“Our cases of camera equipment and vital pictures floated down the river and flooded.”
they shot across the sand at speeds with a human equivalent of 760kph. Part of the crew’s success, according to Nick, was put down to the small bar they found at the edge of the desert, where they could end the day with a beer and regain their sanity.
Getting carried away
When pushing the boundaries of wildlife film-making in remote and hostile regions, danger is rarely far away. In the Peruvian Amazon, Toby was filming fire ants escaping the flooded forest by building rafts with their living bodies, for the Weather episode. “We were nearing the end of an eight-hour river journey, when the skipper encountered an unexpected current and the boat, a long slender craft similar to a British narrowboat, capsized. We swam through the cabin and out through an upturned exit hole, and made it safely to the riverbank.
“All of our 40 cases of camera equipment and drives containing the vital pictures were on board. Many floated down the river and flooded, despite the case manufacturer’s waterproof guarantee, but miraculously one set of drives, on which a month’s filming was recorded, had survived intact. It’s the most important thing to save after human life – though, ironically, it was the back-up drives. The master drives had been destroyed.”
Perhaps the biggest test was in the Gulf of Thailand, where producer Ed Charles was in search of Eden’s whales, a close relative of the slightly larger Bryde’s whale. The image that stuck in Ed’s mind was not one
“As a birder, the most memorable shoot was sitting for days at the world’s largest colony of southern carmine bee-eaters, filming new behaviour. They were being hunted from below by Nile crocodiles, which leapt vertically up to try to catch them, and from above by African fish eagles, which swooped in to grab them in mid-air. Daily journeys to the hide would involve negotiating a path between hippos and crocodiles. We were sometimes closer to giant bull hippos – hot and bothered in the peak of the dry season – than I would have liked!” of whales, even when he did find them, but something else entirely: “Every morning, we would watch the residents of the town come out of their houses with a garbage bag in each hand, walk down to the ocean, and throw the bags into the water, before turning back to their homes. As we looked for the whales, there would be lines of this trash stretching for miles, as it was carried out to sea by the current.”
Human impacts
This was to become a frequent and disturbing sight that A Perfect Planet film crews observed even in the remotest places on Earth, such as Aldabra in the Indian Ocean. Huw Cordey was there to film giant tortoises: “Aldabra is one of the most remote and difficult-to-reach islands. It’s pretty much off limits to all but research scientists and the occasional tourist on a high-end cruise. To get there, you have to charter an aircraft and embark on a three-hour flight from the Seychelles, but when you get there, it’s sensational. Aldabra is one of the most pristine islands in the world. For much of it, the human footprint is incredibly small. It is home to the last giant tortoises in the Indian Ocean, and today there are about 100,000 of them roaming the island, along with the last flightless rails.”
But there was another side to Aldabra. Its western shores were carpeted with huge quantities of plastics of all description, washed in on currents from Africa. And, it was this destructive force of humans that features in the last episode in the series.
While touching on hurricanes, droughts, deforestation, floods and climate change, the production team took a close look at