Interview with Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield.
Showing posts with label Planet Earth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Planet Earth. Show all posts
22.4.09
Disneynature 'Earth' launched today
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.
Disneynature launch 'Earth' on Earth day. Just take note of who's name is on the tin whilst watching this incredible movie...
Read the interview here from http://www.moviesonline.ca/
"Leave it to Disney to make global warming as soothing as a full-body massage," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "In the grandiosely titled 'Earth,' plundered largely from the BBC Natural History Unit's magnificent 'Planet Earth,' the filmmakers Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield take the temperature of our planet and conclude that it is rising.... You may leave the theater feeling as fuzzy - and ultimately as powerless - as those doomed polar bears."
14.12.06
Planet Earth: The Future
BBC4 Sunday 10th December 2006. 10:00pm - 11:00pm
104,000 viewers
A group of conservationists and philosophers discuss the future of the planet, and look at how successful campaigns such as Save the Panda, Save the Whale and Save the Rainforest have been. They ask how conservation fits into a world driven by economics and development, and at what point does eco-tourism cross the boundary of real benefit to the wildlife. Plus, the role of religion in promoting a moral and ethical approach to our world.
From the radiotimes.com
104,000 viewers
A group of conservationists and philosophers discuss the future of the planet, and look at how successful campaigns such as Save the Panda, Save the Whale and Save the Rainforest have been. They ask how conservation fits into a world driven by economics and development, and at what point does eco-tourism cross the boundary of real benefit to the wildlife. Plus, the role of religion in promoting a moral and ethical approach to our world.
From the radiotimes.com
7.12.06
Planet Earth: The Future, Into the Wilderness
BBC4 Sunday 10 - 11pm (153,000 viewers)
Repeated Tuesday 7 -8pm (423,000 viewers)
Faced with an ever-expanding human population, people with a concern for the way we use our planet ask whether wilderness areas are just sanctuaries for wildlife or something more than that. Contributors include David Attenborough
From www.radiotimes.com
Repeated Tuesday 7 -8pm (423,000 viewers)
Faced with an ever-expanding human population, people with a concern for the way we use our planet ask whether wilderness areas are just sanctuaries for wildlife or something more than that. Contributors include David Attenborough
From www.radiotimes.com
Planet Earth: Ocean Deep
Life goes to extraordinary lengths to survive this immense realm. A 30 tonne whale shark gorges on a school of fish and the unique overhead heli-gimbal camera reveals common dolphins rocketing at more than 30km an hour.Descending into the abyss, deep sea octopus fly with wings and vampire squid use bioluminescence to create an extraordinary colour display. The first ever time-lapse footage taken from 2,000m down captures eels, crabs and giant isopods eating a carcass, completely consuming it within three hours.
Planet Earth: Forests
BBC 1 Sunday 9pm
7.2 million, 28.5% Audience share
Patrick Barkham Only one more Planet Earth to go - what will Sunday nights be like without it?
From The Guardian:
Planet Earth (BBC1, Sunday) is nearing the end of its series, and George Fenton's score triggers a melancholy premonition of the globe-sized gap it will leave in Sunday night's schedules.
"Trees. Surely among the most magnificent living things," began Sir David Attenborough as a camera swooped up a vertiginous Californian redwood. Like many childhood fans of Life On Earth and The Living Planet, I was shocked when I rediscovered Attenborough after two decades. His voice seemed to have been around, as he would say, since before humans walked the earth, and now his 80-year-old timbre is more false-toothy than breathy. But this new fragility chimes with the eco-calamity we are living. Planet Earth on our plasmas may soon be all we have left.
This is monumental television. Every shot is full of wonder. Like ropeless bungee jumpers, mandarin duck chicks hurl themselves from the nest to the leafy forest floor; the pink tongue of a crossbill prises open a fir cone; fecund bracken unfolds. Every sound, too, from the sniffling fear of the world's smallest deer - with toothpicks for antlers - to the dog-straining-on-a-lead choke of a wolverine ripping apart a caribou in the snow.
The commentary may play second fiddle, but Tony Blair should sign up Attenborough, or Planet Earth's script editors. We learn that the taiga forest on the Arctic fringes contains as many trees as all the world's rainforests; that a sequoia in California is the largest tree on earth, 10 times the size of a blue whale; that bristlecone pines pre-date the pyramids; that autumn leaf colour can be seen from space.
Sometimes Attenborough is a poet: the prints of wild animals are "stories written in the snow". Next he's a bit Doctor Who. "The nymphs of the periodical cicada have been biding their time." For 17 years, it turns out. "Now they march like zombies towards the nearest tree and start to climb."
Occasionally, it's X-rated. "The air is heavy with the scent of females," he breathes over the rutting of red deer. And then he's droll. "In local folklore, the wolverine is a cross between a bear and a wolf." Beat. "In reality, it's a huge weasel."
Only in the forests of Chile does Attenborough turn senile sports commentator as the smallest wildcat in the Americas goes moth-hunting. "You might call this a game of cat and moth." Oh, Sir David.
Sometimes, you wish the cameras would linger longer in one spot, such as when the pine martin stalks two mating grey squirrels. You want Mister Martin to chalk one up for the red squirrel population. Instead we see a lone grey "stocking his larder" depart in the jaws of the martin while the nasty shaggers get to carry on breeding.
The 10-minute slot at the end showing how it's all filmed jars slightly and might be better scheduled half-an-hour later. This week, however, the amur leopard is upstaged by Dany Cleyet-Marrel, a Frenchman straight from the early aviation era who has invented a special steerable balloon. For some unfathomable reason the Beeb's health-and-safety jobsworths agree that this bonkers balloonist can provide a much-needed filmic swoop around "static" trees.
"Oh my giddy aunt," screeches terribly BBC camerman Warwick Sloss before unleashing a blizzard of un-BBC beeps as the Frenchman pilots the pair into a baobab tree. Cleyet-Marrel tries to repair his balloon contraption accompanied by mournful music from the Jean de Florette soundtrack. Like the script, the score, the editing, the sound and the pictures, it is immaculate. Is it hyperbolic to say we may never see anything like it like again?
The joy of a Sunday in December is that you can immerse yourself in the natural world without leaving the house. From Countryfile (BBC1) in the morning, to the Crocodile Hunter Diaries (ITV) in the afternoon, it's easy to traverse the planet as briskly as Attenborough.
7.2 million, 28.5% Audience share
Patrick Barkham Only one more Planet Earth to go - what will Sunday nights be like without it?
From The Guardian:
Planet Earth (BBC1, Sunday) is nearing the end of its series, and George Fenton's score triggers a melancholy premonition of the globe-sized gap it will leave in Sunday night's schedules.
"Trees. Surely among the most magnificent living things," began Sir David Attenborough as a camera swooped up a vertiginous Californian redwood. Like many childhood fans of Life On Earth and The Living Planet, I was shocked when I rediscovered Attenborough after two decades. His voice seemed to have been around, as he would say, since before humans walked the earth, and now his 80-year-old timbre is more false-toothy than breathy. But this new fragility chimes with the eco-calamity we are living. Planet Earth on our plasmas may soon be all we have left.
This is monumental television. Every shot is full of wonder. Like ropeless bungee jumpers, mandarin duck chicks hurl themselves from the nest to the leafy forest floor; the pink tongue of a crossbill prises open a fir cone; fecund bracken unfolds. Every sound, too, from the sniffling fear of the world's smallest deer - with toothpicks for antlers - to the dog-straining-on-a-lead choke of a wolverine ripping apart a caribou in the snow.
The commentary may play second fiddle, but Tony Blair should sign up Attenborough, or Planet Earth's script editors. We learn that the taiga forest on the Arctic fringes contains as many trees as all the world's rainforests; that a sequoia in California is the largest tree on earth, 10 times the size of a blue whale; that bristlecone pines pre-date the pyramids; that autumn leaf colour can be seen from space.
Sometimes Attenborough is a poet: the prints of wild animals are "stories written in the snow". Next he's a bit Doctor Who. "The nymphs of the periodical cicada have been biding their time." For 17 years, it turns out. "Now they march like zombies towards the nearest tree and start to climb."
Occasionally, it's X-rated. "The air is heavy with the scent of females," he breathes over the rutting of red deer. And then he's droll. "In local folklore, the wolverine is a cross between a bear and a wolf." Beat. "In reality, it's a huge weasel."
Only in the forests of Chile does Attenborough turn senile sports commentator as the smallest wildcat in the Americas goes moth-hunting. "You might call this a game of cat and moth." Oh, Sir David.
Sometimes, you wish the cameras would linger longer in one spot, such as when the pine martin stalks two mating grey squirrels. You want Mister Martin to chalk one up for the red squirrel population. Instead we see a lone grey "stocking his larder" depart in the jaws of the martin while the nasty shaggers get to carry on breeding.
The 10-minute slot at the end showing how it's all filmed jars slightly and might be better scheduled half-an-hour later. This week, however, the amur leopard is upstaged by Dany Cleyet-Marrel, a Frenchman straight from the early aviation era who has invented a special steerable balloon. For some unfathomable reason the Beeb's health-and-safety jobsworths agree that this bonkers balloonist can provide a much-needed filmic swoop around "static" trees.
"Oh my giddy aunt," screeches terribly BBC camerman Warwick Sloss before unleashing a blizzard of un-BBC beeps as the Frenchman pilots the pair into a baobab tree. Cleyet-Marrel tries to repair his balloon contraption accompanied by mournful music from the Jean de Florette soundtrack. Like the script, the score, the editing, the sound and the pictures, it is immaculate. Is it hyperbolic to say we may never see anything like it like again?
The joy of a Sunday in December is that you can immerse yourself in the natural world without leaving the house. From Countryfile (BBC1) in the morning, to the Crocodile Hunter Diaries (ITV) in the afternoon, it's easy to traverse the planet as briskly as Attenborough.
30.11.06
Planet Earth - The Future
BBC Four Sunday 10pm/Tuesday 7pm(Total number of viewers: 423,000)
PLANET EARTH: THE FUTURE, With global warming at the top of the political agenda and species vanishing at an unprecedented rate, this new series brings together some of the world's premier thinkers, including scientists, environmentalists and the Archbishop of Canterbury, to discuss survival strategies.
From The Times - 25/11/2006
24.11.06
17.11.06
Planet Earth: Jungles
BBC 1 9pm Sunday
6.7 million, 26.1% Audience share
The Guardian - 18/11/2006
This is what TV was invented for, right? Skilful and innovative without being ostentatious, this series continues to beguile and inspire. Now, we're in the jungles and rain forests - occupying a mere 3% of the planet's land mass, they are home to over half of the world's species. Watch as trees fight for the precious sunlight, birds of paradise engage in some downright screwy mating rituals, and see what a freaky fungi does when it infects insects (something straight out of science fiction). More than just pedagogy, it's an experience. - Martin Skegg
6.7 million, 26.1% Audience share
The Guardian - 18/11/2006
This is what TV was invented for, right? Skilful and innovative without being ostentatious, this series continues to beguile and inspire. Now, we're in the jungles and rain forests - occupying a mere 3% of the planet's land mass, they are home to over half of the world's species. Watch as trees fight for the precious sunlight, birds of paradise engage in some downright screwy mating rituals, and see what a freaky fungi does when it infects insects (something straight out of science fiction). More than just pedagogy, it's an experience. - Martin Skegg
10.11.06
Planet Earth: Great Plains
BBC 1 Sun 12th Nov, 9:00 pm
The great plains cover one quarter of the land on our planet and are home to some of the greatest gatherings of wildlife anywhere on earth. While herds of gazelle run for their lives on the Mongolian steppe, plagues of 5 million 'red-billed' quelea create havoc as they sweep through the African Savannah and in North America the immense herds of caribou are making their migration. These vast grasslands play host to some of the most incredible and surprising dramas in the natural world. "The sequence of the pride of lions hunting an elephant will stay in your minds for a very long time"!
The great plains cover one quarter of the land on our planet and are home to some of the greatest gatherings of wildlife anywhere on earth. While herds of gazelle run for their lives on the Mongolian steppe, plagues of 5 million 'red-billed' quelea create havoc as they sweep through the African Savannah and in North America the immense herds of caribou are making their migration. These vast grasslands play host to some of the most incredible and surprising dramas in the natural world. "The sequence of the pride of lions hunting an elephant will stay in your minds for a very long time"!
7.11.06
Planet Eath: Ice Worlds
BBC 1 Sunday 9pm (6 million, 23.5%)
BBC 2 Monday 7pm (2.5 million, 11.4%)
Are polar bears hot stuff at poker? Planet Earth is back in the Arctic to find out
From The Guardian - 06/11/2006
As the wedding guest at Cana said, most people keep the cheap booze until the end of the party when the guests are too bladdered to notice (I paraphrase St John slightly), but Planet Earth (Sunday, BBC1) kept the best till the last.
It was the end of the Ice Worlds episode, during the diary section, which shows the struggling human beings behind the camera. Doug and Jason were sitting down to supper in a bleached wood hut in Kong Karis Land. Now, say what you like but a name like that, Kong Karis Land, does not fill you with confidence. It is in the Norwegian Arctic and has not been visited by humans for 25 years. I am not altogether surprised.
Doug said suddenly, "I thought I heard something." (For years I have been trying to persuade the BBC to give us some good ghost stories. They made up for it now.) A face appeared at the window. It looked like an enormous snowman - solid, white, compacted - with two pieces of coal for eyes. It pressed its big, black, boxing glove of a nose to the glass, melting the frost like a child rubbing a circle in the pane to see better. I have heard that polar bears are peculiarly dangerous because their face is a fixed mask. You cannot tell what they are thinking. They would be hot stuff at poker. I'm not sure this is totally true. This bear was clearly curious. Not angry. Not hungry. Nosy. It is a face that stays with you, like snow made flesh.
Earlier we saw a polar bear swimming slowly through black seas. It swam on for two days, looking for a seal to eat. Starving and weak, it smelled a huge herd of walrus, the largest and best-armoured of all seals. Pulling itself on to the ice, it waited, eyelids drooping, for its strength to return. Then, under cover of fog, it attacked a billowy, black, blubbery backside, trying to prise a walrus away from her young. And failed. And tried again. And failed. Gored and exhausted, within sight and smell of that tremendous fish supper, it lay down to die. It didn't make a big deal about death. It just curled up like a pup and slept.
You do feel the crew could have chucked it a kipper. As global warming has already disturbed the balance of nature, it may be time to rewrite the rule that natural history programmes can observe but must never interfere. In the Antarctic, Frederique, a field assistant, had no hesitation in helping an emperor penguin chick out of a hole, quite literally, saying endearingly, "Come on! Grab my hand! Out you come chicken!" We have reached the point where nature does need a helping hand.
- Nancy Banks-Smith
BBC 2 Monday 7pm (2.5 million, 11.4%)
Are polar bears hot stuff at poker? Planet Earth is back in the Arctic to find out
From The Guardian - 06/11/2006
As the wedding guest at Cana said, most people keep the cheap booze until the end of the party when the guests are too bladdered to notice (I paraphrase St John slightly), but Planet Earth (Sunday, BBC1) kept the best till the last.
It was the end of the Ice Worlds episode, during the diary section, which shows the struggling human beings behind the camera. Doug and Jason were sitting down to supper in a bleached wood hut in Kong Karis Land. Now, say what you like but a name like that, Kong Karis Land, does not fill you with confidence. It is in the Norwegian Arctic and has not been visited by humans for 25 years. I am not altogether surprised.
Doug said suddenly, "I thought I heard something." (For years I have been trying to persuade the BBC to give us some good ghost stories. They made up for it now.) A face appeared at the window. It looked like an enormous snowman - solid, white, compacted - with two pieces of coal for eyes. It pressed its big, black, boxing glove of a nose to the glass, melting the frost like a child rubbing a circle in the pane to see better. I have heard that polar bears are peculiarly dangerous because their face is a fixed mask. You cannot tell what they are thinking. They would be hot stuff at poker. I'm not sure this is totally true. This bear was clearly curious. Not angry. Not hungry. Nosy. It is a face that stays with you, like snow made flesh.
Earlier we saw a polar bear swimming slowly through black seas. It swam on for two days, looking for a seal to eat. Starving and weak, it smelled a huge herd of walrus, the largest and best-armoured of all seals. Pulling itself on to the ice, it waited, eyelids drooping, for its strength to return. Then, under cover of fog, it attacked a billowy, black, blubbery backside, trying to prise a walrus away from her young. And failed. And tried again. And failed. Gored and exhausted, within sight and smell of that tremendous fish supper, it lay down to die. It didn't make a big deal about death. It just curled up like a pup and slept.
You do feel the crew could have chucked it a kipper. As global warming has already disturbed the balance of nature, it may be time to rewrite the rule that natural history programmes can observe but must never interfere. In the Antarctic, Frederique, a field assistant, had no hesitation in helping an emperor penguin chick out of a hole, quite literally, saying endearingly, "Come on! Grab my hand! Out you come chicken!" We have reached the point where nature does need a helping hand.
- Nancy Banks-Smith
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