Nature Films

Nature filmmaking is a sham.

Seriously. I watched an episode of Planet Earth once. The one on African wild dogs. They showed a sequence of scenes during a hunt, and declared it to be the first time a complete hunt by these (albeit rockingly cool) animals has EVER been caught on film! Amazing! Inspirational! These guys must be way dedicated for that kinds of thing! You’ve seen it, too! Great!

Keep watching.

You hit the end, the section about the Diaries or some such where they let you know about all their hardships while making tons upon tons of money from BBC, and they proceed to explain to you, the naïve viewer, that the “hunt” (you know, the first entire hunt ever caught on camera), was actually filmed over the course of (something surmounting to) two weeks, and was several hunts (perhaps even several packs) put together and edited flawlessly to create the illusion of a single, first-time-caught-on-camera sequence.

So they lie, and then they admit to it? Which is worse?

Also, I find out at Christmas by several people who know him personally that Bob Landis, the Yellowstone-local filmmaker who has won several awards, notably for the grizzly special he did for National Geographic some years ago, is currently working on a project following the life of a black wolf in Yellowstone over the course of a year. Only, to illustrate this year-in-the-life, he’s using footage from several black wolves in Yellowstone over the course of about 8 years.

Isn’t this cheating, all you wildlife filmmakers out there? Isn’t this fraud? This is the breaking down of everything I held dear as a child, watching Nature and Nova with wide eyes, pondering that someday, I, too, could make $16,000 a year as a wildlife biologist.

What else aren’t you telling us, wildlife filmmakers? Did you digitally create the platypus? Did you stick that great white shark, jumping majestically out of the water to feast on a witless gull, on a trampoline? Did you really film just five wildebeests running across the African plains and then draw in the thousands of others (and maybe a bit more dust in the sky) with a sharpie to make it look more impressive? Is the sky even blue, or is that Crayola “sky blue” I see sticking out of your pocket?