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“With the kangaroos I wasn’t as close, on the whole, as I’d generally like to have been,” he explains. “With the habituated few that we worked with, we could easily get 70 or 80 metres away. If you wanted to get closer than that, you had to just sit there and let them come to you.
“When we started filming we would drive over a rise as the sun came up, and look at this plain rolling away where you’d see a little group of roos, three or fours kilometres away. They’d look straight at you, and then they’d go. And as soon as one went, the whole lot would go. Even when we were 200 metres away from them, they’d run. There was a lot of time spent going around in circles trying to habituate a group of animals to the noise and move- ment of the car.
“But their natural tendency is to just move away from you slowly. So you have to change your position when that happens. Eventually the habituat- ed female we worked with would come within about ten metres.
If you say that to a scientist they think that’s really close. The ideal distance is about 30 metres, because it gives a good range of picture sizes, with the lenses that you’ve got.”
Filmed using a standard 600mm lens most of the time, and shot on Fuji 64 and 250 daylight, Kangaroos - a working title, as the final name has not yet been cho- sen - will air in the Natural World series some time soon. And its marsupial heroes look certain to beguile audiences just as they have delighted the veteran cameraman who has spent much of the last 18 months filming them.
“A large male red kangaroo is a truly phenomenal sight to witness,” he smiles. “They are majestic creatures, especially the big males. When they stand up they are almost two metres tall, and you see all their muscles in the way that they present themselves to their opponents. They look understandably quite magnificent.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
Kangaroos was originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
SKIPPY
“Are you talkin’ to me?”
“Are you talkin’ to me?”
in production