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ANIMAL MAGIC
ANIMAL MAGIC
The birds and bees go ape in Weird Nature
tv production
It might appear that the main challenge in natural history filmmaking is coming up with a new subject each time. But John Downer, producer of BBC’s recent wildlife series Weird Nature, continues to be enthused by technological advances that allow things that we might consider familiar to be filmed in ever greater detail.
“The great thing about film is that it’s limitless,” he says, “the only boundaries are your ideas. I can’t see how anyone could get jaded by it because anything’s possible. Particularly now.
“As long as you have an enthusias- tic team, which I did, the subject is limitless and you have the chance to show people things they’ve never seen before. I think that’s wonderful.”
Approaching various aspects of animal behaviour that may seem bizarre in isolation, Downer attempted to put them in the context of similar human behaviour.
So where humans have developed all kinds of fantastic vehicles to help them move at speed, the Mount Lyell salamander curls up into a perfect wheel shape and rolls downhill, achieving speeds up to 40 times its walking pace.
Where the dark side of human cre- ativity has developed weapons to pro- tect us from each other, a Californian species of mantis shrimp can strike with a force similar to a 0.22 calibre bullet. And where grown ups occasion- ally like a drink or two, some bees will consume the fermenting sap from lime trees to achieve much the same effect.
“Weirdness is a relative term,” Downer adds, “so we felt we needed us in the background to be compared with. That, we felt, would make every-
thing relevant. Once we came up with that concept the rest followed.
“All I’ve ever tried to do is engage the audience, break the rules and not necessarily do things because that’s the way they’ve been done in the past.
“We take each subject on its own and decide the treatment as the series progresses. We don’t necessari- ly set out on a mission, that we’re going to do it this way or that. It’s only as we get deeper and deeper into research that we really start to work out how we’re going to film things that suggest themselves.
“And we used a lot of new filming techniques. A lot of those come from asking ourselves what’s the best way of demonstrating this behaviour.”
While Weird Nature uses the latest computer techniques it is important to stress that everything is captured on film first, rather than created within the computer.
“Scenes might go to the computer to make them slower, for example. But what we capture on film is pure animal behav- iour, as pure as any natural history.”
In addition to pushing those film- making boundaries, Downer and his team have also returned to more established technology using, for example, aerial image techniques that were superseded by the increase in blue and green screen.
“Aerial image is a type of split lens that captures a very small scale scene in the foreground and combines it with a background in real time and in the camera.
“What it does is enable you to catch two scenes simultaneously, com- bining them in camera and getting an effect that would be very difficult to achieve through ‘lifting’. A good exam- ple of that is in the last programme, Peculiar Potions, where bees are get-
ting drunk on sap and there’s a pub scene in the background.
“But it’s about whatever seems appropriate. We also used time slice stuff, similar in principle to what they did in The Matrix, and took that tech- nology to the limit.
“Time slice is a system of multiple stills cameras arranged either in a cir- cle or an arc around the subject, and they catch the same moment in time, freeze it and when those images are put together you get a movement or a track around the subject, frozen in a moment of time.”
Another advancement in technolo- gy has meant that faster stocks are better equipped to capture the speed of movement of some animals who oth- erwise would have simply been a blur.
“We were very often shooting at two thousand frames or more, and high speed stocks were the only way we could get it,” says Downer.
There is little doubt that the great- est quality any wildlife filmmaker can have is patience. For Downer this was rewarded on one sequence in particu- lar using time slice which then had to be ‘cleaned up’ within a complex com- puter programme.
“That’s my favourite sequence I think, filming the animals that appeared to fly. It took weeks and weeks and weeks, and about halfway through you start to ask yourself if this is really worth the effort.
“It looks pretty shoddy to begin with, and it’s only when it comes together at the end that you see how wonderful it is. That’s the great moment, when you suddenly see what you conceived is suddenly working.” ■ Anwar Brett
Weird Nature was originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
Photo above: John Downer and opposite page, a composite of the real stars of Weird Nature