“I feared I was putting myself out of a job!”
GORDON BUCHANAN TELLS US HOW THE ANIMAL STARS OF THIS NEW SERIES DID THEIR OWN FILMING…
One of the marvels of modern wildlife films is the evolution of camera technology that allows us to see things we never could before. In this new three-part series, the animals themselves are given specially-designed cameras to wear, and the footage they capture gives us a close-up perspective on their lives.
Inside TV chatted to wildlife cameraman Gordan Buchanan about how this series is changing the game…
Were you worried about entrusting the animals with cameras?
At the beginning I think my fears were over the number of things that could go wrong. One was the technology – most of these things were minifrankenstein’s monsters of bits of other things that had been put together to do this specific task, plus in the case of the smaller animals we had to design cameras from scratch. And while deploying the cameras is one thing, retrieving them is another! But with each animal, as we got the results in, my fear was that I was putting myself out of a job – the animals were able to film more interesting things themselves than
I ever was!
We see in the series that it wasn’t always easy to get the animals to wear the cameras – Kimbang the chimp in episode one takes several attempts…
That was the first trip we did, and I was really surprised by how difficult it was, even with a chimpanzee that is so used to being around people. Obviously they’re incredibly strong and destructive, and you have to take that into account when you’re setting up the camera. The meerkats were about the easiest, but getting the cameras back was a bit nerve-wracking – they’re made of soft neoprene, so if the meerkats find it uncomfortable they can take it off. But what we didn’t want was for them to be taking off the cameras four feet underground in a labyrinth of tunnels!
What were the biggest challenges of filming the animals in this way?
The safety and welfare of the animals is paramount, so that’s where you start off – what weight can the camera be?
You have to think, ‘Where is the best place to have a camera on this animal? Where will it be least obstructive? Where are we going to get the best view?’ For me, it was thinking about animals in a
very different way. As a wildlife cameraman you spend so much time watching them from quite great distances, so this was an opportunity to think, ‘Hopefully this animal is going to take us with it to see the world from its point of view’.
Do you think you managed to achieve what you set out to do?
It was never about, ‘Let’s put a camera on an eagle and let it fly about’ – the heart of it was unanswered questions, and speaking to scientists and asking them what they wanted to find out about these animals that they can only see with this sort of visual reference. It was quite tense to sit down with a scientist who in some cases had been studying the animal of choice for 15-20 years, and for them to be blown away by what they were seeing!