Page 17 - Fujifilm Exposure_8 Wildlife John Downer_ok

win. What’s good is when you win on two fronts, for example if you’re nominated for a craft award but also for the story side of it. It shows you’re bringing natural history to a wider audience and making it more accessible, so getting recognition on both fronts has to be the ultimate accolade.”
Even now Downer and his team cannot sit around congratulating themselves, as another spe- cial is currently underway. Lions has just started shooting in Africa, and will be another two years in the making. But Lions, and indeed Eagles, are quite different in structure from something like SuperNatural, an extended insight into the behav- iour of just one animal as opposed to the more confined view of a particular phenomenon that the crew must capture on film.
“It’s obviously a different challenge,” Downer explains, “to come up with a different way of look- ing at lions, who have been filmed many times before. On SuperNatural we were after specific sto- ries. We’d tell the crew that this animal does this, what’s amazing about it, and they’d go out and capture it on film.
“There isn’t any scope for us to include some- thing absolutely fascinating that the animal might do, if it’s not relevant to the story. Eagles and Lions have a more open brief. You can make more of the serendipity of what happens in the field and include behaviour that you weren’t necessarily expecting.
“A large part of the excitement of it is that we don’t know what’s going to be in the final film. We know what we want to get in the film, but whatever happens we are going to have elements of a story that we couldn’t predict, because they will do some- thing different than you’re expecting - if you spend 12 hours a day for 200 days watching your subject.”
Not that filming is totally without the odd mishap. Utilising a much bigger crew on SuperNatural than he had on Eagles - which basi- cally comprised himself, cameraman Mike Richards and his assistant producer - Downer found some of his subjects were far from camera shy.
“We were filming a herd of black rhino, because rhino use these low frequency calls which are below human hearing, that can carry for as far as 10 km across the savannah. They talk to each other in a way we are not aware of. The game park they were in is constantly threatened by poachers, so they have an armed guard and are quite used to people, which allowed us to get very close to them.
“But the problem is you can never know what they’re thinking and they can change in an instant. One of them suddenly decided he didn’t like Mike Richards so close, so he actually ran into him and knocked the camera out of his hand. He was, for- tunately, otherwise unscathed.”
From the kings of the jungle, to rhinos and eagles. Downer clearly enjoys the huge contrasts that natural history allows. SuperNatural will cer- tainly demonstrate this during its run, from the obvious dolphins to less obvious creatures.
“We go from bacteria to whales,” he laughs, “so it’s pretty universal in terms of looking at the animal kingdom. And bacteria are very under appreciated too. We’ve got some amazing stories about them, which will be revealed in the series.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
Eagles, Lions and SuperNatural were originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
SOARING TO SUCCESS
Photos from top: Dolphins, Man covered in bees, Pelicans, Lion and Hippo underwater from SuperNatural (Courtesy John Downer Prods/BBC)