Chronicling the birth of our cities
Walk back two decades and the Earth as we know it today was nothing like it then. With our growing needs and an exploding population, human beings have been on a constant lookout for ways to house all of us, and engineer ways to make our cities more efficient.
Featuring some of the marvelous constructions that humanity could master on our planet, the show Generation
Earth is deconstructing what it took to build towns and architectural masterpieces like the Burj Khalifa (the tallest building in the world) and Buckingham Palace. The show’s executive producer Helen Thomas talks to us talks about documenting a transforming planet.
“The way that the earth is changing got me interested in the show. If you look back a generation, 30 years ago, Las Vegas was just a small city, Dubai was a dusty desert with a single highway, and the tallest building was a tower in Chicago. We were looking for some of the most extraordinary stories from around the planet. Each of the episodes cover a different aspect of the transformation, about manmade constructions, to show the epic scale of redesign of Earth. And we thought it was a good time to document that,” says Helen about the show that will be aired on Sony BBC Earth.
The kind of research that went into bringing out the series was intense, with travels around the planet from the Burj Khalifa, to Mexico to Shanghai — where they built a 30-storied building in the span of 15 days!
“It was intriguing how human beings were moving things around the planet and were finding ways to connect all of them — the biggest bridges, finding ways to provide food, energy and water for everyone. We once had a Hashima Island in Japan, where a lot of people used to live and mine, and once the mining was stopped, people left the land overnight, leaving their shoes and trams behind — these were the kind of stories we were looking for through the show,” adds Helen, adds the award-winning producer, who has worked on shows like Stargazing Live (with Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield), Countdown to Life among
others. The journey of entering television production took her an immense lot of hard work, Helen admits, saying, “I did physics degree, and I was one of the few women doing physics degree then, then I wanted to be a sound engineer — again to be one of the very few women who did that, but I felt very welcomed. From there I ventured into production. It was considered harder for women to make it but I’ve always worked extremely hard to move to the level where I am.”
Her mind is constantly engaged with questions, she says. “I’m always looking for interesting questions that the audience would have about life and our planet. I try to find questions which they wouldn’t have had before and look for answers through the shows I make.”
(Generation Earth airs every Saturday and Sunday at 9 pm on Sony BBC Earth)