The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
TV FAVOURITE TAKES US ON A FANTASTIC NEW VOYAGE
Green Planet shows the secret world of plants, as Danielle de Wolfe discovered from Sir David Attenborough
Drifting across the dewy lawns of London’s Kew Gardens, the unmistakable voice of Sir David Attenborough has caused countless passing visitors to do a double take. After all, it’s not every day you spot the 95-year-old naturalist and broadcaster perched casually upon the gnarled root of an old oak tree. On this overcast morning, Covid restrictions have eased enough to venture on location with BBC Studios’ renowned Natural History Unit. It’s a shoot that marks five years since filming first began for the forthcoming five-part BBC documentary series The Green Planet – a period that has seen the team travel the world, capturing footage of the rarest and most intriguing plant-life imaginable.
“The world has suddenly become plant conscious,” Sir David reflects as he adds there has been “a revolution worldwide in attitudes towards the natural world in my lifetime”. We have seen, he explains: “An awakening and an awareness of how important the natural world is to us all. An awareness that we would starve without plants, we wouldn’t be able to breathe without plants.
“The world is green – it’s an apt name (for the series), the world is green. And yet people’s understanding about plants, except in a very kind of narrow way, has not kept up with that. I think this will bring it home.”
The show’s executive producer, Mike Gunton, agrees.
“The idea behind this was I wanted to do a Planet Earth for plants – because obviously your first thought with plants is, ‘It’s going to be like Gardeners’ World, it’s going to be dull’,” the Bafta-winning producer says.
“Planet Earth gives you a sense that there’s going to be some drama and some scale. It is constructed by habitat, so I wanted to replicate that. There’s tropical worlds, desert worlds, water worlds, seasonal worlds, and human worlds.”
As the first ever creative director of the BBC’s Natural History Unit, Gunton has played a pivotal role in the production of hit BBC documentaries including Planet Earth II, Dynasties and Africa, making him ideally placed to take on the mammoth challenge posed by The Green Planet. Reuniting with Dynasties series producer Rupert Barrington, the forthcoming series – which premiered
32 | Saturday, January 8, 2022 on the eve of November’s COP26 summit in Glasgow – will see Sir David return to our screens as series narrator.
Sir David hopes the series highlights the importance plants play in human life. He describes the world of plants as “a parallel world on which we depend, and which up to now we have largely ignored, if I speak on behalf of urbanised man. Over half the population of the world according to the United Nations are urbanised, live in cities, only see cultivated plants and never see a wild community of plants. But that wild community is there, outside urban circumstances normally, and we depend upon it. And we better jolly well care for it,” the TV veteran warns.
Recalling how the series proposal was met with the words “we’re ploughing a new furrow” from Sir David, Gunton says he knew the project needed to be an immersive viewing experience.
Gunton explains how the unit developed never-before-seen technology, resulting in a new approach to filmmaking. Based upon a widely-used technique known as timelapse photography – a process by which a moving object is photographed consistently over a period of time and when played back, appears as a fast-forwarded video – the concept emerged after producer Paul Williams chanced upon a YouTube video uploaded by American visual engineer, Chris Field, who had tinkered with existing electronics to create a customised camera capable of capturing the movement of plant life. Together with the BBC’s in-house team, they set about developing the technology in order to not only capture a simple timelapse, but allow viewers to travel along the rainforest floor alongside plants and insects. It’s a project that also saw the Natural History Unit embrace drone technology – a more eco-friendly and immersive alternative to helicopters. Harnessing the skills of two competitive first-person-view drone pilots, the drones were able to weave through the rainforest canopy at high speed, capturing footage unlike anything the team had previously seen. “We managed to go to all the habitats,” says Gunton, listing trips across South America and Europe. “We’ve been to rainforests, deserts, water worlds, and the Arctic – we even went to the Arctic Circle.”
The Green Planet begins on BBC One on January 9.