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THE WILD
tv production
THE WILD
“Sometimes after a really fantastic hunt, when the one animal has caught the other, you need a shot to end it, which might be the predator feeding on its prey. I’ve moved in quite a few times to get closer shots like that, but when you get there to set it up you can’t film it with your hands on the camera, you’re so shaky. You just have to lock it off and grab it like that.”
From the high drama of such life and death matters, to the extraordi- nary sight of army worms – in reality
But there may be more signifi- cance yet to the savannah, if current theories about this landscape being the first man made environment are any indication.
“We talk in the film about how early hominids discovered fire, and the theory is that they had a big impact on opening up more savannah with that, either unintentionally or by design. There aren’t monuments left from past civilisations, but there is the landscape itself which could be largely man-made.”
Of course, time does not stand still. Even in the last fifteen years the savannah weather pattern has changed significantly, and the fear is that man’s continued intervention in this fascinating, self sustaining envi-
desert quite quickly. The Sahara at one stage must have been savannah. In geological terms these things hap- pen quite quickly – so in a couple of hundred years things could be totally different.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
Savannah was originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
baby caterpillars – carpeting hun- dreds of square kilometres of savan- nah, this film has an impressive range of ‘characters’.
“We’re trying to show how bountiful the savannahs are. When these army worms erupt in certain climactic condi- tions they attracts lots of migratory birds, such as European storks. You can get flocks of 20,000 birds or more, in some cases about a third of the world’s popula- tion of that species present at one time.”
ronment can only be detrimental. In that regard Savannah may be a snap- shot of a disappearing landscape.
“Lots of the parks now in savan- nahs are fenced, because they have agricultural areas all around them and they have to keep the animals in the park to stop crops being damaged. It is under increasing pressure.
“It’s a very arid landscape any- way, and if the climate continues dry- ing as it is it could actually go to