How the BBC makes Planet Earth look like a Hollywood movie
These images of a swarm of locusts are from theBBC’s groundbreaking Planet Earth series in 2006.
And this footage comes from the brand newsequel to that program — this is Planet Earth 2.
You might notice the improvement in resolutionfrom HD to Ultra-HD.
But another big change is that in Planet Earth2, it’s not just the grasshoppers that are moving.
The cameras are moving too.
These dynamic tracking shots are part of thereason why Planet Earth 2 is the BBC’s most cinematic wildlife film yet.
GUNTON: We know when we go to the cinema nowthe camera’s never static.
It's always on the move, it’s always on a steadicam, it’salways on tracks, it’s always flying.
And I think we wanted to reflect that in ourapproach.
Not just because we wanted to do homage to cinema but because the reasonwhy cinema does that is because as soon as you have that sense of moving camera it feelsmore immersive, it feels more connected.
Watching Planet Earth 2 feels a bit like watchinga hollywood blockbuster.
You almost forget that these actors are hidingin remote corners of the globe and they do not follow scripts.
The BBC’s Natural History Unit in Bristolhas been producing wildlife films for 60 years.
Their frequent presenter, sir David Attenborough, is most recognizable voice of the genre.
“This extraordinary creature is half blind, half deaf, and this is just about as fast as it can move”And through the decades, they’ve continually raised the bar for the look and feel of naturefilms, too.
That evolution, as we’ll explore in this3-part series, is in large part a story of technology.
The first big breakthrough was lightweight, 16mm film cameras.
NIGHTINGALE: If you remember, television beganas a studio operation.
It just had ginormous video cameras that werelarger than a person.
Then in the film industry, of course, thatwas all movies, and again, they were very, very cumbersome.
There simply weren't cameras that you couldtake into the jungles and deserts and so on.
16mm cameras were portable, but they werecontroversial inside the BBC, seen as amateur cameras, since 35mm film was the broadcaststandard at the time.
But Attenborough insisted on the smaller camerasfor his first trips overseas.
And sure enough, he came back with footageof animals that had never before been filmed, like these Indri lemurs in Madagascar.
Fifty-six years later, filming the Indri meansmoving the camera around them and traveling with them through the trees, but the technologythey used to do this has only come around in the past few years.
The issue is stabilization.
You can see the shaking in these rare handheldshots from the BBC’s 1990 series The Trials of Life.
Aerial shots had the same problem.
And if they tried to zoom in, those bumpsjust got magnified.
Producers could achieve cinematic motion withcranes, dollies, and sliders where it was practical to do so.
But for decades almost all the shots thatweren’t underwater involved a camera on a tripod — panning, tilting and zoomingto follow the action.
There’s definitely no shortage of incredibleanimal behavior to film that way.
But it all changed around 2002.
That's when BBC switched from film to digital HD cameras for the Planet Earth series.
That switch gave them access to a tool calledthe Cineflex heligimbal, a stabilization system for a helicopter-mounted camera.
The heligimbal delivered the smooth sweepingscenic shots that defined the epic look of that series.
But it also let them film individual animalsfrom a kilometer up in the sky, and zoom way in to follow them without the noise of thechopper scaring them off.
And that changed the way they could capturebehaviors like hunting.
GUNTON: If you look at how people shot andedited hunting sequences, because of the nature of where you had to put the camera, you couldnever get long continuous shots because you would you get a shot on a tripod, the wolfwould run off, you had to jump up and get in the land rover, run across, put the tripoddown and get another shot.
So it always had to be quite edited and quiteconstructed.
Compare that to the wolf hunt in Planet Earth.
GUNTON: Once that wolf started hunting youcould just fly along, keep your distance and in one shot, you just see how that drama playedout.
And you just do not know what's gonna happen:is it gonna stumble, is gonna catch it, is the little caribou gonna run away, is it gonnastumble? It was so gripping because it was unmediated.
The Cineflex system required digital camerasbecause it separates the lens from the camera’s data storage, which at the time was digitalvideo cassette tape.
You just can’t do that with film.
The 400mm zoom lens is mounted inside a seriesof rings called a gimbal, that isolate it from the movement of the helicopter, withthe help of small sensors called gyroscopes.
Those sensors detect changes in orientationso that motors can correct for those movements almost immediately.
So the camera operator can control thelens with a joystick inside the helicopter and zoom in without losing any stability.
Ten years later, that stabilization technologycomes in smaller, much more affordable forms.
It’s embedded in drones, and built intorigs that you can hold in your hands.
And that technological change aligned perfectlywith what the BBC wanted to do with Planet Earth 2.
GUNTON: We wanted to push the proximity, getting close to the animals because we wanted to see the world's landscapes, our planet, through the animals' eyes.
Gyro-stabilized drones provided more intimateaerials, and handheld shots showed what it feels liketo really move through these habitats.
WHITE: I think we've gone for a much moreemotional narrative in these.
It's much more trying to put you in theirworld and what would that animal be feeling.
Trying not to be anthropomorphic about it, but just sort of taking the viewer on a journey where they can start to relate to how thatanimal might work in that world.
It's a slightly warmer, closer take on PlanetEarth.
Hollywood filmmakers have been able to getstabilized walking shots for decades using a Steadicam.
That’s a bigger, more complicated rig thatstabilizes the camera with balanced weights and a spring-loaded arm attached to a vestthat the operator wears.
Those long walk-and-talk shots that ER andThe West Wing made famous, those are all Steadicam shots.
The producers of Planet Earth 2 used Steadicamsfor a few sequences, like this footage of a serval cat hunting in South Africa.
But it most cases Steadicams have been toocumbersome, expensive, or inflexible for shooting in the wild.
Instead, the Planet Earth 2 team relied heavilyon smaller handheld stabilizers.
Like the heligimbal, these rigs have gyroscopesthat measure orientation along 3 axes and motors that counteract those movements.
These rigs are so small and versatile theycan often replace several other tools like sliders and cranes.
WHITE: On some of the trips, like the tripto film the penguins, we took a crane with us, we talked about taking sliders.
The reality is it didn't come out of the box.
Everything was done with a cameraman holdinga camera on a gimbal.
In an environment like that, just to be ableto move around quite freely, have a camera that you can put down at penguin level butbe able to pick up and get above the penguins was just so useful.
Handheld stabilizers are most effective whenyou can get close to the animal, and a lot of animals don’t like that, so they’llnever replace tripods.
Rather they add to the rapidly growing arsenalof tools becoming available not just to pros, but to everyone, to be able to get shots thatlook like hollywood blockbusters.
But ultimately, what makes a movie great isn’tjust the pictures, it’s the story.
The Natural History Unit’s style has shiftedover time from more educational to more cinematic, but they haven’t forgotten that.
GUNTON: The imagery of course is that firstthing that catches the eye, catches the attention but without the revelations the storytellingbrings, in the end, it palls quite quickly.
So no technology will ever replace the abilityto be able to tell a story that grips and fascinates and emotionally connects with anaudience.
Thank you for watching! You can find Planet Earth 2 on BBC America.
It will be airing Saturdays through March25th.
You can also find tons of clips from theirarchive on BBC Earth’s mobile app.
It’s called Story of Life and it’s actuallywhere I found a lot of the clips that I used in this video.
And it’s free! So check it out.
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