Partially I’m wondering the physical aspect of how they fit in these places or get close enough to dangerous situations to film them; and partially I’m wondering how they seem to be in the right place at the right time to catch things like a dead whale sinking down into the ocean?
What are the odds they’d be there to capture that and how much time do they spend waiting for these types of things?
In: Technology
The recent Attenborough series has a bonus episode where they take you behind the scenes of some of the shots. I believe it was called “our planet”.
It may help answer some of your questions, for example it took 2 people living in a shed for the winter 3 years to capture just 25 secs of footage of this super rare tiger.
There is a podcast about wildlife called “The Wild” [https://www.kuow.org/podcasts/thewild](https://www.kuow.org/podcasts/thewild) and the most recent one was about a videographer who was trying to film siberian tigers in the wild for the first time ever. 7 months in a hole in the ground, eating peanuts, rice, vitamins, salt and water. Twice per week exiting the hole to take a #2… in a bag that is sealed and hauled out later. Oh and it is -30C. He is literally in a hole in the ground for months!
The photographers are hard core to get that footage!!! Have a listen. That guy is both cool as hell and a bit insane. He and his resupply guy wouldn’t make eye contact so that it wouldn’t remind him how lonely it was out there alone.
They also use high end expensive cameras with long battery lives so they can leave them in the field for weeks at a time
It takes a lot of luck and patience. It can take years to capture one scene. In Blue Planet II, the film crew traveled to French Polynesia to film groupers spawning. That event happens for less than an hour every year. They completely missed the spawning the first year, despite all the planning and preparation they did. They had to leave and come back the next year to film it.
It takes hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of filming to successfully capture an event: “The team then clocked up several thousand hours diving with the grouper, including round the clock sessions the following year when they were due to spawn, to film the event.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/blue-planet-film-crew-were-11483428.amp
Underground stuff (ant hills, dens, etc …) are artificially made with a glass barrier. It can be constructed in a way to get the best possible shots.
A lot of the insect footage is filmed on “sets” indoors. Set up a terrarium, drop in the bugs, and there you go. It’s a bit more difficult to get correct lighting for small scale stuff.
The BBC has a documentary called Life In The Undergrowth that shows the life of insects if we were viewing it at their level. I think they show how it’s done. A must see
The recent series “our planet” had an extra hour long episode in which they explained how they got footage of a very rare tiger. Members of the team had to take turns living in a small hut near where they had found evidence of tigers being in that area (paw prints, poo etc)
They stayed in that hut all by themselves for a week or more, not leaving at all and waited for the Tigers to pass by.
The most amazing shots though were captured with trap cams. Any movement would turn on the camera and start filming.
When they were filming Orangutan, they had to treck through the forest following them. 1 team member carried the huge camera, another carried the huge tripod, then when they stopped they had to assemble it all and try and film the orangutans before they moved again. Which they did, alot.
Eventually after much perseverance they managed to film the amazing moment an orangutan broke open a dead tree containing an ants nest and then used a stick to poke inside to get to the ants.
Many shots are completely fabricated on sets with recreated environments and creatures raised in captivity, or transplanted from the wild.
This is especially true with the scenes with things like ants.
I want to see the setup that caught all of the “iguana running through the snake pit” scene
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