory.

“As the budget increased we’ve managed to get more toys to play with,” Hawkins says. “Series one and two were shot on DV [digital video] cameras, Sony DSR 570s with Canon lenses. We had good lenses but pretty cheap formats. We shoot for 26 weeks, so we go through a lot of tape. By season three, the series had caught on globally and the U.S. came in and said, we want this next series in high-definition. So series three is being shot on a Panasonic VariCam.”

The Emmy Award–winning VariCam shoots real-time video at 24 frames per second and can record time lapse and up to 60 frames per second.

However, Hawkins points out that improved technology doesn’t necessarily make the job easier. “The picture quality is wonderful,” she says, “but focusing is really critical. It made the cameraman’s job harder. He couldn’t get them quite as spontaneously as he could before. We always find we solve one problem and it opens up a whole stack of other ones. The cleverer you get the more complicated it gets. Things like vaulting fences with the VariCam were harder. It’s a lot heavier than the DSR.”

Minicams, incredible lenses and high-speed recording may get much of the attention in the technology area, but filmmakers also look for less glitzy improvements.

A key technological advance for Hall is taking place now in the storage of video images, which frees the photographer from the limited time available on a reel of film—less than eight minutes for high-speed photography, or up to 40 minutes for videotape. “That’s really nothing if you’re waiting in the bush for a piece of action,” Hall says. “We want to be able to record all day long and review that footage later. As soon as they get that storage cheaper, the more cameras we can stick on everything, so you can cover every shot with ten cameras. Imagine the camera angles you can get with them all recording on a tiny chip. I don’t think the technology has even started yet.”

WHAT’S NEXT

A new development that Deeble applauds is cache memory in HD cameras. “It was frustrating with early HD cameras to hit the button and then have to wait for everything to basically lock up. It would take a couple of seconds before you got an image, and the animal could be gone. What they do now is have a cache memory, so if the camera is powered up, you record that image, to a cache—you have four or eight seconds in cache memory.”

While Animal Planet features blue-chip documentaries like The Great Savannah Race (on the annual East Africa wildlife migration) and the series Meerkat Manor, both of which make use of the latest hardware, Phillip Luff, the senior VP and general manager of Animal Planet International, notes that new technology is also affecting the network’s light-entertainment shows.

“Our brand is elastic enough to let us go both ways,” Luff says. “What consumers can buy in the shops today is pretty incredible. That allows us to tap into that world of people making their own films. Some of them are broadcast quality.”

High on the wish lists of most in the wildlife business is the yearning for smaller cameras and lower prices.

Parthenon’s Hall explains how the two go together. “The thing is for the cameras to get smaller and lighter to the point where you only have a lens with a little bit on the back that happens to be the camera,” he says, “so you can get these [cameras] strapped onto everything to get them into the action—and cheaply as well. The smaller cameras are, the more damage you get, so you need affordability.”

Others have more specific wants. Luff is concerned with the logistics of getting content from the bush back to the home office. “If you’re out on location in remote areas, how [do you] get what you’ve filmed back to an editing suite quickly and cost effectively?” he says. “That’s the one thing most of the people I work with would like to see—maybe by wireless or mobile or your laptop.”

SIZE MATTERS

Shooting meerkats in their underground burrows presents problems for which OSF’s Hawkins has yet to find a solution. “When we went down the high-def road, we said, ‘How do we do that?’ We use infrared cameras. When we shoot on the surface we’re getting high-definition images and underground it’s really grainy, standard-definition infrared footage. We explored with various companies how we could improve the picture quality and it became apparent that you can’t do high-definition infrared because you have to take one of the chips out of the camera.”

David Hamlin, a senior producer at National Geographic Television & Film, has used small high-definition cameras in underwater housings, but what he really yearns for is a high-def “lipstick” camera.

“Little cameras delivering superior imagery are on the way,” Hamlin says. “I’ve heard there is one in existence in Japan. If we can make that available at a price we can afford, that would be huge. We love hiding cameras.”

He’s also looking for more reliable digital storage. “We need stuff that will survive the sweltering humidity of the Congo and the driest Arctic freeze. We have lost footage.”

And Hamlin wants to get his hands on high-def cameras with a digital prerecording feature, meaning a cache memory that constantly saves a few seconds of images even before the operator hits the record button. “That’s a critical thing,” he says, to capture unpredictable action. “If I’m filming a crocodile going for bait, I have no idea when it’s going to explode out of the water and take that bait, but, as long as I’m focused on the bait, I’ll get it all. I won’t miss that second or two. None of our cameras does that.”

Deeble thinks 3-D may be the next big thing in documentaries. “We’re in preproduction for a 3-D theatrical feature on elephants,” he says; it’s called Distant Thunder. “We’re taking the same approach as March of the Penguins.”

Distant Thunder is being done for BBC Worldwide, which says the film will take audiences “on a journey of courage, loss, beauty, risk and hope that reveals the emotional intelligence of the African elephant in a way that has never been seen before.”

Deeble takes note of increased interest in 3-D lately, led in part by the director James Cameron and made possible by high-definition digital moviemaking and digital projectors. “With the transition to digital cinema, for a small extra cost most of the digital projectors are 3-D-ready,” Deeble says. “You’re projecting both the left and right side through the same projector, running at a higher speed, alternating right and left.”

The next step is 3-D television, which Deeble thinks is coming, too. “I don’t know how long it’s going to be, maybe ten years’ time. The holy grail is to have glasses-less 3-D. I think it can be done. Three-D is hugely exciting and I look forward to using it to tell a story.”

On his wish list right now is a lighter, high-speed digital camera with great resolution. “We still have yet to see that,” Deeble says. “They tend to be either good resolution or high speed. There isn’t really a good production model you can take into the field and move around easily. And combine that with an optical viewfinder. We find that seeing the image through the camera with a viewfinder is important. It makes focusing so much easier.”

High on Hall’s wish list is an affordable version of a multi-lens camera that he observed recently. “I saw the ultimate demonstration a couple of months ago of this 360-degree camera with 11 HD lenses on it, a sort of balloon shape,” he says. “You can put it into the center of a scene and it effectively records everything [360 degrees around]. It’s got a hard-disc recorder underneath. When you put it in the edit suite you can pan to look at the image. You can do a 180-degree turn to see the action. When that becomes commercially available that’s going to make a huge difference for wildlife filmmaking. You’ll be able to chuck it into the middle of a group of hippos.”

The problem right now is that the camera, the Dodeca 2360, from Immersive Media in Calgary, Canada, comes with a price tag of around $100,000. Current users include Google Maps, which is using the camera for its “street view” images of major cities.