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Planet Earth II Moment bobcat manages an epic face plant
- Published_at:2016-11-13
- Category:Pets & Animals
- Channel:CHECKING 2016
- tags: Planet Earth II Moment bobcat manages epic face plant cat jumping
- description: Planet Earth II: Moment bobcat manages an epic face plant From the love lives of penguins nesting on the Antarctic tundra to the plight of plucky marine iguanas sprinting from packs of hungry snakes, The BBC's Planet Earth II has captured the imagination of the nation. And while many of the animals and plants featured on the programme live in far flung corners of the globe, the show's production is run a lot closer to home from BBC's Natural History Unit in nearby Bristol. Released a decade after the original Planet Earth documentaries, the second series took producers a collective two decades to painstakingly film and edit in some of the harshest environments known to man. "More than half the human population now lives in cities. A lot of people don't see any wild animals beyond a rat or a pigeon. "Since we depend on the natural world, seeing it portrayed sparks something deep in all of us. TV can't replace the real thing, but it can show how fragile and important other creatures who share the earth with us are. "Sixty years ago, nobody thought we were going to exterminate a species. Now, everybody realises it." Thanks to exclusive access from the BBC, the Bristol Post can exclusively share the experiences of each of the show's six producers. Elizabeth White - Islands The Islands episode will have you completely reassessing how you think about penguins. They may be cute and clumsy, but they're also fiercely determined. Here we see how chinstrap penguins undertake an epic journey - on foot and by sea - simply to feed their young. Many return stained with blood from being flung against the cliffs as they attempt to get back onto land. Islands' episode producer Elizabeth White was keen to tell the chinstrap's little-known story but, to do so, her team faced hardship to reach the 1.5 million-strong colony of chinstrap penguins that inhabit Zavodovski Island in Antarctica. The journey involved a 24-hour flight, followed by a week-long boat ride. "It was really rough! Like being on a rollercoaster," says White. "The boat is a steel-hulled vessel, so very heavy, but the waves are massive. Some cameramen were very seasick." Finally on the island, they found that camping in the penguins' huddle was the only option viable, with wet wipes providing a 'packet shower'. Read next: Bath yoga teacher to run cosy Hygge Yoga classes with fire and soup "Most mornings, you could tell what the weather was doing by the sound of the penguins," recalls White. "If it was quiet, it was usually snowy and they were all hunkered down; if you could hear the sounds of squishy feet plodding around, you knew it was rainy." A highlight of producing the Islands episode was that White and her team also visited tropical climes. image: http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/images/localworld/ugc-images/276268/binaries/NFS_Bailey%20and%20Attenborough%202.jpg They filmed a sequence she is particularly proud of on the Galápagos Island of Fernandina. It shows baby marine iguanas emerging from the sand after hatching. As hatchlings attempt to make their way to the sea, they run the deadly gauntlet of hungry racer snakes lying in wait. "It's a raw, brutal story," says White. "The first time we saw a little one come out of the sand, we watched it run towards the rocks. Then it was spooked by something and jumped up. As it did so, the wall came alive with snakes, like a Medusa's head. We didn't expect to see snakes pouring out of the rocks; seeing it was like witnessing something from a horror film." The resulting scene appears all the more real when viewed on TV, thanks to the technologies available to White and her team. They often opted to use cameras mounted on handheld gimbals at animal-eye level to keep the image stable and convey a real sense of what animals experience. But getting cameras up into the sky was also important, to show that the filming locations were indeed 'specks of land surrounded by water', rather than easily accessed coastal areas.
| ranked in date | views | likes | Comments | ranked in country (#position) |
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| 2016-11-16 | 10,374 | 1 | 4 |
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| 2016-11-17 | 14,361 | 5 | 26 |
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