Goodall on her wildest adventure yet
WILDLIFE LEGEND’S STUNNING NEW VIRTUAL REALITY FILM SERIES DEBUTS AT CANNES FILM FESTIVAL
‘Amazing!” gasps Jane Goodall, as she tilts her head in all directions, oblivious to the outside world. Goodall is the primatologist who changed our understanding of nature by recording chimpanzees using tools, a skill previously thought to separate humans from animals. But today Goodall is the one mastering a new tool: the 84-year-old is sitting spellbound on a sofa, wearing a VR headset and a wry smile.
She’s watching a film from The Wild Immersion, a project intended to raise awareness of — and perhaps even save — the natural world, via 360-degree virtual reality wildlife documentaries.
Introduced by Goodall, they really are immersive: you’re practically nuzzling into the pandas’ fur, flying with the flamingos over an African lake. Then a lioness comes up and sniffs your face, before a giraffe walks right over you, its vast legs splayed above you like pillars. So that’s what a giraffe’s underneath looks like. Turn your head and the savannah stretches to the horizon in every direction.
“Mouse, you have a go,” says Goodall, passing the headset to her assistant Mary Lewis.
We’re in the London offices of the Jane Goodall Institute, which is in Mary’s house.
“Aargh!” screams Mary. She’s just come face to face with a cobra.
“My favourite thing is watching other people watch,” Goodall says. “It’s so funny!”
Fear is more global
Having lived in the wilds of Tanzania for 15 years, Goodall is less fearful.
“I used to be afraid if I heard a leopard at night when I was alone up on the peak,” she says. “I’d pull the blanket over my head.”
Now the fear is more global. We hardly need reminding that these animals and their habitats, and by extension our own survival, are in mortal danger. The numbers are chilling: 16,000 species in danger of extinction, including a quarter of all mammals and one in five plant species [and much more by the end of the century]. It’s time we all stopped pulling the blanket over our heads.
That’s where The Wild Immersion comes in. The first three 12-minute films, capturing African savannah, underwater and polar habitats, are debuting at the Cannes Film Festival. There are plans to exhibit them at venues globally (including in China, the US, and London). Beyond that, headset-makers Lenovo are currently marketing its VR Classroom technology, including The Wild Immersion’s content, to schools in the US, enabling “virtual field trips”.
Money raised will fund existing nature reserves and create new ones.
It took 120 days of filming, on five continents, to produce 80 minutes of footage, using a small team headed by French film-maker Raphael Aupy.
There was no trickery such as scent or food to attract animals: the cameras were simply placed in the habitats, manned or unmanned. Sometimes they were on drones — or, in the case of the pandas, on the end of four-metre poles. They did lose a few cameras to the lions.
“The films are a way of interesting kids in conservation,” says Goodall. “And they may inspire people to save up and go out there and see it for themselves.”
There’s also the depressing thought that The Wild Immersion may one day be the only way future generations get to see these creatures — because we’ve made them extinct.
Goodall first travelled to Gombe, Tanzania, in 1960 as an untrained 26-year-old researcher, generating such headlines as “Comely miss spends her time eyeing apes” and ruffling scientific feathers by giving the chimps names, before documenting their personalities and relationships.
But she discovered what nobody else had: that chimpanzees used tools, hunted strategically and ate other chimps or monkeys, even killed each other. Goodall’s work redefined humanity’s conception of itself. Her book, In the Shadow of Man, has been translated into 48 languages.
But Goodall gave up full-time research at Gombe in 1986.
“I suddenly realised the chimps were vanishing, the forests were going, terrible things were going on in medical research, and I knew my time had come to do something about it.”