Getting started in Wildlife TV - Have you thought about Wildscreen?

'One thing for sure is that, whatever the path, it’s up to the individual and their dogged persistence combined with undying passion that will get them through the bumpy, muddy, arduous jungle road that is the path towards becoming a wildlife photographer or filmmaker.' - Sandesh Kadur Felis Blog

Other than being dogged and persistent, another top tip is to attend the Wildscreen international film festival.

What is Wildscreen?

This biannual festival is the Mecca for Wildlife Filmmakers, internationally acknowledged as the most influential and prestigious event of its kind in the world. The aim of Wildscreen is to celebrate, applaud and encourage excellence, and responsibility, in wildlife and environmental filmmaking - films which increase the global viewing public's understanding of the natural world, and the need to conserve it.

By attending wildscreen you'll get a real flavour for the wildlife filmmaking industry and see what's hot and what's not for those who are commissioning programmes or hiring new talent. You'll hear behind the scenes stories from producers and presenters, cameramen and editors and discover what it takes to make a top natural history film. Most importantly you'll meet people who can inspire and help you on your way. And as Sandesh says it will 'help fuel the passion and jump-start your career in wildlife TV' - it certainly did that for me when I was seeking my break in the industry almost 10 years ago and It's been a top event in my calendar ever since.

If you're fresh from university then you'll probably find the festival a bit on the expensive side - about 600pounds to register as a full delegate. The budget option is to become a festival volunteer, or apply for a reduced rate as a newcomer. If you've just produced your first wildlife film then enter it for the highly prized newcomers award - a real springboard to success.



The Workshops

The workshops are really worth attending as you'll get hands on with cutting edge technology and learn from the experts - everything from highspeed filming and 3D cameras to workshops about how to be a wildlife TV researcher. This year I'll be running one entitled 'Breaking out of the Box' about how to produce content for a web audience.

The Awards

The highlight of the festival for me is always the Gala Panda Awards Ceremony. Wildscreen is a competition as well as a Festival and this is the night when the award winners will be announced. The stakes are high as the awards have established themselves as the Green Oscars, and the posh black-tie do certainly has an air of hollywood glitz about it. This year it will be hosted by Kate Silverton and Benedict Allen.

I'll be there in anticipation of one of my series winning an accolade. 'Life' is up for a whole range of awards, and 'How Earth Made Us' is in the running for the Earth Science Award, as well as best series.

It was an honour at the 2008 Panda Awards, when we won the Golden Panda for 'Life in Cold Blood'.
 

For handy tips and advice on starting a career in wildlife television get your hands on a copy of the book by Piers Warren titled: Careers in Wildlife Filmmaking.

Good luck
- Paul 

Faking it? Wildlife filmmaker Chris Palmer publishes 'Shooting in the Wild' to reveal all

The following is an edited excerpt from an article by Daniel de Vise published in the Washington Post, Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Read the full article here

Environmental Film Maker, Chris Palmer 63, has written a confessional for an entire industry. "Shooting in the Wild," published this year, exposes the unpleasant secrets of environmental filmmaking: manufactured sounds, staged fights, wild animals that aren't quite wild filmed in nature that isn't entirely natural. Nature documentaries "carry the promise of authenticity." Nature filmmakers profess to present animal life as it is lived, untouched by mankind. Yet human fingerprints are everywhere.

Nature is frequently boring. Wild animals prefer not to be seen

Palmer's book underscores the fundamental challenge of wildlife filmmaking: Nature is frequently boring. Wild animals prefer not to be seen."If you sit in the wild and watch wildlife, nothing happens for a very long time," said Maggie Burnette Stogner, an environmental filmmaker who works with Palmer on the American University faculty. "That's mostly what happens in wildlife."

Nature footage is hard-earned. A crew might spend six weeks in discomfort and tedium for a few moments of dramatic cinema. Certain shots -- animal births, or predators seizing prey -- are difficult to capture by chance. So some filmmakers set them up.

The lemmings that plunge to their deaths in the 1958 Disney documentary "White Wilderness" were hurled ingloriously to their doom by members of the crew, as a Canadian documentary revealed. Palmer writes that Marlin Perkins, host of television's "Wild Kingdom," was known to bait animals into combat and to film captive beasts deposited into the wild, and that the avian stars of the 2001 film "Winged Migration" were trained to fly around cameras.

"Sanctimonious smugness"

Erik Nelson, a prolific environmental filmmaker in Los Angeles, finds "a sort of sanctimonious smugness to his book that sets my teeth on edge." Nelson is a glancing target in Palmer's book; the author portrays Nelson's eight-part television series "The Grizzly Man Diaries" as "sensational" and lambastes the animal-attack genre that Nelson helped to create. Nelson, in turn, asserts that Palmer has seldom actually shot a nature film -- most of Palmer's credits have come in the comparatively detached role of executive producer. He terms Palmer's ethics crusade "a giant nothingburger of an issue." (Palmer says he has been "deeply involved" in all of his films.)

"If there is an ethical beacon that guides the wildlife channels, it is the quest for realism."

Programmers say they condone the use of captive animals as stand-ins for wildlife, and contrived meetings between species, as long as all involved are acting naturally and the viewer is seeing things that might actually happen in nature

Palmer disapproves. In his book, he proposes that every nature film might open with a disclaimer on the screen that says something like, "All the scenes in this film are real and not staged," or, more probably, "Some of the scenes depicted in this film were shot with tame, captive animals." Not likely, say industry colleagues. Who wants to watch a tame nature film?

Read the full article from the Washington Post here

10 steps to becoming a Covert Google Earth Surfer

If you are a Natural History film-maker than you will no doubt find Google Earth invaluable. Unfortunately some organizations seem to have put a block on this crucial piece of software - even years after it was first released! As a result they have limited, if not reduced, the 'productivity' of their staff. Here is a guide to Covert Google Earth surfing... use this at your own peril!

1. Visit the Google Earth website and download the 'Google Earth.exe' installation file. You'll need to save this to your computers non-networked drive it might be called the 'D' Drive.

2. The first step in covert Google Earth use is to rename the downloaded file 'Google Earth.exe' to 'decoy.exe'. High-tech I.T.bots sweep through your computer for anything named "Google Earth" and then deploy their digital missiles to obliterate them from your system.
So to avoid this and to prevent a .exe from being an ex .exe - rename 'Google Earth.exe' to 'Decoy.exe'

3. Next - the point of no return - launch the installation of Google Earth by double clicking on 'Decoy.exe'

4. Go to C/ Documents and Setting/ Your Username/ Application Data/ Google/ Google Earth/ and once again change the 'Google Earth.exe' in this folder to 'Decoy2'.

If you've gotton this far without being shot by the I.T.erminators then well done.

5. Under the cover of darkness, right click on 'Decoy2.exe" and select 'send to desktop (shortcut)'.

6. Go to desktop, and while simultaneously looking over your shoulder, right click on the shortcut of "Decoy2" and select properties.

7. In the window that pops up click on "change icon" - try to withhold your excitement - any hint of this may alert the I.T. Bots.

8. Another window will pop up. browse for another icon, or paste this: C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe into the browse box to give you access to a selection of carefully trained decept-icons.

9. Select an alternative icon from this platoon. My favourite decept-icon is the earth icon - very experienced in the field of covert Google Earth access.

10. You should now be ready for a life of secret Earth surfing.

The Earth is in your hands - enjoy, I hope it helps with planning your shoot.

- Matt the Mysterious

Free to use 'Planet Earth' Satellite Images from Nasa

If you want the 'Planet Earth' touch, the majesty and beauty of satellite imagery in your film then you can use Blue Marble from Nasa, an archive of free-to-use extremely high resolution images of the Earth. The very images that helped the BBC generate some of the memorable shots that made 'Planet Earth' so spectacular.

To view the full resolution you would need a monitor as big as your house (1 thousand million mpixels) so I think the quality is fit for most purposes! However, you will need a mighty machine and photoshop 8 to even stand a chance of opening it - a safer bet might be to use the lower resolution versions (still 2km and 8km pixels) - an excellent choice for wide 'locators' such as entire continents or countries.

You can check the resolution at this link (cloudless) and also here (including atmosphere/clouds).

Download the KML file to allow you to view this as a live layer of satellite imagery on Google Earth.

The 'Rapid response system' is used to view near-real time satellite imagery which is useful for navigating and downloading more localised and regional images, as well as images of natural phenomenon such as hurricanes and wildfires. You can search the Modis archives here.

Another site that is a little more technical but I have found useful is the Earth Science data interface (they are very helpful if you have particular requests)

Networks of Nature - stories of natural history film-making from the BBC.

Networks of nature: stories of natural history film-making from the BBC.
A great read for anyone interested in the BBC Natural History Unit and a must for all aspiring BBC NHU researchers...

In May 1953 the first natural history television programme was broadcast from Bristol by naturalist Peter Scott and radio producer Desmond Hawkins. By 1997 the BBC's Natural History Unit has established a global reputation for wildlife films, providing a keystone of the BBC's public service broadcasting charter, playing an important strategic role in television scheduling and occupying a prominent position in a competitive world film market.

The BBC's blue-chip natural history programmes regularly bring images of wildlife from all over the globe to British audiences of over 10 million.

In her PhD thesis Gail Davies traces the changing world of the BBC natural history unit. Using archive material, interviews and through close observation of the film-makers at work she explores the ever changing relationships between broadcasting values and scientific and film-making practices.

This research puts the BBCs popular representations of wildlife within the context of post-war British attitudes to nature and explores the importance of technology, animals and public conceptions as additional factors influencing the relationships between nature and culture.

University College London PhD Eprints

Cataloguing Life On Earth: An Inside Look at ARKive, Part 2

Still Images

One of the most common situations in which a member of the public will be engaged head on by wildlife photography is in a gallery. It’s one of the few places that people will go, at little or no cost, with the intention of spending time contemplating the merits of each work. Many will unexpectedly leave with a new appreciation of the natural world.

A Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition is one such example, annually touring the globe inspiring thousands. For the people who visit, it may well change their perception of the living organisms with which we share this planet.

Experiences like these personify the role of wildlife photography in promoting conservation issues. It can invoke the will for action. Museums and galleries around the world are a fantastic place to display such imagery, but they are limited to what they can fit inside their walls and by how long it is on display. There is a vast amount of wildlife imagery which is never seen.

Collections of wildlife photography are spread out. Even for those species where it is easy to look up imagery for yourself, some of the most unique photographs may be hidden away. This is where ARKive steps in, aiming to create a safe, centralised digital library of wildlife imagery accessible to anybody.

The aim of these articles is to shed light on the way ARKive works. Last time, I looked at moving imagery and gave a brief introduction to some of the other key aspects of ARKive. Footage is an invaluable part of the database, but it’s only half the story.

An ARKive Media Researcher hard at work

To obtain the still images that will represent each species, ARKive goes to many of the biggest libraries in the natural history sector of stock photography. Photographers represented by agencies such as Nature Picture Library, OSF, Animals Animals, Ardea, Biosphoto, FLPA and NHPA all generously contribute their work to the project, to name but a few.

However, stock agencies certainly are not the limit of the source material. Indeed, independent donors are as much a part of the project as any of the biggest commercial libraries. ARKive proudly displays the work of over 2500 media donors, ranging from Sir David Attenborough himself to keen birders, herpers, academics or just about any naturalist with a passion for taking pictures.

So, if it’s not part of a stock library, then Google really is your friend. Even for a particularly tricky species, there’s often a keen enthusiast with a host of images waiting to be tracked down. Case in point, cycads have a surprisingly massive underground following. Communities such as these are full of lively, passionate individuals who are more often than not willing to do their bit for ARKive.

For the most part, licensing issues are a relatively straightforward process. The copyright for every image stays with the owner. The imagery can only be used for display on the website - where the public may download it freely for private or educational purposes, and stored in ARKive's offline media vault. Of course, that’s a tad simplified, but the licence agreement that is presented to donors is, effectively, an incredibly elongated version of those two sentences (and doesn’t make for great blogging).

Once again, the aim is to create a comprehensive representation of each species’ life history. So as not to over-saturate each gallery, a highly selective approach needs to be taken. For a species which has rarely been seen yet alone photographed, it’s easy - just take what you can get. Things become somewhat more difficult when the subject looks pretty and stands still.

Keeping in mind the archival aims of ARKive, the highest resolution copies are always requested. In this day and age, that constitutes a lot of digital files. Original RAW files contain the most data, and so are preferred. A photographer will usually send this in alongside a processed file which is presented to the world on the website, whilst the RAW file goes safely into the vault.

Sylvia Earle is a vital part of the selection process!

Of course, transparencies form a gigantic part of the photographic records that exist of the natural world. Slides from donors and libraries are used where available. ARKive sends them to an outsourced scanning agency for digitisation at very high resolution. During the process, transparencies are meticulously damage checked several times and at the end, are sent back to their respective donors along with a disc containing the digital copies.

Metadata is recorded in a similar system to that which deals with footage. Once images have been captioned, they are ready to be published on the website. All of the images are credited to the photographer with optional contact details, which has the added benefit of acting as an incentive for donors, whereby ARKive becomes a showcase for their work.

ARKive recently hit a big milestone, reaching over 30,000 images representing more then 4,000 species. In a sense, ARKive is a museum (in a somewhat more digital format). There is certainly a case to say that wildlife imagery has a purpose which supersedes value. Keeping it hidden away or hard to access, would be a terrible shame (I think Indy would be proud).

I had mentioned I would detail some work about species texts, but it seemed a shame to try and squeeze it in here. I’ll take a brief look at that in another instalment.

Rob Morgan
Photos: Ben Roberts

SoundsSnap Sound Archive

Soundsnap

From BBC Click
If you are a music producer and are looking for some interesting new sounds to use in your work, then soundsnap.com will be a goldmine for you.

We love free stuff, especially if it helps us become a little more creative, and here you can download all sorts of sounds for use in music, video and audio productions.

It even has some funky sound effects for your website or presentation.

Once you have registered and confirmed your address, you can start downloading or uploading samples straight away.

Use the buttons on the opening page to jump to the categories. There are animal noises, comic sound effects and classic musical samples such as drum loops and much more.

These sounds are royalty free to use worldwide. But make sure you read the terms and conditions carefully before uploading anything to the site.

From BBC Click

Cataloguing Life On Earth: An Inside Look at ARKive

Three months after starting at Wildscreen as an ARKive media researcher, I announced to my flatmate that my first batch of species had been uploaded to the website. My role at ARKive is to track down media for various species, so I was quite pleased to see my first lot go ‘live’. Rather than a pat on the back for a job well done, I received only a look of ‘three months and that’s all?’ - an expression he happens to excel at.

Looking back, my flatmate’s preconceptions of life at ARKive were not so different to the ones I used to have. There can’t be that much to uploading a few pictures to a website. What exactly had I been doing for the past three months?

ARKive is aiming to create audiovisual fact files for all life on Earth, then make that information available to anybody with an internet connection. It’s no small task, so where to begin?

Falling in line with Wildscreen’s most basic imperative, to promote conservation, ARKive prioritises rare and endangered species. Nearly 17, 000 species are categorised by the IUCN as at risk of extinction. Endangered lists from the IUCN and other authorities such as CITES are drawn upon to create the species lists which give ARKive it’s content.

Every day, up to 30, 000 people from across the globe visit ARKive. The site currently has a rapidly growing collection of over 33,000 film clips and images. All collated and catalogued by a small team in Bristol.

Many people may not know what a certain species looks like, yet alone how it behaves. ARKive hopes to allow people to experience this, thereby inspiring action. It’s not easy to make somebody care whether we loose Paradisaea rudolphi unless that person knows it looks like this and sounds like this. As you can see, images and footage can be an important part of the process.

Everything on ARKive is stored in the media vault, a 70 TB (71, 680 GB) database composed of 72 hard disks formed into three disk arrays. The 60 plus hours of footage available on the website alone takes up approximately 5.5 TB (5476 GB) of this. Creating a safe centralised digital bank of material is a crucial part of the project.

One of the biggest providers of moving images to ARKive is the BBC. The BBC Motion Gallery is one of the first stops once a species list has been allocated. Footage is inherently less common than images, but you might be surprised at some of the species you can find if you look.

Tapes are rented from the archive at the Natural History Unit. Some species bring with them a lot more tapes than others. For a ‘big’ species, this could mean a mixed pile of up to 30 or more trims and programmes. Wildscreen itself holds a fair amount of programmes in its own library of festival entries. This dates back to 1986, but it doesn’t have everything and certainly won’t have trims tapes, which are important for the ‘small’ species.

Assuming each tape contains footage of the correct species, it would be incredibly impractical to catalogue it all. Not to mention you wouldn’t be inspiring anybody with hours of a lion pride resting. The aim is to create a comprehensive cross-section of the species’ life history, from birth to death and as much behaviour in-between.

Dredging through hours of archive footage inevitably stirs up a few great clips although, unfortunately, often of non-target species. Seeing a northern giant petrel pick at a still flapping gentoo penguin from the inside out is one such gem, something that didn’t quite make it into Blue Planet. Or Gerald Durrell’s useful tips on leech removal from Two in the Bush - using the butt of a cigarette. However, those of target species often do make it to the website.

Once timecodes and metadata have been catalogued, the next phase is to call in master quality tapes for digitisation and editing. At this point, footage leaves the hands of the researchers. All editing is carried out by an in-house team.

Track laying and audio mixing is outsourced for almost all clips, then sent back to Wildscreen where they are synched to moving images. The clips can then be re-uploaded to the vault where they are transcoded into a variety of formats, including the final low resolution form seen on the website.

So, before footage is made available on the website, it passes through several hands and is dealt with in a variety of forms and formats. Moving footage is just one part of an audio-visual factfile. Still images and species text make up the rest. Read more about these and the unique ARKive database in my next post.

Rob Morgan

Online Music Catalogues

BMGZomba music is a music library which contains old music composed for the BBC in the past and is still BBC copyright. You can hear the track and search by category or by a key word.
http://www.bmgzomba.co.uk/launchpage/UK/

Another great site which works in a very similar way is www.audiolicense.net (this is the site I used to chose music during my recent session at Wildscreen), very easy to use and find music in particular genres.

Both of these sites save us from the traditional method of searching through mountains of CDs, which never seem to deliver what their elaborate descriptions would lead you to expect. You can quickly sample tracks live on the web, download them in a WAV format ready for use in AVID of FCP, and pay per use for the ones you download.

A site I was sent today is www.searchdewolfe.com

Quick tip: If its commercial music your after and you dont quite now which one to use you could always use Limewire to find and download a few options. Of course this peer2peer sharing system is breaking copywrite laws but if you use the track for broadcast then you'll pay the artist in the usual way.

- Paul Williams

Send upto 1GB over the net

E-mail up to 1gb in one go I use this to get scientists to e-mail me large video files and images, rather than waiting for them to be sent through the post. Use the following free web service http://www.yousendit.com/

Another option is to set up an FTP server but that's a little more complicated!

Picasa - a handy tool to help you manage your images

Picasa is another great way to help you manage the unweilding array of folders in your main production folder. Install Picasa and it will automatically search for and start managing all the images and many of the video clips on your computer (and shared production folder - if you set it to look there). Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organised by date with folder names you will recognise. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organised.

Like the Microsoft Office Picture Manager that most BBC desktops now have, Picasa also has useful editing tools and one-click fixes. With Picasa you can also email, print photos at home, make gift CDs, instantly share via Hello, and even post pictures on your own blog.

Top 50 Science Blogs

Weblogs written by scientists are relatively rare, but some of them are proving popular. Out of 46.7 million blogs indexed by the Technorati blog search engine, five scientists' sites make it into the top 3,500. Read the Nature article HERE to find out about their success.

For a list of the 50 Top Science Blogs go HERE

Unofficial Factual BBC website

http://www.bbcfactual.co.uk/










From the page owner:
"For a long time I have enjoyed and been impressed with factual/documentary programmes shown on BBC television. Having watched The Ascent Of Man, America and Royal Heritage in my youth I wanted to create a web page listing those programmes that the BBC does so well."

Listed on that page, in chronological order, are entries for factual/documentaries, giving Title, Author of book/Presenter of programme, where applicable, and the date when the series was first broadcast.

Most of the information on these pages has been taken from BBC sources, such as BBC Online, Radio Times, BBC Information And Archive, BBC Books and personal emails from BBC staff.

TV & Radio Bits - Retro TV

If your interested in retro-TV, and quirky little things such as idents, eurovision and when TVC last had a power cut, visit "TV & Radio Bits". I love this site.

http://www.tvradiobits.co.uk/

Find the Geographic Location of a website

Geographically trace the actual server containing a Web page or allocated an IP address.

TraceRoute
Useful for verifying the source of websites. I'm sure that there are many applications but if anything its interesting to have a play around.

Natural History Filming Checklist

Here's a quick checklist that I have found useful when researching a natural history story.
- Paul Williams

Behaviour

* Are the study animals marked in any way?

* How often does the behaviour occur?

* Do you have any photographs/video of the behaviour/habitat?

* How many study animals do you have?

* Who is the top scientist studying this animal (get their contact details and best time/way to get in touch with them)? Where are they based?

Does this behaviour occur naturally in the wild, or is only seen in captivity?

What time of year does the behaviour occur/can be filmed?

Do we need permits to film/handle or collect the animal?

How do we get the behaviour to occur?

How do they react to light/being handled?
How can we film the animal without disturbing their behaviour (viewing platforms etc.)?

Location

How easy to access the location?

What does the setting/backdrop/habitat look like?
Are the enclosures naturalists (and how big are they)?

Distance from the nearest major town/international Airport?

Do we need permits to film in the location?

Do you have any other locations where this could be filmed?

The Location Guide

For listings of Production Companies this is proving quite interesting: www.thelocationguide.com - this site also has a Pre-Production Forum where you can ask for recommendations externally.

thelocationguide.com
The Online Location For Your Next Production

thelocationguide.com is a free online resource launched at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001 to help globe-hunting producers track down the best suited locations with services to match their budget.












The site covers over 100 countries and provides contact information for over 1500 production service companies, location finders and fixers, studios, film commissions, film boards and government film liaison offices worldwide. The site also provides a global platform for countries, regions, location services and facilities to promote themselves to producers and production companies from around the world.

Since its launch, thelocationguide.com has registered in excess of 14,800 users from over 100 countries.

The Location Guide

For listings of Production Companies this is proving quite interesting: www.thelocationguide.com - this site also has a Pre-Production Forum where you can ask for recommendations externally.

thelocationguide.com
The Online Location For Your Next Production

thelocationguide.com is a free online resource launched at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001 to help globe-hunting producers track down the best suited locations with services to match their budget.












The site covers over 100 countries and provides contact information for over 1500 production service companies, location finders and fixers, studios, film commissions, film boards and government film liaison offices worldwide. The site also provides a global platform for countries, regions, location services and facilities to promote themselves to producers and production companies from around the world.

Since its launch, thelocationguide.com has registered in excess of 14,800 users from over 100 countries.

History of TV Website

Here's a nice site if your interested in the history of UK TV: History of TV Website









"Devoted to the past, present, and future of television in the United Kingdom, HTW places emphasis on the programme makers as opposed to the programmes themselves (though some programmes inevitably do get mentioned). Special sections are provided for each of the main UK TV broadcasters (BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel Five), plus features on other topics such as Colour Television are also included."

The Wayback Machine - Travel Back in Time On-Line

The wayback machine is a server which stores previous versions of millions of websites, effectively allowing you to search back in time.

One researcher used this tool to see how a government body had responded to some big news, it turned out that they had tried to cover their involvement up by changing their website. The stored versions of their site clearly showed their involvement, and how they had tried to lie on-line, as it retained the original incriminating statements.

http://www.archive.org/

Click on the image below to see a list of the stored versions of BBC.co.uk (sometimes it can be a bit slow):





Just to show how far bbc.co.uk has come check out a few of the welcome screens from almost 10 years ago:

"The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public."