Page 19 - Fujifilm Exposure_17 Africa_ok

BRIGHT
BRIGHT...with Africa, a series of programmes looking
at different aspects of this vast continent through
the eyes of the people who live there.
cover story
the company than this, their most famous brand. Tigress makes the hit series ManEaters series for ITV, Monkey Business (set in a Dorset mon- key sanctuary) for Meridian/Channel 4, Britain’s Wild Invaders for Channel 5, and a host of shows for the American networks PBS, WNET and National Geographic.
One of their most significant com- missions will air on PBS this autumn. Africa is a series of eight one-hour programmes looking at different
they are making programmes for tele- vision, which is a mass communica- tion medium. What we’re trying to do at Tigress is to reach the widest possi- ble audience.”
There’s no shortage of stories to tell, despite the millions of feet shot of so many animals over so many years. New information is being discovered all the time.
“If you looked 20 years ago there were very few wild dolphins that were tame, or that tolerated human pres- ence. Now there are 30 or 40 round the world, because people have got much more aware of that kind of thing. Nobody knew what killer whales were doing on Patagonian beaches
aspects of the continent through the eyes of the people who live there. It has taken two years to film, and looks certain to be another highly presti- gious series for the British company.
“Africa is a multi-million dollar series,” Jackson continues, “and it’s fantastically filmed. But it’s hopefully taking the subject on in a different way. These are very people led stories and involves animals and their natural envi- ronment in a different way than the tra- ditional BBC documentary ever would.
“For instance we’ve told the story of the Sahara Desert
through the eyes of
a nine year old
who’s on his very first caravan jour- ney, a round trip of a thousand miles. He is telling us his story of what he’s doing and through that we are seeing the histo- ry of the desert.
“If somebody
asked me what show two was about I’d say it’s about the desert, and they might say they’ve seen that a thou- sand times. But told through the eyes of a nine year old boy it becomes something different. What we’ve tried to do is constantly reinvent the way of telling a story.
“Our aim is to get the Guardian headline that reads ‘watch tonight and learn more about the Sahara’ and the Sun headline which reads ‘watch this 9 year old boy walking for 30 days in the heat of a 130 degrees’. We’re hope- fully bringing in different audiences each time by appealing across the board.”
Achieving the rarefied goal of
educating and
entertaining
has been the
hallmark of
Tigress’s output down the years, and it continues to be the watchword of Bradshaw and his fellow directors Jackson, Brand and Justine Kershaw.
“The problem with units that are specifically focused on making natural history is that that they tend to be inward looking,” says Bradshaw. “They concentrate on the speciality that they deal with, and can forget that
until it was discovered in the last cou- ple of decades.
“Bears are breaking into peoples’ homes and coming closer than they ever did before. Scientists have found chimpanzees that actively hunt other monkeys. There are new stories break- ing out all the time. We also made the current affairs update for Channel 4, Death Watch, about the foot and mouth crisis.”
Not restricted to wildlife films, Tigress also specialises in the science and adventure genre. Justine Kershaw is making a programme for Secrets Of The Dead entitled Riddle of the Plague: Survivors, about new genetic work which reveals why some people survived the great plague in Europe when others didn’t. There’s also a series called Haunted for Channel 5 which investigates the paranormal.
As programme makers get more and more adventurous in their uses of computer graphics, reconstruction and other storytelling techniques, so audiences are showing an ever greater appetite for factual programming. It seems that documentaries produced by companies like Tigress will contin- ue to be a mainstay of the schedules – which is good news for Jeremy Bradshaw and his team.
“What we’re most interested in,” says Andrew Jackson, “is bringing an audience to natural history, rather than bringing natural history to an audience. That’s our aim.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
Africa was originated primarily on Fuji 64D, Fuji 250D,
Photos: inset above, In The Wild with Holly Hunter; main and top: scenes from Africa (photos Duncan Chard and Graham Booth)