Wildlife Cinematographer Gordon Buchanan and NATURE’s Executive Producer Fred Kaufman discuss the making of NATURE’s new series, Animals with Cameras.
Features
TRANSCRIPT
- Nice to meet you.
- Yeah, you too.
- Good to see you.
(soft music) - In Animals With Cameras, it's about the viewer being right there with the animal, we do enter their world.
- We were able to put a camera on these animals without interfering with their behavior, many of the animals didn't even know they had the cameras on.
- [Female] That's really cool.
- Instantly you get a real chimp point of view.
To make a series like this, just five years ago, wouldn't have been possible, it's astounding that something as small as this can get moving images.
For a wildlife film maker, there's always that point, that animal disappears and the story ends where as with Animals With Cameras the story continues.
- [Kaufman] You just see wonderful, intimate behaviors and personalities.
- Are you going to wear a camera?
- [Buchanan] It was very much a partnership between the program makers, the scientists, and the animals, it was a very diverse team.
- [Female] Having such a long term project the meerkats end up so used to us.
- [Kaufman] Gordon was able to insert himself into the scene, get to know the animals, put the equipment on them.
- [Buchanan] There were so many challenges, it was a lot harder than I ever imagined.
The key thing for this camera is just to not interfere with any of her senses.
- A lot of it is studying how they move.
- [Buchanan] It's high risk strategy just creating something that is so much thought and expense has gone into and you're giving it to a wild animal.
- Never thought that would be strong enough, because a big, wild male will just do that straight away.
- [Kaufman] There was no way of knowing whether or not we were getting good footage.
- Fantastic.
- That's amazing, it really is excellent footage.
- [Buchanan] Every single animal we've been able to see in a completely new way.
- [Kaufman] Within the burrow, we saw these newborn meerkats, and you couldn't have gotten that otherwise.
- [Buchanan] The cheetahs filmed it themselves, we saw what they were seeing.
Such a very intimate moment.
- It's novel, but really we did want to find out things that will help scientists, things that will help those animals in a changing world.