When Gordon Buchanan was following bears in the United States we watched the resulting documentaries on television. We have seen him a number of times in episodes of countryfile as well. Now he is working on getting footage of wolves in the wild. For this project he is staying out in the wild and following a pack of wolves day after day for weeks. As part of this project he is filming with a broadcast camera and gopro cameras which he fixed on to a “rock crawler”. The Rock crawler is a remote control car with the body removed.
The BBC were working on a documentary about polar bears and for certain shots they created a den for filming purposes. It helped to tell the story but people felt that the purity of that documentary had been tainted. This genre of documentary aims to tell a genuine story with no reconstruction or trickery. Everything has to be genuine.
As we see from the footage above Gordon Buchanan was able to get the camera right up to the den and film the wolf cubs from the mouth of the den. This technology is great for story telling because it provides the camera operator with greater flexibility. He is able to get the camera to where he wants it to be without going there in person. In theory animal behaviour is genuine.
Sensory: BBC Wildlife Director John Downer & the technology of ‘spy-cam’ filmmaking from Getty Images on Vimeo.
With this technology a greater variety of shots can be achieved, from flying with specific birds to traveling under water with penguins and lounging in a pool with tigers. In essence spy creature cameras allow wildlife filmmakers to get genuine animal interactions without relying on luck. They can make their own luck and the natural history documentary genre benefits.
I like that I can watch days of television series and that I can’t spend 90 minutes watching films. Television series are about people, places and situations and the characters are realistic. In contrast films are superficial, shallow and too full of special effects for a story to be told. The cinema loses out because it is too superficial, too pretentious without offering something contrast at the end of the donated time.
We do donate time to the media we appreciate and gain from.
Cloud timelapses are fun when you can put the camera somewhere and go and do something else. Yesterday I knew that we would go from blue skies and sparse clouds to overcast and rainy so I set up the camera to record a timelapse. I set the interval to one setting and the number of frames to one. You see the rain clouds form and then the rain starts.
This timelapse was recorded over 220 minutes or more. It took a full charge of one of the long duration batteries. I could have plugged the camera and used power straight from the wall but sometimes it’s good to cycle batteries.
I really wanted the rain to fall so heavily that it would be impossible to see through the window at the end of the timelapse. That would have made for a nice conclusion.