TROPICAL WORLDS
Hornet attacks, robot cameras and rain. Go behind the scenes of episode one with producer Paul Williams. “The dipterocarp sequence is very moving. The seeds spiral en masse down to the enemy waiting below ”
BBC Wildlife: What’s the theme of the first episode?
Relationships. The tropical world is a dense, tangled environment, containing more than half of the plant and animal species on Earth. This phenomenal abundance of life is all down to tropical plants and the relationships that they have developed with animals, and with each other, over millions of years. The episode has another theme: fragmentation, and how we need to piece our forests back together to preserve this rich life.
What’s the episode’s standout sequence, in your view?
The dipterocarp sequence is very moving. These are the tallest tropical trees in the world – some are over 90m high – and are very abundant on Borneo. They have a remarkable, cooperative survival strategy: the trees go for years without producing any seeds at all, then produce and drop their seeds all at once, billions across the entire forest. Seed predators, such as bearded pigs, can then eat their fill, but enough of the seeds survive to ensure the survival of the next generation. We follow the seeds in slow motion as they spiral en masse down to the enemy waiting below. It reminds me of the scene in Saving Private Ryan when the soldiers go into battle together.
What interesting tech did you use?
The last series on plants was the Private Life of Plants, 25 years ago. Back then you’d point a camera at a plant and try to predict what it was going to do. Usually, it would grow out of shot, and you’d have to start again. But we have new, specially developed robotic cameras that we can programme to follow the action. These are giant systems that ‘fly’ around a plant as it slowly grows in a studio. They allow us to film plants like we film animals – the plants do their thing; we follow and capture the action. We see the plants growing and fighting, but on their timescales – it takes us into a parallel world. We also wanted to break new ground and take this studio technology on location, so we worked with ex-military engineer Chris Field to shrink it all down into a field robot, which we named the Triffid. It’s a really exciting piece of technology that enables us to explore plants on every scale, all around the world.
So what does the Triffid do?
It can capture the fine detail of a leaf so that it feels like a landscape, but also ‘fly’ you along a root, as if you’re on the back of a fly. What I really like is that it also allows us to create long, continuous shots, so we can tell a story without constantly cutting from wide to close. We have a three-minute shot following leafcutter ants and it’s mind-blowing. The Triffid also creates magic. For instance, it ‘flies’ you into the buttress of the tree, closer and closer until all the cracks of the bark start to feel like enormous canyons, drawing you into a magnificent world of miniature.
Did you use drones?
Yes. We worked with Andrew Lawrence, a top drone racer. He flies a first-person-view (FPV) drone the size of a matchbox using video goggles, so he sees what the drone ‘sees’. We took him to Costa Rica and unleashed him. He was able to navigate his drone among the branches and leaves – it’s the first time an FPV drone has been used in a series like this. Usually, a drone would crash in this kind of environment, but because this drone is so small and his flying skills are so high, he can perform these dynamic moves, giving a hummingbird’s view of the rainforest.
PAUL WILLIAMS, PRODUCER, TROPICAL WORLDS