Page 13 - Fujifilm Exposure_3 Michael Winner_ok

television production news
nOdonesia Indonesia
ver the years there it mates - occasionally it feeds - so it doesn’t its own reminiscent of Monty Python’s spoof have been so many mind that it’s not meant to live there!” ‘Alan Whicker Island’ where, perhaps, one excellent natural histo- Warming to his theme, Jackson - whose day the hordes of camera crews descending ry documentaries on career in television actually began in news upon it will become as familiar and populous television, recording so and current affairs, before turning to natural as the many domestic species to be found many weird and won- history 10 years there at any one time.
derful sights from far- ago - suggests that “Indonesia is a away places, that it the vast untapped, very tricky country would be tempting to and so far unex- to film in,” Jackson think that the viewing plored expanse of adds, “because there
public had seen it all before. But you can be Indonesia repre- are such huge dis- sure, they haven’t. Wild of Indonesia, a new sents an amazing tances to cover and series of three one-hour programmes, made by challenge for nat- transport is dodgy at
independent Bristol-based producer Andrew Jackson, should give some idea of the vastness of the natural world as yet not captured on film, and will make remarkable viewing.
“It might not sound much,” he explains picking out one aspect of his documentary, “but I’ve just been watching rushes of this tiny little fish that’s about two and a half inch- es long. This is an Australian freshwater species that lives about 2,000 miles away from Australia, on an island separated from Indonesia by the ocean. So there’s a very big question mark about how it got from Australia to this freshwater lake, in the mid- dle of this huge island. It needs answering.
“It’s never been filmed before, because it’s only recently been discovered. We sent a cameraman there, it took him four days to get to these remote lakes, he dived into them, and there it was doing this great little mating ritual. This fish spends all its time mating, from the start of the day to the end of the day
ural history film- makers for many years to come.
“A huge, vast
island region, it
is set between Asia on one side
and Australia on the other, and is made up of something like 18,000 islands which stretch the same distance that separates London from New York, or London from Afghanistan.
“That’s how big this place is. It only con- tains one per cent of the Earth’s surface, the rest is ocean, yet it has something like 25 per cent of the world’s birds, 14 per cent of the world’s reptiles, 12 per cent of the world’s mammals - tigers, rhinoceroses, elephants, kangeroos, possums among them - and the highest number of endemic animals in the world. That is to say, animals that occur nowhere else in the world except Indonesia.”
Such a place is inevitably a huge attrac- tion for natural historians, a remote world of
best. It’s also quite a difficult and contrary political system to get round, which has only
recently become slight-
ly more open in their attitude to the world’s wild-life film crews.
“I’ve been filming there now for five or six years, that’s why I felt there was a possibility we could do this series, but it’s true there are more and more filmmakers going there now including the BBC. But there is a distinction between what they do - they tend to look at an animal in isolation - whereas we are trying to document the interactions between man and animals in this remarkable place, the most bio- diverse country in the world.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
Wild Of Indonesia was produced by Tigress Productions and originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative.
Photos: (main left) An Orangutan surrounded by food and a can or two
of Fujifilm stock in the jungles of Borneo (and from top) The dreaded and feared Komodo dragons - Photographing a Macaque monkey in Bali - A tiger in the wilds of Sumatra - (and above) A view of Bali’s magnificent Mount Agung.