Baby steps
We go behind the scenes of the latest BBC series, which follows six young animals through their first year
That was a bit of a thumpingheart moment,” says Sue Gibson, looking up from her viewfinder to face the camera that’s filming her while she films macaques. It was for the viewers back home, too. Ace wildlife film-maker Sue had just bagged a sequence where a pack of salivating feral dogs chase a group of macaques through the leafy grounds of a Sri Lankan temple. Among them is the ridiculously cute, wrinkle-browed newborn Jezir, one of six infant stars in BBC Two series Animal Babies: First Year on Earth. Will he make it up the tree to safety in time?
Jezir is a toque macaque, an endangered species named for the wispy Trumpian toupées worn by the adults. While Jezir and his mother scarper – with him clinging onto her belly for dear life – the voice-over tells us that as mum is an alpha female, she is given precedence by the troop’s subordinate macaques when it comes to escaping up trees from hungry hounds. Amazingly, they wait to let the high-ranking pair go first. Animal Babies, narrated by Nigerian-born British actor Wunmi Mosaku, is full of surprising facts like this.
Did you know that, when just 12 weeks old, spotted hyena cubs have to master the
rules of a complex hierarchy in which they must treat every clan member correctly, with either reverence or defiance? That, to begin with, a sea otter can’t dive, because its furry ‘babygrow’ is simply too buoyant? That as soon as Arctic fox cubs see their first patch of snow, they instinctively start practising the balletic vole-pounce? That there are only 50 baby mountain gorillas alive at any time? Or that one of the many hazards facing a naive young African elephant is petulant kicks from grouchy elder siblings whose personal space it has just invaded?
Growing pains
As any human parent knows, a baby’s first year is inherently challenging. The child’s early life is endlessly taxing, not to mention messy, for everyone concerned. There are also lighter moments of great tenderness. But in addition, baby mammals growing up in the wild have to confront a host of daily dangers, including rivals (often family members), predators and the weather. All perfect ingredients for a natural-history programme. “Exactly!” agrees executive producer Jo Shinner. “There is always peril in wildlife film-making,” Jo tells me when I ask her to share the thinking behind her latest series. “It’s central to the genre. But here, it’s magnified, because the terror is that so few baby animals make it. In four of the six species of mammal we follow, the
“The aim was to create intimacy, so we didn't want to be at arm’s length from the action.”
young have only a 50 per cent chance of survival in their first year.”
Animal Babies is notable for its immersive style and, instead of using a crew dozensstrong, the BBC Natural History Unit deployed just three expert camera operators – Sue Gibson, Vianet Djenguet and Colin Stafford-Johnson – who appear on screen and react to interesting behaviour as they film it. Each focused on two species, spending months in the field. “Our aim with this series was to have many extraordinary eyewitness elements,” Jo says. “As you’re with our wonderful camera operators, you feel more involved. You feel like you are that person, there in the moment. It comes across as very present and immediate.”
Up close and personal
At one point in the first episode, Vianet’s voice cracks as he describes the latest scrape to befall baby gorilla Nyakabara. It’s nerveshredding stuff. “We can all really relate to a great ape like the mountain gorilla,” Jo says. “There’s so much emotion between the mother and her offspring.”
I ask Jo about the parallels with making other kinds of TV – news, for example. “This is actually classic observational documentary film-making,” she replies. “We wanted to
combine the camera ‘ops’ with strong factual information and lots of storytelling – we take the viewer on real journeys.”
As series producer, Dominic Weston was heavily involved in the day-to-day decisions on each of the 18 shoots that went into Animal Babies over a two-year period. “We were aiming to create intimacy, so didn’t want to be at arm’s length from the action,” he tells me, when we discuss how the series was made. “You get some amazingly beautiful wildlife documentaries, yet often end up with a distant narration style that is referred to as the ‘voice of God.’ That’s fine but it’s not what we wanted.”
Talking to Dominic, it strikes me that the show has Springwatch coursing through its veins. Since its storylines and key scenes are not planned by the producers in advance, but respond to unexpected twists and turns in the lives of individual animals, this seems like a very different, more naturalistic, approach from that taken by a dramatised wildlife TV series such as Serengeti, which aired recently on BBC One.
Interesting developments
Fair comment? Up to a point, says Dominic, keen to emphasise the longer timeframe involved. “There are similarities with Springwatch,” he says. “But that’s a springboard for something else. What we’re looking at is not only the moment when a baby mammal leaves its den, but what else happens in the months after that. So we can show how all sorts of other fascinating things develop. Some of the youngsters we follow – Nyakabara the gorilla and Safina the elephant, for instance – will still be growing up in seven years’ time!”
In the past, it was standard practice for wildlife film-makers to create sequences by stitching together footage of multiple animals, occasionally even at different locations, and present it as an episode in the life of a single animal. That’s generally frowned on nowadays, yet sticking with the same individual is altogether trickier. When I ask Sue Gibson about this, her reply concedes how hard it can be, recalling the sweaty macaque shoot at the temples of Polonnaruwa. “One minute, Jezir would be playing on the ground, the next zipping up a tree,” she says. “Keeping up with him was exhausting!”
There are challenges with this style of wildlife film-making – what if your chosen star dies?