Super Cats: Episode 1 | Extreme Lives

'Nice to meet you.'

'You too.'

'Super Cats is the definitive portrait of the entire cat family.

So we've got all the familiar big cats, but also the secret surprising small cats.

It's one family, it's got 40 different species and we tried to film as many of them as possible.'

'They're really beautiful creatures.

They can run fast, and they can jump high, and they can stalk - so there's a super heighten quality to the things they do.'

'New technology was a huge part of this series.

Without the technology, developments that happened in a few years, we simply couldn't have made the show.

There's developments in low-light filming technologies.

There's thermal cameras which lets us film new behaviors in complete darkness.

We were able to put cameras in the field and then leave them there for months on end, which just gave us a portrait of cats that we've rarely seen before.

And also we developed our own technologies; we used a buggy cam to film the cheetah and we were able to ride alongside it at 40 miles per hour.'

'We got a perspective that people haven't really seen.

We slowed it down about 30 times.

It was a very ambitious series - 16 countries, 600 filming days, we filmed 31 species of cat.

What I love about this series: most of the cats people have never even seen before - really beautiful, interesting animals.

It's really about discovering the unknown and I think viewers will appreciate that.'