BBC NHU’s Jonny Keeling

BBC NHU’s Jonny Keeling tells TV Real about his path from wildlife biology to filmmaking and what he loves most about making immersive, compelling blue-chip docs today.

Jonny Keeling wears two hats at the BBC’s acclaimed Natural History Unit (NHU). At times he is out on expeditions to far-flung locations filming landmark doc events—such as the time he spent on Fernandina Island overseeing the crew that captured the footage for Planet Earth II’s mind-blowing, nightmare-inducing snakes vs. iguanas segment. At other times he’s at his home base in Bristol, exec producing NHU’s kids’ projects, with a slate that includes Attenborough’s Adventures for CBeebies’ Storytime app and an upcoming dinosaur drama. Keeling’s latest event doc endeavor is Seven Worlds, a seven-part series he is exec producing for BBC One in 2019 that will focus on a different continent in each episode.

TV REAL: How did you get into documentary filmmaking?
KEELING: We didn’t have a TV growing up, at all. So we were outside all the time. My mum was a teacher, she taught biology, and we had loads and loads of animals at home. I bought a small cine-camera from a jumble sale for £1, and I went out and filmed our dog and some of the other animals we had in the garden, and I really enjoyed it. Since I loved wildlife, I ended up becoming a wildlife biologist and [studying] zoology. While I was doing my Ph.D. someone from the BBC contacted me and asked if I could radio track a domestic cat for them. I was radio tracking animals at the time, so I said, Yes, sure. It was loads of fun, and I loved radio. I went on an expedition to an uninhabited island off of Scotland and thought, I’m going to make a radio piece for the BBC about the animals that live there. I gave it to them, and they said, Come work with us for two weeks, we won’t pay you, but you can get some experience. So I did that. I handed my CV around, and two months later someone from the TV department called me. I was thinking, I don’t really want to work in TV, I want to work in radio. But they told me about the project, and I thought it was interesting. I did a week’s work, and they said, Come back for a couple of weeks, and then it just rolled on. That was 21 years ago. So [I’m a filmmaker] partly by accident, but I wonder if the beginning was when I was 12 years old running around with a little camera filming dogs and geese and goats.

TV REAL: Technology has transformed wildlife filmmaking. Have you found that storytelling techniques have also had to evolve? Do you have to make shorter, snappier segments to keep people engaged?
KEELING: Storytelling has gotten a lot more sophisticated. [Segments] haven’t gotten shorter—I think they’ve become longer. If you’ve got an hour-long documentary and lots of short stories, it can end up feeling like a panicky list. We want to be confident. The snakes and the iguanas [scene] in Planet Earth II ran for about seven and a half minutes. That’s a long story. But it’s a lovely, natural drama. That’s what we want to do. We look at dramas and study them to see their techniques. How we engage and hook an audience and weave an emotionally exciting story so that you end up with something that makes you think, Oh my goodness! We’re definitely more sophisticated about storytelling. Twenty years ago when I was making big, landmark documentaries, they were a lot more informational. Here’s a snake and it does this. Here’s a polar bear and it does this. Now, we’re concentrating much more on characters. It’s character-based stories, so you emotionally buy into them immediately. When they go through struggles, you go through them as well. It’s an overused word, but it’s a lot more immersive as a storytelling technique. The way that we film [has changed] as well. We’re able to get a lot closer. That makes it more emotionally powerful. And I’m very careful about which species we choose. That sounds bad, but say you have ten sequences—I’m not going to choose ten boring animals. You have to look at that animal and ask, would I relate to it as an audience member? What would it make me feel? This is very obvious, but 20 years ago it wasn’t, it was all about fact, fact, fact, information. Now you get that layer of fact, that’s important, but the topline for me is, is this going to be emotionally engaging? What do I feel when I see this?

TV REAL: Does filming in 4K make the production process harder?
KEELING: It doesn’t really. It’s still a camera; you still have to carry it into the field. One of the challenges is having to download everything. We used to just have a tape. Actually, we used to have film originally. Now you have it on a drive, and you think, I better back that drive up, and then I better back that one up! And you need someone to do it all technically, so you better take a technical assistant. And because you want everything to be on the move, you end up taking stabilized camera rigs and they are incredibly heavy. So that side has gotten a little bit harder. You have to balance the weight on this gyro stabilizer rig so you can walk around an animal.

TV REAL: Any revelations in the field that you can tell us about? Any animal behavior that truly shocked you?
KEELING: I went to film lions hunting elephants for Planet Earth I and I suppose if I’m really honest, I wasn’t sure we were going to get it, it was a bit of a gamble. I thought we might just get lions in the morning feeding on an elephant carcass. We did get it, and it was an incredible revelation. We were maybe five meters away—the lions were right there. They were a bit cross with us, but they tolerated us. I was in an open-back vehicle, and the lions could have jumped up there at any point. It was a revelation because no one had ever seen what we’d filmed. But it was also a revelation because I wanted to get this behavior. I had thought about what I would feel seeing a big animal like an elephant being brought down. When I saw it I thought, this is shocking. We edited it very sensitively. To be there [while it’s happening] is quite a drama. It’s the middle of the night and you have elephants running just past your vehicle and lions charging around. It’s quite an emotionally charged place. And you’re not quite sure who you want to win. If the lions don’t get their food, the cubs will starve. But if an elephant is brought down, it’s a big beautiful animal. It’s a very confusing situation. That was quite a revelation.

TV REAL: What projects are you working on at the NHU now?
KEELING: I spent two years working on Planet Earth II and now I’m doing a series called Seven Worlds. That’s taking up quite a lot of time. There will be 110 to 120 expeditions to film all of it. I myself will go on three or four of them. Putting that team together and coming up with the ideas takes a long time. I also run the children’s department for NHU, which is exciting. That’s our new audience. Lots of them watch things like Planet Earth II anyway, but it’s nice inspiring a new audience to love wildlife. And there’s a lot more freedom within that. We make Andy’s Dinosaur Adventures, Deadly…, Naomi’s Nightmares of Nature. We’re doing a dinosaur drama. We do lots of VFX. We’re doing a talking animals show where it’s an observational documentary set in a zoo, but it’s a comedy. The vets tell you about how they look after animals and the keepers will tell you how to feed them. That is all genuine footage, and then you cut to the animal and the animal tells you their point of view. It’s brilliant CGI. We’ve worked with some fantastic animators in Bristol. So there’s a real range of content. We’ve been doing music raps, like how to say the dinosaur names, for YouTube. Some of them have a couple of million hits on them. We’re taking David Attenborough’s genuine life stories and we’ve made him into an animated character for the Storytime app. We work on all sorts of platforms.