Explorations from upon high
The third season of the documentary series Aerial China continues to portray the country’s natural splendors using footage taken from helicopters, drones and even cameras tied to balloons, Xu Fan reports.
Imagine seeing China like a bird does. It is, indeed, a bird’s-eye view that the popular documentary series Aerial
China takes as its point of focus. The series has aired its latest season on China Media Group’s CCTV-1 and CCTV-9 channels, as well as on the group’s new media platforms, since May 21.
It reveals a unique angle, in every sense, from which to explore the country’s vast landscapes, cultural sites and endangered wildlife.
The new season, Join Us to Fly, assumes a larger scale than the first and second seasons released in 2017 and 2019. It explores more than 250,000 kilometers in total through Yunnan, Guizhou, Jilin, Hunan, Shanxi, Anhui, Hebei and Shandong provinces, the Ningxia Hui autonomous region and Tianjin city.
Each episode of the 10 focuses on a single province. They were filmed with over 300 crew members taking over 400 flights in 18 helicopters in addition to 118 drones.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exerted unprecedented pressure on China’s film-and-TV industry, forcing many projects to suspend production for several months.
Shooting of the third season was completed before the Spring Festival holiday in late January, which would typically see the world’s largest annual travel rush.
When chief director Yu Le and his colleagues came to realize the seriousness of the outbreak, all the team members volunteered to cancel their festival plans.
Instead of returning to their hometowns, they stayed in Beijing to concentrate on post-production work, delivering video clips in external hard drives among their homes for editing.
“It feels sort of magical to imagine all of the third season’s scenes journeying across the capital’s empty streets,” Yu says.
Weather was a major variable during filming.
They had to wait for the perfect moment to shoot awe-inspiring scenes, such as the sunrise over Yunnan’s Meili Snow Mountain and the “sea” of clouds surrounding Anhui’s Huangshan Mountain.
“Clouds, fog and mist can create a certain mood or feeling, forging a tone of poetic beauty that contributes allure,” Yu says.
“So, we have to be very patient and wait for the best moment.”
But such visually stunning conditions make drone flight difficult.
“It’s typically recommendable to fly drones on cloudless days with stable winds,” Yu says.
Some of the other hardest shoots involved wildlife, such as endangered black snub-nosed monkeys in Yunnan and finless porpoises in the Yangtze River.
“Large animals are usually less sensitive to the flying vehicles. But we had to figure out how to avoid scaring small animals like monkeys,” Yu says.
“The monkeys would hide if they heard our drones, even if they were a kilometer away.”
The crew used such tactics as dangling bananas from drones and fastening cameras to helium balloons.
But they lost two cameras when the balloons to which they were connected flew away.
Yu says he remains hopeful someone will find and return the cameras so he can edit the clips into an adventure tale featuring the balloons as the protagonists.
While it’s impossible to avoid all mishaps, veteran drone pilots, and especially those who’ve filmed wildlife for years, can reduce accidents.
For example, an experienced drone operator would fly a certain distance from migrating birds to make them feel more comfortable about their unique “companion”. The drone would then slowly move in closer, as the flocks feel more relaxed.
The most breathtaking scenes required patience, persistence and a bit of luck, Yu says.
He recalls that filming the misty Dongjiang Lake in Central China’s
Hunan province was one of his most impressive expeditions.
“We arrived during the hottest days in summer, but it felt like we’d entered a refrigerator when we took a helicopter over the valleys around the lake. In the distance, the waters were shrouded in white fog, making it look like a Chinese brush-painting scroll.”
The helicopter’s whirring blades pushed the mist away when the chopper descended over the lake, opening a window of time to shoot the water’s surface before the mist returned. The crew repeated this several times over two full days, until they got the perfect shots.
Shots of human activity demonstrate Chinese people’s wisdom of living in harmony with nature.
Such scenes include the Hani ethnic group’s ancient rice terraces on Yunnan’s Ailao Mountain. The peak appears like a giant painting when observed from above or far away.
The episode on Guizhou shows over 2,000 ethnic Miao people jumping into a pond to catch fish with baskets or nets, an annual celebration that has lasted for more than 600 years. It’s the local equivalent of Valentine’s Day.
Yu says directing the third season led him to re-examine the relationship between humankind and nature from a new perspective.
“There has always been a tradition of naturalism in our culture, which has become pivotal to Chinese philosophy. We, Chinese, always regard nature with awe,” Yu says.
The latest season has received 9.2 points out of 10 on the major review site, Douban. Many fans are students learning about China’s geography.
Ultimately, Join Us to Fly offers all viewers a chance to see China’s lands from a new perspective — that is, a truly panoramic view.
There has always been a tradition of naturalism in our culture, which has become pivotal to Chinese philosophy.” Yu Le, chief director of the third season of the documentary series Aerial China