Planet Earth II
Season 1 BBC Earth (*184) 16:00 Doccie
Nature doccie series Planet Earth II (2016-current) has rewritten the books on wildlife shows and not just because it took years to make and they have Sir David Attenborough narrating. We got inside info straight from the horse’s mouth when we chatted to Aussie biologist-turned-filmaker Dr Chadden Hunter, who worked on the series…
What convinced you to make Planet Earth II so long after 2006’s Planet Earth? We had new technology that’s allowed us to really get inside the animals lives, unlike Planet Earth I, which was about animal habitat. This series was about really seeing things through the animal eyes and as you’ve never experienced it before. Is there a moment in this season that really stood out for you? One of my highlights was seeing the saiga antelope. It’s such a weird-looking creature and it’s a relic from the ice age. These antelope have lived alongside woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed cats and I thought they were extinct, so I’d never see one. We heard they were still around and we went on a mission to find them in the grasslands of Russia. Is there a moment you’d prefer to forget? In the Okavango Delta! We were stuck in our boat surrounded by grumpy hippos and hungry crocodiles. We had to move the boat manually and I remember the mosquitoes, my legs getting slashed by swamp grass and thinking that we were going to be eaten alive. Filming this kind of show isn’t easy, right? We ran things like a military schedule. We spent nine months doing research before we even went into the field. And then over the space of two years, we had multiple teams going out to over 40 different countries. Collectively we’ve had to cut over 2 000 hours of footage into seven episodes.