David Attenborough: Bristol and Wildlife TV - more than an accident of History.

From: Made in the UK online essays at the BBC
www.bbc.co.uk/madeintheuk

(Image from Aerial online)

THE NATURAL history unit in Bristol is a rare constant in an evolving broadcast world. Whereas other specialist centres of excellence have come and gone, the NHU has always been there, or so it seems. What happy combination of circumstances and talents made Bristol the ideal habitat for the unit, enabling it to grow into the most enduringly successful out-of- London production department in the history of the BBC?

You might argue that there has always been a strong interest in natural history in the West Country, and a long tradition there of self-educated, amateur naturalists. But the truth is that the NHU would not exist in Bristol, had it not been for the enthusiasm and passion of one man, and his belief in the public service ideals of the BBC. Desmond Hawkins was not himself a trained naturalist, nor a West Countryman. He moved as a radio producer to the BBC in Bristol after WW2 and started natural history production in Bristol with radio programmes such as The Naturalist and Birds In Britain, long before the arrival of television in the area. As a boy, I listened to those programmes, and I dare say my own passion was stoked by them.

Desmond Hawkins interviewing Sir Peter Scott

(Image from WildFilmHistory)

Global reputation In 1952 I began my career with the BBC in London, at the tv talks department in Alexandra Palace. I worked on anything from political broadcasts to archaeological quizzes. But before long I launched Zoo Quest, a series which took me all over the world and helped to determine the future course of my life. Meanwhile, in Bristol, Desmond Hawkins had decided that as soon as it was physically possible to make television programmes in the West Country, his team of natural history specialists would show these upstarts in London how it was really done. Hardly was Zoo Quest on the air in 1954 than Desmond had decided to launch his own series Look, with Peter Scott, whose bird sanctuary at Slimbridge was only 20 miles away. The fact that there was still no actual tv studio in the city, or for that matter any transmitter or tv sets in the region, did not deter him. He brought in an outside broadcast unit, ran cables and cameras into the large radio studio and piped the programme by landline up to London. So natural history tv programmes were being made in Bristol even before anyone in the region could watch them. Enthusiasm is infectious, and Desmond gathered about him a core of people whose passion for natural history equalled his own, so that by 1957 it was officially recognised as a production specialism in Bristol, and he set up the NHU proper there.

When I became controller of BBC Two in 1965, I naturally wanted to indulge my own passion for natural history. When BBC launched colour tv in Britain, I could think of no subject better suited to showing off the new technology. I commissioned from the NHU The World About Us, initially a series of 26x50 minute programmes that turned into a long-running strand, and helped to establish a global reputation for the unit. Bristol also produced Life, a magazine programme that covered natural history news stories. Productions like these, building on the foundation of its existing BBC One output, secured the future of the unit and bound natural history production ever more closely with its Bristol roots.

David Attenborough outside a cave entrance during filming of Life on Earth

(Image from WildFilmHistory)

At BBC Two, I also launched a style of documentary which would now be described as the ‘landmark’ series, taking a big subject and devoting 13 onehour programmes to it. The first of these was Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, followed by Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man. An obvious contender for the same treatment had to be the history of all life on earth, but that was a subject I hankered after tackling myself. As soon as I resigned from my management job, I suggested the idea to one of the most experienced producers at the NHU, Chris Parsons, who would later himself head the unit. This was without doubt at the time the most ambitious series to be produced in Bristol. We started work on it in the mid-1970s, and the ground-breaking Life on Earth was transmitted in 1979 to huge audiences, selling around the globe so that eventually it was estimated that 500m people watched it. There is a great deal of trial and error in producing natural history programmes, and the people who make them have built up extraordinary levels of knowledge and expertise. Waiting patiently week after week in freezing temperatures for a snow leopard to creep across a mountainside, or understanding precisely when and how to film the annual hatch of turtles on a starlit beach, requires special skills. So too does the post- production of natural history series, and once a commissioning momentum was established, over the years the NHU in Bristol attracted many satellite businesses and freelancers. The city has accumulated a unique set of trades and talents.

Cultural identity At the same time the cultural life of Bristol has benefited from the existence of the NHU. The world’s first wildlife film festival, Wildscreen, was held in the city, attracting visitors from all over the world. The University of Bristol would probably tell you that its zoology department gains greatly from the fact that the best natural history television unit in the world is within walking distance, and a close and symbiotic relationship has sprung up between the two. Producers and academics drink in the same pubs and exchange ideas, and many a promising young graduate has found employment at BBC Bristol. It may have been historical accident that the NHU was founded in Bristol, rather than London, but instinct tells me that when Desmond Hawkins produced the first natural history radio programmes there in 1946, he already saw far further than the wildlife that was on his West Country doorstep. Natural history programme making has become as much a part of Bristol’s cultural identity as seafaring or the wine trade. The skills it takes to make such programmes are now woven into the fabric of the city, and long may it remain so.

Read David Attenborough’s full article and the other Made in the UK online essays at the BBC

www.bbc.co.uk/madeintheuk

Interview with the directors of DisneyNature's Earth

Interview with Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield.

Interview: DisneyNature Earth

Disneynature launch 'Earth' on Earth day.
DisneyNatures EARTH Interview
Interview by Sheila Roberts for http://www.moviesonline.ca/

The first film in the Disneynature series, “Earth,” narrated by James Earl Jones, tells the remarkable story of three animal families and their amazing journeys across the planet we all call home. “Earth” combines rare action, unimaginable scale and impossible locations by capturing the most intimate moments of our planet’s wildest and most elusive creatures. Directors Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield, the acclaimed creative team behind the Emmy Award-winning “Planet Earth,” combine forces again to bring this epic adventure to the big screen, beginning Earth Day, April 22, 2009.

“Earth” is the first film from Disneynature, the first new Disney-branded label in 60 years. It is headed by Jean-Francois Camilleri, executive vice president and general manager of the company. With plans to release one feature-length nature film a year, Disneynature was formed in the proud tradition established by Walt Disney with the classic True-Life Adventures series form 1948 to 1960, which won eight Academy Awards.

MoviesOnline sat down with directors Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield and Disneynature’s executive vice president and general manager, Jean-Francois Camilleri, to talk about their new film, “Earth.” Here’s what they had to tell us:

Q: Can you talk about the genesis of this project and why it was an important film to make?

Alastair: Well, it took five years to make. The original vision was that, if you look at nature in cinema, it’s been played on a relatively small canvas. If you look at movies like Microcosmos, Winged Migration and even March of the Penguins, they’re very focused movies on a particular subject. And, Mark and I felt that nobody had ever tried to do the whole planet and it seemed to be a time where people were increasingly caring about our planet. It was the perfect time. But, we didn’t quite appreciate the scale of the challenge. Logistically, it was massive. The genesis was the desire to make an epic movie about an epic subject, which is the natural history of the whole planet.

Q: There are so many endangered species in the world now. Why pick these particular species?

Mark: One of the storylines is the power of the sun and the journey the sun takes and the strength of the seasons. We wanted to choose animals that were affected by the seasons of the planet. The polar bear, living in the Arctic, is in the most seasonal environment on Earth, and much of the storyline is about how the mother polar bear has to battle with the naturally changing things in her environment. Similarly with the elephants, they have to undertake long, epic journeys through desert, which is seasonal. And, the humpback whales travel from the Equator, all the way down to the south. The other thing about those animals is that they are all engaging, intelligent creatures that we felt people would connect with, and that was very important in telling the story in the cinema.

Q: Do you have to be a certain type of person that you don’t get involved and try to help any of these animals?

Alastair: It’s a very interesting question that we do get asked quite a lot, and I generally think it’s a very interesting one because it’s one that concerns us a great deal. On the first level, what are you supposed to do? The male polar bear was starving, yes. Filming that was, for the cameraman and the director there, a very painful thing to do. But, what are we supposed to do, shoot the walrus? You might shoot one, but then you’ve got a life responsibility to go on doing it. The first rule wildlife filmmakers have is to be true to nature. You don’t interfere, you don’t get involved and the reality is that nature is read in tooth and claw. You have to be true to nature, both on the screen and also in the way that you deal with those issues. Obviously, Mark and I are passionate about the natural world, but we recognize that a cheetah is a predator, beautifully evolved. Yes, a cheetah kills Bambi, and that’s sad, but that cheetah has got its own cubs and I think people understand that, if you put it in context. If you look at the cheetah sequence in Earth, we very deliberately slowed it down. You look at that cheetah and can see every move of its muscle and every sinew in its body, and you think, “This is a beautiful predator, at the very top of its game.” George Fenton, our composer, chose an Armenian woman singing because that’s a completely different voice or sound than you would normally associate with a predation sequence, where you have the traditional, rather cliche drum for “Here comes the predator that’s going to kill them.” We didn’t want that. We wanted to say, “Look at this animal. It is beautiful.” But, we recognize that these are family movies and we’re very careful to cut them so that you don’t dwell on the blood and gore. You don’t need to. People know what’s going to happen.

Mark: That’s an important point. There’s a line of commentary over that cheetah hunt that says, “This is the circle of life that people in their urban environment have lost touch with.” In many ways, that cheetah hunt is metaphorical for lots of stuff that you don’t really need to see. You don’t need to see the blood and guts. The moment that that gazelle is brought down, you really don’t need to see what happens next. But, equally, I don’t think you want to shield people from the sequence, up to that point. That is nature. That is the stuff that some of us are losing contact with.

Q: How long did this take to make? Over what period of time did you make it? How much footage did you end up with? How long did it take to edit all of that together?

Mark: Five years was the production period, of which three years were filming. There were 2,000 days in the field with over 40 different teams. With these true-life adventures, there really is no script. The animals just don’t do stuff to order. The way to crack it is immense effort, immense time and using everything that we can to stack the odds in our favor, using the best scientists, the best locations and just a lot of time.

Alastair: And patience, patience, patience.

Q: What are some of the challenges that you both had to face, during the making of this movie, and what did you learn from them?

Alastair: There were a number of different challenges. Mark has touched on the logistical challenges, to a certain extent, and there were some real technological challenges in this movie. Actually, we were extraordinarily lucky that high-definition cameras had just become available, at the beginning of the shooting. There is an extraordinary camera system called a Cineflex, which stabilizes a lens four or five times more powerful than has ever been stabilized in a helicopter before, and that’s extremely important for wildlife documentaries because you can fly four times higher and still get all the close-ups you need. A classic example would be the wolf hunt. Wolves are very shy animals and they run very fast when they’re running down caribou calves, and you just cannot film that from the ground. That had literally never been filmed before. But, with our helicopter so high that the wolves could hardly hear it, we filmed the whole sequence. And the swimming polar bear, out there where you can’t go in a boat or on foot, we were able to film beautifully in the wild. I was in this helicopter and I was over this male polar bear that was swimming, and I knew nobody had ever filmed anything like that before. It was dark blue water and bits of white ice and he dove down, and I was genuinely in tears because I thought, “This is just beautiful.” I was pleased because I knew it was new, and I was in tears because I was emotionally moved by it. One of the things that we’ve been really pleased about the reaction to this movie in Europe and Japan is that people have said to us, “There’s stuff in this movie which we cannot believe hasn’t been created by a computer.” In a world where a lot of cinema is dependent on computers, and Disney does that better than anybody, it’s really wonderful that, with true-life nature, there is nothing in Earth or any of the movies we are doing as part of Disneynature that isn’t absolutely true.

Mark: That’s where the power of it comes from.

Alastair: That is something really refreshing and new.

Q: What was the most dangerous situation that you got into during filming, that had the biggest pay-off for you?

Alastair: The dangerous one was the lions and elephants with the sequence of the pride of 30 lions bringing down the elephant. You immediately might think that the lions are the dangerous bit and, yes, if you got outside your vehicle, they would have definitely eaten you. But, that was okay. You just sit in the vehicle. But, what was really dangerous was that that sequence was filmed in infrared, in complete darkness, because if you use white light, you would have disturbed the animals. We had about 20 people there with lights and cameras, and the only person who could see anything was the camera woman. Basically, we were in there and there were a lot of these elephants, and these mother elephants were really worried. A 15-20 ton mother elephant, looking after her calf, will run straight through your Land Rover without even thinking about it. That was something where the safety issues were slightly high on our concern levels.

Mark: There were some other surprising ones as well. The great white sharks you would think are not dangerous because we’re in a boat and the great white sharks are leaping away. But, they’re actually leaping quite close to the boat and, at that particular location, it has been known for a shark to leap out of the water, rather innocently chasing a seal, and actually land in the boat, which is not recommended.

Alastair: The other one that was particularly memorable was the sailfish which are these wonderful big fish that are 2-3 meters long with these great big javelin things on their noses. We had about 70 of them together. It was an extraordinarily lucky occurrence to have so many. And they were feeding on little bait fish, which are small fish. These little fish are very clever and they saw the cameraman as the best thing to hide behind, and the cameraman came out of the water and said, “This is just unbelievable. I’m in there and these javelins are shooting past my ear. I can literally hear the roar of this fish.” They swim at 70 mph. It is a fast fish.

Mark: Anything to do with polar bears is another thing. Polar bears are very unusual animals, in that most animals maybe present a risk if they’re wounded or they’re starving and hungry. Polar bears just see you as a nice, tasty mammal, wrapped up in a bit of plastic wrapper. You are fair game for a polar bear. If you think about where they live, out in the Arctic waste, there isn’t much to eat. When they come across something nice that’s the size of a fat seal, they’re going to have a go, if you’re not very careful.

Q: Where do you go from here if this one is Earth? What is on the slate?

JFC: I think Earth is a perfect film to start with because we start with everything earth. The next one will be about oceans, which is depicted in Earth a little bit but it will really be about the ocean, nothing but ocean. Then we are doing a movie called Naked Beauty which is about pollinators, bees, hummingbirds, butterflies and explains the incredible love story between them and flowers and vegetables. We are doing a movie with Alastair Fothergill and Keith Scholey in Kenya about African cats called African Cats: Kingdom of Courage, where we follow cheetahs, lions and leopards. Mark and Alastair are working on a new thing for us called Chimpanzees, which is being shot in the Ivory Coast in Africa

Q: Can you talk about bringing back DisneyNature after a 60 year absence? What prompted it?

JFC: Several things. The first one is there is a great appetite from the worldwide audience for this type of film. We saw it with Winged Migration, March of the Penguins and with Earth, which has been released already in European countries and Asia. I think it makes so much sense for Disney to bring these beautiful films and stories to the big screen. Sixty years ago we had True Life Adventures but even since, even when True Life Adventures ended, Disney has always been very close to nature and to animals so it was making a lot of sense. I think it’s a perfect period to do it because people care about nature more than they might have cared like 20 years ago. And we had these wonderful incredible directors working with us but also the techniques evolved, and worked so well with today’s beautiful theaters, with HD, and great sound. I think these wildlife feature films belong to the big screen and movie theaters. They are the best places to see these films, which might not have been the case 20 years ago. Today, if you want to discover Earth, and animal behaviors and the incredible stories in nature, the movie theaters are the best place to discover them. On the film we are doing with Mark and Alastair, every six months there is a brand new camera coming out that is even better than the ones before. So it’s a perfect time for us to do this and revisit nature.

Q: What about anthropomorphizing animals, like the young polar bears have the spirit of their father in their hearts, when he might have eaten them. Can you talk about that choice to do that so we can identify with them?

Alastair: You’re completely wrong to say the father would eat his own cubs, but you’re completely right that he’d eat anyone else’s cubs. But you are talking about a very key point. We have to recognize that these are family movies and that’s why I think they’ll work so well in theaters. I think they appeal to four year olds and I hope they’ll appeal to 94 year olds. To be honest, if we chose not to anthromorphize the animals in the script, people would anyway. That’s the way human beings look at natural history. I’ve made a lot of natural history television with very scientific narration and you still get anthromorphizing animals. And what’s wrong with that, for God’s sake? You say the polar bear’s young don’t know the spirit of their father, well they do—that’s what they’re doing. They’re carrying on their father’s genes. If you want to replace the word genes with spirit, it’s a bit more romantic, it’s a bit more theatric. I make no excuses for that.

Q: There are a lot of funny things that the animals are doing, like the courting bird and the little birds falling out of the nest and flying, did you make a conscious effort to balance it with humor?

Mark: Absolutely. It’s critical on a cinema movie. In any movie actually you want the full, rich gamut of emotions—laughter, sadness, pathos. You want them all. And the great thing about nature is it does provide them all so you’d be crazy not to use it. It does give you that full, rounded experience of cinema that we hope people will get when they see it

Alastair: The bird of paradise dance is hysterically funny. The fact that he puts all that effort in and the girl never turns up, well we’ve all been there.

Mark: Particularly Alastair

Alastair: Yeah. But it’s true

Mark: Even the baboons. They’re not wanting to get their private parts too wet or whatever. It’s great, it’s fabulous

JFC: What you said is very important. These are movies for the theaters and we need to have the same type of emotion as in any movie. And they managed to have all that.

Q: The dancing bird was in Planet Earth as well—was that repurposed footage? Did you use anything you’d shot for that and did you try to make things different?

Alastair: The wonderful thing about this movie is that we knew from the very beginning that we were working on a TV series and a movie. Very strictly, we thought for the movie that we would have a completely different storyline. The TV series, if you’ve seen it, is about mountains, rivers, deserts. Very few people can watch the whole TV series anyway. The movie has its own completely separate storyline---the whole planet storyline, the sun’s journey, the three key characters. And we shot a lot of extra material of those key characters. What the TV series helped us to provide was some of the animal behaviors that are in the movie like the bird of paradise, but all of them were completely re-edited for the big screen and there was a completely new music score composed and played by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, which was an extraordinary privilege. They’re the best orchestra in the world and that was a pretty amazing experience. And also having James Earl Jones’ voice which works brilliantly in the cinema but possibly wouldn’t be so appropriate for a TV series.

Q: Was he your first choice?

Alastair: Absolutely. We’ve used different voices in different parts of the world. In the UK version we used Patrick Stewart.

Mark: But for the U.S., yes.

Alastair: (To Camilleri): I don’t know if it was you who suggested James to us, it was Disney’s suggestion. We’re really happy with it

Mark: He brings a weight, a gravitas fitting of the subject, and it’s a rather large subject, the whole planet

Q: What would you like to have the audience take away from seeing this film?

Alastair: More than anything else we want them to have a good time in the cinema. This isn’t An Inconvenient Truth. It’s not The Eleventh Hour. It’s not trying to preach to people. There’s a lot of bad news about the environment out there. But if you had all the money in the world and ten lifetimes you wouldn’t see ten percent of what we can show you in this movie. It’s all there, it’s still there, it needs preserving. And we just want people to come out uplifted, really.

Mark: It’s funny, people come out saying there’s a conservation message but it’s so subtle and light that it just naturally emerges from the fact that when people see all the things they see in the movie, they realize that’s still out there and what we need to preserve. You just naturally come to that conclusion. It’s a very light environmental slant but it’s actually not so much delivered by us, it’s just the take home that people tell us after the movie. It has a strong conservation message and not really intentionally, it’s just the way it is. It’s inevitable.

Q: How do you market a film like this? Does it go to art house theaters?

JFC: It’s going to have a traditional release. The movie is going to come out on April 22nd on 1800 screens. It’s going to go in regular theaters like any movie

Q: It won’t be promoted with Happy Meals at McDonalds will it?

JFC: Nope

Mark: But there is a fantastic tree planting scheme, which we’re all delighted about.

JFC: The first seven days, for everyone who buys a ticket, we plant a tree in the Atlantic forest in Brazil.

Q: Potentially how many can you plant?

JFC: As many as possible. For each person who comes we plant a tree.

Q: Where did you get your passion for nature?

Mark: We both started rummaging around in the undergrowth, catching slugs and snails to show to our family and spending all of our time…

Alastair: I had a zoo in my bedroom. My mother would never, ever come near it.

Mark: Both of us had rooms full of animals that we probably shouldn’t have had and both of us really enjoyed being excited about them and explaining them to other people. We both went to university to read zoology and then just sort of tried to publicize our enthusiasm and kind of spread it so it was a natural evolution to end up doing this

Alastair: We started in television at the BBC Natural History unit and made a lot of TV documentaries, most of them with David Attenborough. The cinema has been the natural evolution of that for us

Q: What did you learn from making this?

Mark: The amazing tenacity and dedication, all of those animals have successfully pulled through a difficult year on earth and show incredible tenacity and drive and I guess that’s what we all need as well

Alastair: I think that’s true and one of the nice things about concentrating on mothers and their babies is that one of the things you think about the film is we’re preserving the planet for the next generation. That’s one of the resonances that we hope in a subtle way this movie might have an environmental message for people. I think there are very specific and exciting challenges about making nature work for cinema and creatively and technically something that will continue with us. We’re very fortunate to be doing that now with the chimpanzee movie and the big cat movie, which are very different challenges but very exciting as well

“Earth” opens in theaters on April 22nd.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within are in no way those of the editorial team of TheNatureWatch.com

Mark Carwardine: Last Chance to see... Again!

Nadège Laici for The NatureWatch

“I’ve been asked to talk about my life but this could take years so for tonight I’ll just talk to you about what I’ve done last year.” Mark Carwardine smiled widely and turned the lights off.

It must have been a chilly evening of March and I was stuck in my chair unable to look away from the screen where the most amazing wildlife spectacles were projected. Two hours before, one glance at a photo on his website of a couple of blue whales taken from the air had convinced me to give up my laundry plans.

I can now confirm it with jealousy and admiration, Mark Carwardine encounters more wildlife in a year than most people dream to encounter in a lifetime. He has been literally everywhere on the seven continents, supporting the most diverse and varied conservation projects. A zoologist and renowned photographer, Mark has also presented numerous wildlife related programmes on BBC 4. He is chairman of the judging panel for the Wildlife photographer of the year and writes monthly columns for BBC Wildlife and Wanderlust. Mark has also written more than 50 books mainly on wildlife but also on conservation and travel based themes, one of them being “Last Chance To See” co-written with Douglas Adams and published in 1990.

I approached him at the end of his talk, holding on tightly to the last issue of the “Missing Link”, the University of Bristol Natural Sciences Magazine, that I’d dared to bring. He drew a little whale in the book I brought for him to sign and accepted to give me an interview.

Mark Carwardine began travelling around the world with Douglas Adams in 1988 to look for some of our planet’s most endangered species. They made a successful radio series about it and subsequently wrote a book describing their adventures which became a best-seller.

“Originally, Douglas stuck pins in a world map as where he would really like to go… And then I stuck pins where the endangered species are and we compromised and went for a mixture… but the whole idea was to pick animals that aren’t to obvious to most people and to pick the ones that are really charismatic and really different like the Aye-Aye and the Komodo Dragon. And of course at that time most people haven’t had heard of most of these animals.”

Each chapter of the book covers one of the trips made by the pair. The first one tells us about the time they met in 1985 when Douglas Adams was sent to Madagascar with Mark to look for the almost extinct Aye-aye. The encounter finishes with Douglas Adams saying to Mark : “I’ve just got a couples of novels to write, but, er, what are you doing in 1988?”

They began their adventures journeying to Komodo to see its famous Dragon. On their way to meet the White Rhino in Zaïre, they saw the Mountain Gorillas, then on to search for the Kakapo in New-Zealand, the Yangtze river dolphin in China and on the last leg of their epic journey they found the Rodrigues fruit bat in Mauritius.

“They are really different, each one represents a different issue. So one might represent haunting and poaching and another one would be Rainforest destruction and so on so you cover different themes within each chapter and have a whole range of different animals.“ Mark had a sip of his orange juice, looking grave. “I think they listed the latest account, 16 300 endangered animals and plants you can chose from, so everything from the Giant panda, which everyone has heard of, to the No-eyed Big-eyed Wolf Spider which is in Hawaii, that nobody has heard of.”

Mark just started filming a BBC TV series at the beginning of 2008 inspired by his book “Last Chance To See”. In January, he went to the heart of the Brazilian Amazon with Steven Fry to film the Amazonian manatee. There, they joined their forces to produce a the series that they are now co-presenting.

The unusual partnership of Douglas Adams and Mark Cawardine made the book simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious. Mark ensured me that they will keep this spirit in the series.
“I did the travels with Douglas Adams twenty years ago and so there is a history, we can actually have a look back for the first time ever in a TV series. We have a chance to see what has happened over a long period of time, see how the animals that we went to look for are doing. Douglas died, about six years ago now and he was good friends with Stephen Fry, who I knew. Stephen seemed like the obvious person to take his place being genuinely interested in wildlife and conservation, so I contacted him and he said he’d like to. We took the opportunity with the twenty year anniversary to look back. We are looking for partly the original animals, and partly a whole load of new ones.

The aim of the series is to get people who wouldn’t normally watch a wildlife program or a wildlife series to think about conservation. The whole idea was not to have a heavy documentary style that only very keen people would watch but no one else would… because it’s too boring!

On working with Steven
Steven Fry has a much more popular appeal, a whole different take on it. The first program we have maid has loads of very funny bits and it’s very entertaining as well as having a serious thing, and I think that’s the aim of the series. It will maybe attract people not necessarily that interested because of Stephen and everyone will go away with at least some sort o idea of what conservation is all about. So the whole idea is it’s entertainment and there’s a message.
Stephen has an incredible knowledge about everything already but he hasn’t been to the majority of these places, hasn’t done roughing it very much and so that’s all a big adventure and a new experience for him. The idea is to look at things from a fresh perspective; if you’ve been involved in conservation for a long time you don’t necessarily see things from a side view, which is interesting. I went originally to all the places and I’ve been back since and know them reasonably well. I act then as a guide, introducing them to people and then in between we go of with Stephen, looking for the animals.”


The book was a real success and had such an impact on many people that I wondered what Mark was expecting from the series.


“I spoke to people who said that as a result of reading it they change their career and got involved in conservation and so on. That’s fantastic! That’s exactly what we hope might happen. Television has a much bigger impact than a book in many ways so who knows, it might just hit a pool of people to go off and do something. I think the more people who actually can be aware of some of the details of what’s happening in conservation rather than that sort of background noise of observation, then the better.”

Of course it has been proved many times in the past, wildlife TV programmes have helped to shape attitudes towards nature and conservation. So what is the best way to do it?
“It’s got to be a combination of hope and shock. If you have a completely negative television series it would be too depressing and everyone would give up. It’s like walking around and say: The end of the world is now! It’s not a good way of inspiring people. So it’s much more important to say: We’ve got really serious problems and not pretend they’re not serious, but then meet the people who are devoting their lives to doing something about it and learn what needs to be done and how it can be done and thus inspire people to do something. We have to be honest but we also have to make the point that there’s actually something that could be done, that most of these animals can be protected and saved if there is the world to do it. It’s a matter of hitting a balance between honesty and inspiration. I think that’s where individual people come in. Most of them have been there all these years and they are still devoting their lives to saving individual species. In most cases a lot of these species have been really seriously endangered that are still here because of the few individuals, not because of big conservation groups, meeting or conferences. These individuals live in the field and do everything in their power to save them. That is really inspiring, the fact that one person can make the difference, it’s cliché but it’s true.”

Because some of the species they went to see are even more threatened now than twenty years ago (The White Rhino and the Yangtze river dolphin are even believed to be extinct), I thought that finding them again would be more difficult now but Mark’s views were different.

“Twenty years ago, you couldn’t phone or email these places so we had to do it by telex which banged away one letter at that time and the message came out. It took us ages to get replies and it was much more difficult travelling around. Now you email and you get a reply that same day, you can fly to many more places we could then, there were boat trips to islands and there’s tourism and so on… so setting up the trips is a lot easier. In most cases the same people are there, working on the same animals. We were in the Amazon doing the first shoot and we met the same lady who was already studying the Amazonian manatee twenty years ago when Doug an I first met her in the same place. But the actual finding of the animals is going to vary, two of the eight species we picked for the book are now extinct… that says everything. Some of them are doing better than twenty years ago; the Aye-aye is now relatively easy to see, whereas it wasn’t when we went. The Komodo Dragon is pretty much the same and the Kakapo is doing a little better".

This reminded me of an interview made after the filming of “Planet Earth”, some of the crew members were also working on “Life on Earth” filmed twenty years beforehand. They were saying how they were both depressed and touched after coming to the same places and finding them completely changed and even sometimes destroyed by human intervention. Did he fear that happening to him?

“All the time. You rarely go back somewhere and see it has improved, nearly everywhere you go back two years later and it’s worse. There’s less wildlife and there’s more people. They’re places where you could go and be the only one in the whole reserve or national park and now there are hundreds of thousands of people and the wildlife is in general harder to see. It is quite depressing sometimes travelling around the world because you really do see a decline. A man I was talking to the other day was describing a scene in East Africa with 72 vehicles of Tourists around one pride of Lions…But tourism can help as well, there would be no Mountain Gorillas without it. It has to be well managed though so you have a situation where the money from tourism is being put back into national parks or into conservation of species and habitats but where it’s not allowed to get out of hands and destroy the wildlife. It’s a really delicate balance and you don’t get that many places who got it right.”

Mark Carwardine continued telling me about conservation and I couldn’t stop asking him questions about his marvellous adventures. I saw the twinkle in his eyes every time he was describing one of his favourites wildlife encounters.

“I think watching blue whales from the air, in an aircraft with the door off is pretty spectacular… because you get the idea of the scale of the animal slowly swimming below, that’s quite exciting.”

I remember with shame hearing myself saying: “You don’t even realise how lucky you are…” He looked right into my eyes and smiled. “No, I do!” When he had to go, we said goodbye and I walked away feeling ten feet tall.

Nadège Laici

I would like to thank Rachel Ashton and of course Mark Carwardine for their generous help. (written in small)

Future Shoots
The final line-up is still being discussed (there are currently no fewer than 16,306 endangered species to choose from) but this is the plan so far:

PROGRAMME 1: Amazonian manatee and West Indian manatee (Brazil and Florida).

PROGRAMME 2: Northern white rhino (now extinct), mountain gorilla and African lion (Uganda and Congo).

PROGRAMME 3: Aye-aye (Madagascar).

PROGRAMME 4: Kakapo (New Zealand).

PROGRAMME 5: Komodo dragon (Indonesia).

PROGRAMME 6: Yangtze river dolphin (China) and a selection of endangered whales, dolphins and porpoises (Mexico).

Please visit : http://www.bbc.co.uk/lastchancetosee/ to follow Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine online in their incredible journey to some of the most remote places on earth in search of animals on the edge of extinction through exclusive video and blogs.

Presenter Interview: Saba Douglas-Hamilton

From Times Online

“Fear is what you feel at night when you have come to your senses,” says Saba Douglas-Hamilton. The young anthropologist props her chin on a slender, bronzed wrist and fixes me with intense hazel eyes. “My biggest fear is that we don’t wake up in time to this insatiable devouring of natural resources and pollution that threatens every lifeline, and we lose everything.”

The naturalist – once described as having the “effortless sex appeal of a young Anna Ford” – captivated the powers that be at the Natural History Unit when she arrived with her father, the zoologist Dr Iain Douglas-Hamilton, in 2001. Since then she has fronted series such as Big Cat Diary, which she says was “quite macho” before she came into it. “It was two men out in the bush. When I came in, it did soften a bit, and people realised that, actually, girls can do this too.”

She is fresh from filming a three-part BBC series The Secret Life of Elephants, about her father’s Kenyan-based charity, Save the Elephants. As a graduate she trained with Blythe Loutit, the revered rhino conservationist, in the Namibian desert. Loutit, who dedicated her life to pulling the last of the desert-adapted rhinos from the brink of extinction, was “a real eco-warrior who lived on absolutely nothing”.

Her take on the emotions and awareness that large mammals display attracts vast audiences. Elephants, for example, have traits such as empathy and a sense of mortality, and plan for the future in a way that “makes them a lot more like us than we think”. At present, she says, of all the money given to animal charities, most goes to domestic pets. She hopes, by helping people to engage with wild animals, to redress the balance. “The rhino, for example, may look like a throwback from a prehistoric era, but it thinks and feels and does things for intelligent reasons.”

Douglas-Hamilton bases herself on the outskirts of Nairobi in her “biodegradable house” – a ramshackle hut that she built with her husband, Frank Pope, a writer and marine archeologist. “It’s easy to forget how lifestyle affects the environment – eating Chilean sea bass or buying ivory. Don’t buy ivory! It equals dead elephants, most often killed illegally. If you like sushi or tinned tuna, be aware of what species you are eating, where they come from and how they are fished. I feel very strongly that we need to bring a stronger conservation ethic back into making films, how we’re selling stories, how we’re awakening people’s consciences.”

She grew up in the Kenyan wilderness with her younger sister, Dudu. Her father introduced her to their extended family of 400 elephants at just six weeks old – so understanding animals is second nature. “I find human beings far more scary than animals because they are much more unpredictable,” she says. She likens film crews to “parasites. We go out there, find the best stories, suck out all the information, take beautiful images and then leave. The scientists who are there day in, day out, collecting data and finding those stories are the real heroes. Like rangers taking bullets from poachers, they are in the front line. My job is to link these worlds. What I love is to bring the wilderness into people’s sitting rooms and then, hopefully, they’ll feel a passion for what’s going on”.

Presenter Interview: Miranda Krestovnikoff

From Times Online

“It has been mentioned I have to glam up a bit,” laughs Miranda Krestovnikoff, a biologist by training and a presenter of Coast, her sea-tanned face beaming from across her kitchen table. “But I’m very much a jeans-and-wellies sort of person: you’d look slightly stupid if you were wading around in the undergrowth wearing a large pair of earrings.” Krestovnikoff, seven months pregnant with her second child, is on a mission to make us appreciate our native treasures. “I’m passionate about British countryside and the British coastline. To have an amazing experience, people think you’ve got to go somewhere wild and remote – they forget the diversity of wildlife we have in this country.”

Krestovnikoff was one of scores of young, eager and privately educated Bristol University biology graduates banging on the door of the BBC’s Bristol-based Natural History Unit.

“It was a slow start,” she admits, “but I got my break looking after frogs and toads for a cameraman who introduced me to people at the BBC. I started as a science researcher for wildlife programmes, and then became the resident zoologist and presenter for Fox Television’s World Gone Wild in 1998.” She has extensive knowledge of marine and other wildlife, a gung-ho attitude and an ability to encourage even the most tongue-tied field researchers to talk.

She credits her husband, Nick, as much of the reason that she can have a child and hold down the demanding schedules. “We’re a team, and having that sort of relationship is really critical in a job that’s so transient. One minute you’re working and the next your contract has come to an end.” And the future? “I’d like to do more green-based things on television. It’s not just conserving species, but getting the message out about our environment and the world we live in. It is such a fragile place, we are massive consumers and just don’t think about our actions enough. Somehow it’s going to have to change.”

Wildlife broadcasting, too, needs to evolve. “If you’ve got the right expertise, qualifications and you fit the bill, then I don’t think it’s any harder for women to get into wildlife presenting. But to stay and make a big name for yourself is difficult. As a woman, you might make it for a few years, but somebody younger or more glamorous than you is going to come in. Whereas with men, it’s the voice of authority. I’m prepared for the worst.”

For now, she is embracing what she has. “Every day that I work, I’m learning something. If I’m in the middle of Pembrokeshire on a boat looking at puffins, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world.” Not that she doesn’t sometimes question herself. “The weather in this country is so extreme, and there are frequent moments, when diving and filming with a big heavy mask on, when it’s hard to breathe. When I’m roped to a boat in murky, freezing-cold water, trying to work against the current, I do think, ‘What am I doing? I’m mad.’ ”

Presenter Interview: Dr Charlotte Uhlenbroek

From Times Online
It takes more than a pretty face to follow in the footsteps of Sir David Attenborough. Wildlife television presenting was once a man’s world. A documentary on baboon behaviour or ocelot extinction would call for a bearded naturalist like David Bellamy, or the cheery anthropomorphism of Johnny Morris. But now this territory is facing a climate change all of its own, as it is invaded by a new breed of presenter: feisty, intelligent, eco-aware – and female. Though a publicist for Sir David Attenborough assures me that he is “obviously not replaceable”, his grip on the title of king of the jungle may not be as firm as it once was.

Dr Charlotte Uhlenbroek flings open the door to her Bristol-based home, auburn hair tumbling over her green safari shirt. I have caught up with Uhlenbroek the day before she flies to Uganda to film a chimpanzee series for Channel Five. Great apes are this zoologist’s speciality. She lived in a hut for four years on the edge of Lake Tanganyika, following chimps through the forest and recording their long-distance calls for her PhD, alongside the revered primatologist and conservationist Jane Goodall.

Uhlenbroek’s big television break came in the late 1990s. “I’d spent months analysing chimp vocalisations in a soundproof studio back in Bristol,” she explains – work that revealed that chimp communication involves not just one type of call, as was previously thought, but several different long-distance calls. “The BBC heard there was a girl up the road who had been working out in Gombe, and asked if I wanted to go back to present a series called Dawn to Dusk, and that they’d pay me!” Presenting came naturally to the young primatologist. “I was talking about chimps that I knew incredibly well. I was just turning to the camera as if it was a friend. I felt like a conduit.” Her ability to decipher primate behaviour, her blue-chip zoological credentials and look of “an eco-friendly Lara Croft” meant she was soon fronting BBC2’s Chimpanzee Diary. Since then, her eager, breathy tones have become a TV fixture. We have seen her swing through the jungle canopy, scale mengaris trees in Borneo and inspect pink-toed tarantulas in the Amazon.

Male journalists have noted Uhlenbroek’s “athletic, almost innocent sexiness” and her “tight sleeveless tops”; one wished “these frivolous young females dancing about” would stop making wildlife programmes. She appears unperturbed. “I’m a scientist. I’m coming in from a point of some expertise. Otherwise audiences think, ‘Why is she telling us this; how does she know?’ ” She doesn’t have a game plan. “I’m very much here and now and take things as they come. Television is a very fickle industry.”

Presenter Interview: Nick Baker

From BBC New Talent website

Nick is a broadcaster, author, naturalist, zoologist and has presented 'The Really Wild Show' for around ten years. He gets involved in field work, supporting conservation projects and is trying to build a zoo. Along with some of his many creatures Nick was also involved in the selection process for 'Serious Jungle'. Here he talks about his own love of wildlife, explains how he became a nature reporter and gives some advice to young explorers, like those who will go to the Andes, before they face the camera for the first time.

Q. Did you keep lots of pets when you were young?
I kept them in a cage with one of my mum's old stockings stretched over the top of it. We went away on holiday and the stockings laddered.
Listen to the full answer

Q. Now that you are 'grown-up', a well known naturalist and broadcaster, do you still keep pets?
I've got 3 tanks of frogs ... a turtle in the kitchen ... a spare bedroom full of snakes ... plus about 80 tarantulas, various scorpions ... (and much more).
Listen to the full answer

Q. How did you become a wildlife presenter?
I was chasing butterflies around down here in Devon ... and at the same time I was setting up a club for kids called the 'Bug Club'.
Listen to the full answer

Q. What advice can you give the young adventurers before they face the cameras in Serious Andes as reporters?
When you look at a camera you've got to forget about the fact that it could be broadcast to millions of people ... have a one-sided conversation with a pepperpot!
Listen to the full answer

Interview with Neil Nightingale, Head of the BBC Natural History Unit

Listen to Neil talking about his career here. (MP3 6mb)

I run the BBC Natural History Unit. Every year we make about 100 hours of television about 50 hours of radio.

I make sure we get enough great ideas for the radio and television commissioners, and then ensure the productions get made at the fantastic quality that our natural history productions are known for.

Average days might involve:

Meetings with my development teams, executive producers to see how productions are going, viewings of final programmes and visits to London talking to commissioners or channel controllers about future ideas and ongoing projects.

Because our work is international, I also travel from time to time. I used to travel on location as a producer, but now it's more to places like Washington, Tokyo and Beijing, striking deals, bringing money into the BBC on co-production, so we can continue to make the big expensive blockbusters like Planet Earth and other series.



"I rarely get a chance to go out on location now..."

although I will go down to Spring Watch in May - that's very close, in Devon - and last year I was lucky enough to go out and see the Big Cat Diary operation. I have been out to China this year, but that's mainly been to set up business deals rather than getting out with the pandas!

"I suppose the real highlights come at both ends of the process"

One is when you get a fantastic new commission, something exciting that you've never done before, something better, and you get the go-ahead to do it, and at the other end is when it goes out, something like Planet Earth at the moment, when it's a big success and everyone loves you for it.

"When I finished university, I was looking for a way to continue with a career in natural history"

I was interested in animals from a very early age and later I was also interested in writing and journalism. I was looking around at the kind of careers that would allow me to combine both of those and making natural history films seemed like a fantastic opportunity.

I got a job at the BBC in the natural history department. I was given a few days research which then continued, on very short contracts. I think you have to be quite dedicated if you want to get into this thing! Eventually I got on a BBC training scheme for two years, which kicked off my career.

"I still remember back to the days when I was working on news and in regional programmes"

I think particularly that very fast turnover, working in areas on daily and weekly programmes, gave me a huge boost. I was making films and preparing items every few days.

I think it's important to work on some fast turn-around programmes if you want to get on, because you probably learn more during that time than you'll learn in the rest of your career or even on a training course. You're learning from your mistakes every day.



"One of the most valuable things I've learnt over the years is flexibility"

Always look ahead and don't get stuck in a rut, look for the opportunities and problems that are about to hit you. I think it's the same in any creative job.

"If you're an aspiring wildlife programme maker, I think you've got to really want to do it"

It's incredibly competitive, but if you stick at it, if you're talented and you really want to do it, you can make it, there are great opportunities.

If you want to get a good idea of the programmes we make, the BBC Science & Nature website is excellent because it gives you both an idea of the programmes we have produced recently and a certain amount of behind the scenes material.



"Technology has always been a huge part of natural history"

I made a series called The Private Life Of Plants about ten years ago. We developed some of the first computer controlled tracking using time lapse cameras. This enabled us to follow plant behaviour over weeks, even months on occasion.

We're now well known for miniature cameras which we're able to put on the backs of birds, and things like boulder-cam and so on. But even at a more basic level, in terms of camera technology we now use Z1s the little HD DV cams, for some of the synch shooting on the diaries and we're moving into high definition which is very exciting.



Planet Earth is in high definition

It not only produces high picture quality but also has advantages such as being able to work in very low light, being able to work in a video format which allows you to remove the lens from the recorder. Gyro-stabilised helicopter mounts become possible because you only have a very small lens and the whole back end is in the helicopter - that's produced some fantastic results.

Technology is also a real driver in terms of post-production. On Planet Earth, producers have had access to their rushes on their desktops and have been able look at material, review it, log it and assemble it prior to editing.

In terms of new media, I think the Planet Earth website is certainly the richest we've had with very high quality media and a spinning globe which enables you to go to any part of the world and search for images. It's very exciting when technology opens up new opportunities like that.

"A good wildlife programme must be entertaining"

Whether it's a popular programme on BBC One or a more intellectual one on BBC Four or indeed a radio programme, whatever it is, it has to engage an audience first and foremost.

So in that sense it's no different from any other genre. You have to get your audience in and hooked.

I think our audiences also expect quite a lot of information with their entertainment. We find that new revelations, seeing and hearing new things, or new perspectives is incredibly important.

"I first started in the Natural History Unit about 20 years ago"

Life On Earth had gone out just a few years before that, and The Living Planet was in production. Everyone at that time was saying that Life On Earth had pretty much done everything:

"Well anyway we'll go back and do it habitat by habitat on The Living Planet and then everything will be done, we won't be able to make any more wildlife programmes because we'll have done it all!"

Well here we are 20 years later, and I guess when you see something like Planet Earth, you could ask how we'll top that, and yet we're making a raft of around 20 new series that we're making over the next three years.

So I think with inventiveness, both creatively, editorially, technologically and so on, there will always be new things to film, new ways of filming them and new stories to tell.

"The essential qualities of a good wildlife programme maker depend on the role"

If you're a camera-man, creativity, technical ability, an understanding of animals and animal behaviour, and patience is important. If you're a researcher or producer, a story telling ability is absolutely essential.

We have producers that have backgrounds in natural history, news, in entertainment and so on. There isn't one single route or one single quality that we rely on - we have a whole range of output that requires a whole range of skills.



"The amount of tenacity wildlife programme makers need to have depends on a variety of things"

For example a Bill Oddie programme, How To Watch Wildlife, is shot in five days. We're out in the country, it's very rough and ready.

At the other end of the scale, on Planet Earth, the snow leopard sequence took three separate trips and many many weeks, just to get one sequence. The camera-man spent weeks sitting in hides getting nothing. So at the really difficult end, it requires huge amounts of patience.

When I made The Private Life Of Plants, we went for weeks without getting shots because it was technically so difficult to get the time lapses working, getting the plants growing and so-on. But by persisting over weeks, we cracked it and became very productive.

It does need more patience than filming people, who can just talk and talk - animals don't do that!

"At times however, you have to draw a line and give up on a shot"

Time is money and sometimes despite the amount of time you've invested in making the best plans and preparations in the end you have to realise that you're just not going to get it, and it's time to cut your losses!

A lot of wildlife filming is about risk management. It's deciding how much risk to take and when to pull out.

"It's always important to have a narrative in any type of programme, wildlife or otherwise"

The narrative can take many different forms. An investigative programme might have a very straight narrative, where one's trying to find out the truth about something, but a show like Spring Watch might have various narratives over the week - will the baby birds live or die, how they'll do and so-on - and that's all mixed up in a much more entertaining format.

There always has to be some kind of narrative, but it doesn't have to be the same kind of narrative.

"We've got lots of series coming up"

Following on from the success of Big Cat Diary, we've got a similar stripped series looking at polar bears, black bears and grizzly bears, we've got another series of Spring Watch, and this year we're also going to have autumn watch, in October, we have a fantastic trilogy on the Galapagos, shot in high definition coming up in the late summer, and we have a scientific expedition to Borneo to find new species, and that will produce a science adventure series for transmission towards the end of the year.

Science & Nature homepage
Planet Earth
Behind the scenes of Big Cat Diary
Radio 4: Planet Earth - an insight into the making of the programme

Planet Earth repeats on BBC Four from 11 April, Tuesdays at 7pm

From www.bbctraining.com

Photo Credits (from top to bottom of page)

1. Snow geese in flight, USA. Image shows a few of the birds in the flock, estimated to contain 500,000 geese.
© Ian McCarthy

2. Base jumper diving into the Cave of Swallows, Mexico.
© DCI/Ed Carreon

3. African Elephant underwater, Okavango, Botswana.
© Peter Scoones

4. Helicopter, showing the 'heligimbal' camera. The Rockies, Glacier National Park, Montana, USA.
© Jean-Marc Giboux/DCI

5. Cameraman Mark Smith and team in the Himalayas, looking for snow leopards.
© Jeff Wilson

Interview with Sarah Blunt, Natural History Radio Producer

Listen to the full interview here (MP3 21mb)

The following text is an abbreviated transcript

I'm a Senior Radio Producer at the Natural History Unit in Bristol. No two days are ever the same, which is the great thing about this job.

I can be doing anything from editing material that's just come in, running a production meeting, researching a programme idea - which might mean talking to people on the phone, talking to scientists or conservationists, doing web searches, reading through scientific articles and journals - or I could be out on location recording.

That could be anywhere from a reed bed to a sea bed or up a tree, in the middle of a moor - the range of things I get up to is quite incredible.

Is that one of the things you enjoy about the work?

Absolutely, no two days are the same. That variety of work, both in terms of recording and editing the sort of programmes I make, is incredibly stimulating.

Is it something you've always wanted to do?

Yes and no. I came into it by quite a strange route. I was very interested in both sciences and arts at university, and did a degree in agricultural botany. I went on to do a PhD and then a post doc and became very specialised on plant diseases and plant genetics. But I became very removed from natural history, which was really why I'd followed a career in agricultural botany in the first place.

I decided to change career and I had always loved the Natural History Programme on Radio 4. I applied to the BBC's production trainee scheme and was incredibly lucky and was accepted. Towards the end of the two year scheme, an attachment came up in the Natural History Unit, and again I was lucky enough to get the job.

What is it that you like about making radio programmes?

For me it's very much about sounds. I've always been interested in sound, and I actually used to think I was a bit odd because I was so interested in the sounds around me.

Most of the time, most of us simply don't listen. In today's society we tend to block out sounds. We're very visual people - we watch TV, we read newspapers and magazines.

But all the time, all this sound is going on all around us and most of the time, we block it out. Fridges, cars, phones, printers, someone typing - most of the time we ignore sound.

The sad thing that happens is that you stop listening to natural sounds, the wild sounds, water, wind, bird song.

I've always been interested in those sounds, and thought I was a bit odd until I met other people who were interested in those sounds, like sound recordist Chris Watson and discovered an organisation called Soundscape and the whole idea of soundscape ecology - a lot of which began in the USA - where people have become very concerned about the sounds in their environment and acoustic pollution, man made sounds that block the natural sounds.

It's very exciting when you combine a medium that's all about sound with the natural world, which is bursting with sound. For me as a producer, it's like being an artist - instead of using colours to paint pictures, I'm using sounds to make programmes.

The other thing I love about radio is that as a producer, you can come up with an idea, research it, work with the contributors, maybe with a sound recordist and engineers in the studio, but you see that idea through from the very beginning to the end and you're involved in every single aspect of the process. That's a wonderful experience.

I also like the fact that programmes are done fairly quickly - we don't tend to spend more than a few weeks on a production - in some cases it might be a day or so. So it's very creative and you don't get stuck in a rut.

Are you interested in new media as a platform for your ideas?

We've just started a blog for a series we're making called Planet Earth Under Threat due out at the end of 2006. As we make the series, the producers and presenters involved are posting to the blog and anyone can add their comments, thoughts, ideas, criticisms, whatever, so it's very interactive.

For every programme we make, we have a web page as well, where people can hear the programme again, find out some extra material, browse related links for more information. The lovely thing about the web site or a blog is that the audience can interact with us. They can tell us their ideas and feed into programmes.

What do you think are the essential qualities of a good programme maker?

Passion. You have to be passionate about what you're making to make it well. I find it incredibly difficult to create programmes that I don't believe in, and I have done that, everyone has.

If you as the producer making the programme aren't excited and enthused by the programme, how on earth is your audience going to be excited by it?

The other really important thing is to be a story teller. You have to engage the audience, take them on a journey and deliver them at the end.

From www.bbctraining.com

Presenter Interview: Charlotte Uhlenbroek

By Alison George New Scientist

She's been chased by elephants and dragged by chimpanzees. Described as an eco-friendly Lara Croft and the successor to David Attenborough, zoologist and wildlife presenter Charlotte Uhlenbroek is still roaming the world. She stopped long enough to tell Alison George about her life

Have you always lived a nomadic existence?
Yes. I was born in London, then soon went back to Ghana where my parents were living. When I was 5 we moved to Nepal, where I stayed until I was 14, then went to school in England. In the meantime, my family moved to Tanzania, so I would go there on holidays.

Were those years formative in terms of your wanting to work with animals?
In Nepal, during the holidays, we'd go trekking in the Himalayas. Although you don't see a great number of mammals there, it is fantastic for birds, and you get a sense of being in beautiful, wild spaces. My love of the natural world came from those early years.

It must have been a shock to go from Nepal to an English boarding school.
At first I felt like a caged animal. I was used to wandering around barefoot with a whole lot of stray dogs to look after, and then suddenly I was at an all-girl's boarding school where I wasn't even allowed to leave the school gates. It was quite a shock to the system.

You went on to study zoology and psychology. What came next?
I was working as a researcher at the BBC Natural History Unit when I heard that primatologist Jane Goodall was looking for a field assistant. I jumped at the chance, and went to Burundi to help establish a research and conservation project looking at chimpanzees living in fragments of forest right up against human habitation where no one expected they could live. Then I went to Goodall's main site at Gombe National Park in Tanzania to study chimp communication. I lived in a tiny hut near Lake Tanganyika and spent two years roaming the forests with the chimps, recording their vocalisations.

What did you discover about chimp communication?
I was concentrating on the males' long distance calls, and I found that there are at least three acoustically distinct types of calls used in different contexts. The alpha males call much more than the low-ranking males - it is advantageous for a dominant male to keep the males together to protect his group from neighbouring chimps, as he benefits most in terms of access to females and resources. The alpha male often calls in others when he finds a good food supply, whereas lower ranking males are likely to stay quiet so they don't get usurped and lose out on food.

You must have got to know the chimps well.
They become almost like close friends, except of course you don't interact with them so they will continue with their natural behaviour. The chimps at Gombe have been studied for so long that they just ignore you, though occasionally one of the little ones will come over and try to pull something out of your pack. I still keep in touch with Gombe to find out what's happening to the adolescents I once knew.

What's your most memorable encounter in the wild?
I've had endless days with the chimps where I've been blown away, but I've also swum with humpback whales, which was amazing, and been chased by an elephant, which was pretty scary!

Why did an elephant chase you?
I was in the Central African Republic on foot in a bai, or forest clearing, where a lot of animals come for the mineral salts as well as to drink. A female elephant and her calf came out of the forest very close to where I was sitting and talking to camera for the BBC series Jungle. I stayed still, hoping she would carry on past me when she suddenly picked up my scent from about 12 metres away and charged. I don't blame her - there is a lot of elephant poaching in that area so they really fear humans and she was protecting her calf.

For a brief moment I thought I would stand my ground - but made a split-second decision that she would probably flatten me if I didn't get out of her way fast. I managed to get to the shelter of a tree where an elephant researcher and local tracker were and we hid while the elephant crashed about in the undergrowth. She finally decided to go in search of her calf which had run off. That's the only the time I've been filming or researching wild animals and really thought, "This could be it".

It was the one time I really thought, 'this could be it'

Have there been other close calls?
In the field, you have lots of uncomfortable encounters with snakes, or elephants around the camp. I've been kicked by mountain gorillas and dragged down a hill by chimps.

That all sounds pretty dangerous!
I knew they weren't out to kill me. Male chimpanzees put on a display to assert themselves within the community, and this often involves charging through the undergrowth, tearing off branches and sometimes hurling rocks. That time, they incorporated me in the display. Drag a branch, chuck it to one side, charge past Charlotte, grab her ankle, charge down the hillside - they're very strong, so there's not much you can do about it. I knew it was a show of bravado. I came back with a few cuts and bruises, but not badly hurt. The most dangerous situations in the wild are either when you are a potential meal for a predator, or when an animal feels very scared. It was the same with the gorillas - the males were just showing off. It is an adrenalin moment when a large gorilla comes over and flattens you, but I didn't think they were going to kill me.

Now you're going back for more?
Yes, I'm working on a UK television series about primates for Channel 5. I went to Uganda last month to film chimps. Next it will be baboons, gorillas and orang-utans. I want to take the audience right into their society by following some principal characters and revealing what extraordinarily complex relationships they have.

David Attenborough has tipped you to be his successor. How do you feel about that?
It is a huge compliment but quite daunting. David Attenborough is a hero of mine, but I don't think anybody can step into his shoes. He's a one-off.

Your life sounds very glamorous. Is there any downside to your nomadic existence?
Yes, there is, though I feel churlish saying that because of the amazing experiences I've had. But I think as humans we also need the quiet, ordinary aspects of life, we need to be with family and friends - and sometimes that can go by the wayside.

Does that ever make you want to settle down to a desk job?
No, I'll carry on doing what I do, sometimes at my desk writing, sometimes travelling. I don't really look too far ahead.

PBS Interviews its top Wildlife camera operators

From www.pbs.org

Nature films allow us, as viewers, to witness marvels of nature that we might not ordinarily see -- or even know of. But achieving that is no simple task. A nature producer's work can be arduous. Working in remote, unforgiving environments, contending with weather that doesn't often cooperate, filming subjects that are shy and elusive, nature filmmakers are put to the task to share their privileged viewpoint with audiences.

PBS Nature asked some of its top filmmakers to reveal how they manage to get the shot -- in a field in which there are no retakes.

What specialized equipment is necessary for natural history filmmaking?

NICK UPTON, Triumph of Life
What you need depends hugely on the subject matter: filming small creatures requires macro lenses and perhaps even more specialized probe lenses; filming distant subjects requires long lenses; filming light-sensitive animals at night needs infra red lighting and IR sensitive cameras or starlight cameras; filming arctic wildlife requires cold adapted equipment (special oils in film cameras, extra batteries etc); underwater subjects need underwater cameras or at least a pole cam (a camera in housing on one end of pole, monitored from above the water). The equipment needed also reflects the "look" required (if you want lots of cinematic moves, you may need to take a jib of some kind -- usually a 33lb portable minijib mountable on a tripod for wildlife), or a dolly (maybe a little trolley that can run on a ladder for wildlife) or even a rope dolly to run between trees. The camera you use and the shooting format depends on what the commissioners require technically.

Can a new filmmaker with a miniDV camera shoot wildlife? What are the absolute essentials in terms of equipment?

DAVE ALLEN, Deep Jungle
Mini DV has changed all documentary filmmaking -- what was once the preserve of well-funded professionals is now open to anyone with a video (and a great deal of time and dedication). Observational documentaries on people are particularly open to an amateur who can often provide access to a subject that professionals could not get to. Wildlife can be the same, and I have seen some ingenious back garden amateur wildlife films that use remote cameras, infrared lights and all kinds of clever ideas to capture nature in and around someone's home. But obviously some of our more far-flung projects provide more of a challenge. Often the animals are in out of the way places. And then distant subjects can involve very long lenses, these can be ten times the power of any handy cam. As soon as you get to this kind of magnification, you need a very large tripod to smooth out the wobble.

What makes a good wildlife cameraperson?

NICK UPTON, Triumph of Life
They need to be able to get close enough (but not so close that they or the animal are endangered), to be aware what is about to happen, to have the patience of a saint when nothing happens for days, to react fast -- and in the right way -- to get editable footage when things do kick off, to be in position ready to film as the sun is rising, to still be there when it sets, to put up with heat, cold, dust, rain, snow, mosquitoes, bat droppings, whatever it might be to get the shots.

In most types of filmmaking, storyboarding is often used to preplan a shoot. Can you "plan" shoots and stories with these films?

MITCHELL KELLY, Searching for the Snow Leopard
You can storyboard as precisely as you like and then you get out and you throw away 50% of what you shot. With every film that I've done, I've had a plan, but that doesn't mean we stuck to it. There was one film I started about how animals adapt to living in a rainforest -- how they cope with the amount of rainfall. But there was a terrible drought when I was there so my film turned into a great film on drought in the rainforest and how organisms cope with drought conditions.

ALLISON ARGO, Wisdom of the Wild, The Urban Elephant
You try to pick your moments but most often the moments pick you. I was in the middle of a different show when Carol from The Elephant Sanctuary called and said she had a good story for me but I would have to come out next week. I went to The Elephant Sanctuary website and read about Shirley and I realized that she was the perfect elephant for the story -- she had lived in a zoo, been part of a circus, she had an injured leg. I knew I had to get a crew together and get out there. When we got out to the zoo, I met Solomon (Shirley's keeper at the zoo). He was so shy I wondered if he would ever feel comfortable on camera. But he ended up being so articulate and such an incredible character. And then Solomon came out with the line about Shirley's chains, and we all started to cry. I just felt the gods conspired for that scene. It became the ending scene of the show -- and it was the first thing we shot.

Do you always get the shot you came for? What are some of the best unexpected shots you've captured?

NICK UPTON, Triumph of Life
No -- and anyone who claims they do is lying! It's a real bonus when you're there to film one thing and something else happens unexpectedly. (We were) on the Galapagos Islands once, filming marine iguanas fighting and courting on a small rocky sea cliff. A sea lion suddenly surfaced about 50 feet away with a huge green parrotfish in its jaws that he started shaking and tearing chunks off. Then about 20 frigate birds started swooping down right over our heads to collect scraps. We spun the camera around, changed lenses and shot some fabulous high-speed material, which appeared in the closing scenes for Triumph of Life. We could have waited weeks for that shot and never seen it -- but we just happened to be there. Mind you, we never really got the mating shots we wanted as the iguana mating season was running late after a recent El Nino event -- so the good luck/bad luck equation often seems to balance out.

Do you often have to condense natural events or streamline what you shot over several days or months and make it seem as if it happened at one time?

NICK UPTON, Triumph of Life
Yes, many wildlife sequences that last two to three minutes when edited and appear as if it all is happening in real time are actually shot over a few days to a few weeks or, exceptionally, months. Quite often, the main action did happen within a concentrated period of a few minutes, but the extra shots that allow the story to be set up and some cutaways (shots used to cover up edits) are often shot at another time. Some would say that makes the scenes less authentic, but I'd argue that if done well it allows a genuine story (the main action is real!) to be told more clearly and more entertainingly -- and everyone wins. Of course it could be done badly. Shots can be taken at different times of day, or in different seasons etc, but some viewers would notice and others might lose the sense of continuity that a well shot and edited sequence brings. I've always tried to achieve the latter!

Have you ever felt compelled to intervene on behalf of a suffering creature?

NICK UPTON, Triumph of Life
I once rescued a large toad from an advancing army of safari ants, removed all the ants whose jaws were clamped onto it (I knew from personal experience what that can fee like) and released it well away from the raid. Admittedly, we took a few shots of it first to document what we saw and how the ants attack anything in their path. So I did the professional thing first, then the humane thing. Otherwise, no, there is usually nothing one can realistically do. And even if you could, by helping one animal you could be depriving another and upsetting the natural order you are there to document -- not to change. That doesn't mean it isn't distressing at times. The nastiest thing I ever saw was a group of Galapagos mockingbirds pecking at a seabird chick to drink its blood. We filmed the behavior for Triumph of Life. But l've never felt so much like shooing away a creature that we were trying to film. If I had, though, (the mockingbirds) would have been back again and again until the chick died.

Is it hard to remain neutral when representing a controversial topic?

ALLISON ARGO, Wisdom of the Wild, The Urban Elephant
It's very hard. You try to achieve the highest degree of objectivity as you can but, ultimately, filming is not an objective endeavor. You are deciding when to turn the camera on and off, or which characters to include. I try to let the creatures be the leading characters, to let them lead the story. I don't comment on them. When you hear of Shirley's story, the details of her life are enough to let you draw your own conclusions about the treatment of elephants.

How much do you learn about a species, habitat, place before you set out to film it?

MITCHELL KELLY, Searching for the Snow Leopard
I research pretty heavily before I start a film. The more you know about an animal's behavior, the more you can interpret what you're seeing in the wild. The flick of the ears. The behavior of the animals in the surrounding. You can use all of this to see how your animal is communicating.

How much does the environment you're filming in affect how and what you shoot?

NICK UPTON, Triumph of Life
Enormously, for all the obvious logistical reasons such as: How do you reach the place the animals are with the equipment you need to film them (they might be out in a desert, deep in a rainforest, out on an ice floe, on a remote island etc)? Where can you stay nearby for the duration of the shoot? Do you need to camp? Is there a field station somewhere close? Can you walk to the filming location or do you need a 4WD, a skidoo, a boat, cross-country skis, a local guide so you don't get lost, a GPS? If you can't get the logistics right, you can't even attempt to film the wildlife you want to. And even if you can be there, is there enough light to film with (maybe not if in a dense rainforest....) or will the camera still operate at -40°C or after a violent dust storm?

What are some of the most challenging environments you've filmed in?

DAVE ALLEN, Deep Jungle
They are all very tough except the African Savannah, that's all done from a car. And is an absolute breeze.

NICK UPTON, Triumph of Life
Far more challenging was shooting in Peruvian Amazonia, where we slept in mosquito net tents on open platforms under thatched roofs. It rained torrentially from noon to 4pm every day and was so humid that our lenses kept steaming up and took the first 2 hours of sunlight from 8-10 am every day to dry out, leaving about 2 hours filming time before the rain came again. All of my clothes developed a white fungal growth on them and most became so rotten that I had to junk them later in the trip. Rainforests generally are tough places. They are hot and sweaty for carrying equipment around in. There are usually masses of biting insects, risk of poisonous snakes, various tropical diseases etc... and they're not called "rain" forests for nothing. But they're so stacked with wildlife that I keep getting drawn back to them.

I've done a lot of cave work also, mostly filming bats. (Caves) can be tough environments -- very dirty, smelly and disease-ridden with a risk of rock-falls, or of falling down shafts. Working at altitude can be hard work. I've done some shoots above 13,000 feet in the Andes and many at almost that height in Taiwan. With such thin air, simply walking up hills carrying equipment is twice as hard as at lower altitudes - but you get used to it after a while.

Cameraman Neil Rettig

Has your life ever been in danger due to shooting?

DAVE ALLEN, Deep Jungle
Yes, from a great white shark. A truck full of pygmies on a hill with no brakes. An angry elephant in a desert. A small plane with a broken GPS and not much fuel.

NICK UPTON, Triumph of Life
My worst affliction was a fly grub that tried to bore into my skull. But I managed to convince a surgeon to remove it (no-one believed I had what I knew I had!) before it got through. Other than that I've NEARLY trodden on a number of dangerous snakes such as rattlesnakes in Arizona and bushmasters in South America (but I might have got anti-venom in time). I nearly got washed off some rocks in violent surf in the Galapagos (but I might have swum to safety). Nearly got crushed by a rock fall in a Trinidadian bat cave and once slipped down a small waterfall in a Trinidadian mountain stream. It wasn't far. I managed not to bang my head, and it was quite funny at the time. But it could have ended badly. Generally, though, the risks are far less than people imagine, especially from animals. We take a lot of care to work safely around them and to avoid upsetting them!

Why do you enjoy filming wildlife and nature?

NICK UPTON, Triumph of Life
I guess I have a genuine passion for watching wildlife and seeing amazing behavior unfold. I started out as a scientist and back then I could only share my findings through talks and papers (which I only expected a few hundred people would ever read!). Working on nature documentaries allowed me to share what I managed to witness with millions. I've also had the chance to travel to all kinds of amazing places and work with some great people.

MITCHELL KELLY, Searching for the Snow Leopard
It's good when you can bring a place or an animal to people- especially one that they never heard about. People tend to act if they know about the problem. I think the best way to get people to care about something is to get them to love it.

Share your best wildlife filmmaking moment.

MITCHELL KELLY, Searching for the Snow Leopard
I took my first film on wolves back to the village where they had been persecuting wolves pretty heavily. The villagers watched the whole film. And when I asked them what they liked the most in the film they said they loved the wolves because of their family relationships. The film showed a wolf and its den- the mother was teaching the pup how to live. Since the villagers were very family oriented, seeing the wolves bringing up their young appealed to them. They had never thought of the wolves as having needs. It was one of the more fulfilling moments.

Share your worst wildlife filmmaking moment.

NICK UPTON, Triumph of Life
The worst moments have usually come at airports trying to get past difficult customs or immigration officials even when you have the right documents. Or when equipment or worse still exposed film stick goes astray in transit. The very worst moment was maybe arriving back in the UK after a tough trip to Kenya and a box with 50 rolls of exposed footage failed to arrive. Or when all our equipment was stuck in a cargo warehouse in Taiwan for 10 days as the customs documents were lost in transit by the cargo firm and copies were not accepted.