How are wild and sometimes dangerous animals in documentaries filmed so close and at so many different angles without noticing the camera operator?
In: Biology
I’ve worked on camera and off-camera on various nature docs and I have a lot of friends and acquaintances in the business.
Most of what you see has been faked in one sense or another. Captive or acclimated animals are filmed. There are wolves in a 20 acre enclosure that you can either film or buy footage of. Tearing road-kill apart and looking very wild. There’s a whole book on wolves that National Geographic sells which was photographed this way. It is very easy to keep the fence just out of the shot.
There are exceptions. What the Jouberts do is amazing, and it takes sitting there for months filming stuff. That is rare.
Read “Shooting in the Wild,” by Chris Palmer for a really detailed description of how most of what you have seen in documentaries was faked.
I will say that I have guested on “Bizarre Foods” with Andrew Zimmern and while I banked pigeons and snails in advance for us to cook and eat, we didn’t fake anything and I was never pressured to fake anything.
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