Wildlife is the focus of 'Planet Earth', an 11-part documentary series premiering Sunday night at 8 on Discovery Channel. All too often, specials that promote themselves as important are merely self-important. Discovery Channel's Planet Earth touts itself as epic, yet it's no exaggeration.
The 11-part series, kicking off tomorrow, is nothing short of amazing. Even stalwart fans of nature documentaries are bound to be astonished because much of this is new. It took 71 camera people more than 2,000 days in 200 locations to capture these high-definition images.
This revealing look at our planet teaches how the world was formed. It also looks at different climates and how animals adapt to them. This is not a show to be watched while going through email. Instead, gather the family, turn off the lights and marvel.
"It is a great gift to people," narrator Sigourney Weaver says. "We have never seen anything like it because we haven't had the technology to photograph so many creatures in their element doing what they do without any interference from the cameraman. I felt like I was in a rocket ship each time I watched, and it was such an intimate look at so many different species, and a kind of a celebration of how well everything works on our planet. Even when it's upsetting to see a lion eat an elephant, you see the Arctic fox take a duckling, and then you see it has five kids, and you have respect for how things work."
Many images throughout the 11 hours are remarkable,such as the blue bird of paradise. While courting, the male puffs up his cobalt feathers, then spins. The female he was trying to impress would have yawned, could she.
Spinning disc
"The females are so well, 'oh, yeah,' " Weaver says.
"It is extraordinary when that bird does that and disappears into this spinning disc," Huw Cordey, a field producer, says.
As a nature documentarian since 1989, Cordey has visited 50 countries. For this series, travelling in Mongolia and manoeuvring in a New Mexico cave most impressed him.
"You would have thought this would have been the most hideous experience known to man or woman," he says. "It was the most beautiful cave in the world. It was this unbelievable privilege of getting into a place that's really closed to people. It took two years to get permission to film that."
As for Mongolia, Cordey says, "It's a very surprising desert because it snows. It blows in from Siberia. And we were after one of the rarest, the wild Bactrian camel. Every camel you would see, or know of, is domestic. The only truly wild camels left are in the Gobi Desert, and nobody's really filmed them before. We were there for two months and had six filming opportunities."
"I hope that what people will feel is the world is a much bigger and more surprising place than they might have thought prior to watching it," Cordey says. "We live in a world where communications are so amazing you might think there is nothing left to explore. This shows that there are amazing wildernesses out there. We all set out trying to reawaken people's interest in the natural world. By using this technology and going to the Gobi Desert, I think that is what captured people's imagination in the U.K."
When the BBC series aired in England, 22 million of the 55 million people watched at least 15 minutes of it, and nine million watched all, Cordey says.
Alastair Fothergill, supervising producer, credits the US $25 million budget with allowing him to hire people to stay in the field to capture elusive images such asthe snow leopard cavorting with her cubs, a newborn panda and six-foot-long salamanders hunting.
In addition to the extraordinary patience and skill of the intrepid cameramen, new technology greatly contributed to the series' successes.
"This extraordinary aerial Cineflex camera system is a way of stabilising, on a helicopter, a very effective lens," Fothergill says. "That allowed us, for the very first time, to film animals from the air without disturbing the animals. The wolves chasing down a caribou calf - wolves are very nervous animals - because if you were on the ground, those wolves are running really fast; there is no way you can keep up with them. Through the power of the lens, we were able to get the close image."
Each episode brims with magnificent images. Here's a breakdown of what to look for:
This Sunday, in 'Pole to Pole', adorable polar bear cubs take their first steps, and three million caribou migrate across the tundra. In "Mountains," the Andes have the planet's most unstable weather, and all four seasons can be experienced in one day. In "Deep Ocean" can be seen footage of blue whales, which at 200 tons are twice the size of the largest dinosaur.
April 1: "Deserts" shows rainbow-colored flat lizards jumping to catch flies in a bizarre ballet. In "Ice Worlds," a male polar bear is forced to swim 60 miles for food because of global warming.
April 8: In "Shallow Seas," a humpback calf, 10 feet long and weighing a ton at a few weeks, is so vulnerable its mother supports it near the water's surface so it can breathe. In "Great Plains," gazelles migrate across the steppes. (A cameraman buried himself and waited in 105-degree heat to capture the communal calving.)
The April 15 "Jungles" shows a fight between warring chimps, and oddly hypnotic footage of parasites growing on dead insects. "Fresh Water" captures a funny scene of otters harassing a crocodile 20 times their size.
The concluding night, April 22, "Forests" reveals the majesty of the Northern California conifers. The briefscene of squirrels mating may, unfortunately, linger. In the finale, "Caves," the walls of New Mexico's Lechuguilla are frosted with spectacular gypsum crystals.
"It is jaw-dropping," Weaver says. "I actually think we should all own this series (the longer BBC version goes on sale April 24.). Watching it once, you can't take it in. You're too amazed by it. My daughter is a teenager, and always on YouTube, and couldn't help but being drawn into it."
