Wild things

For natural history film-making, look to Britain. The UK’s wildlife and nature TV programmes, spearheaded by the BBC’s renowned Natural History Unit in Bristol and fuelled by the indefatigable David Attenborough, are seen and admired around the world and each year brings a new batch of breathtaking imagery.

While the expertise, patience and daring of the camera operators plays a large part in this, none of it would be possible without the input of technology.

The development of cameras and techniques for specialist filming, particularly in wildlife and sports broadcasting, is a story of ingenuity and adaptation. In most cases, the cameras are off-the-shelf products adapted and combined in ways that have, in some cases, been developed over several years and in others, cobbled together on the fly.

They represent a prime attribute of cunning engineering: the ability to take technologies designed for one application and bend them to produce a result its developers would not have dreamed of.

‘A lot of the things we use, such as super-high-speed cameras, are developed for something completely different,’ said Ed Charles, a BBC Natural History Unit researcher, who works with camera operators and tracks down the technologies for assignments. ‘As another example, we use thermal imaging cameras, which were designed for industry, mainly for security firms. But then we have to adapt them to work on a remote basis.’

Charles is working on a series due to be shown early next year, called Nature’s Great Events. Each of its six parts will focus on a change in natural conditions that has affected local wildlife: the annual melt in the Arctic; the salmon run in British Columbia; the plankton bloom off the coast of the Pacific Northwest; the greening of the Serengeti; the sardine run off the coast of South Africa; and the flooding of the Okavango Delta.

The last of these, said series producer Karen Bass, was a good example of the use of technology in filming.

‘Our big mission on this series is to show epic transformations of the planet, but through the intimate stories of the animals that live there,’ she said. ‘The Okavango Delta is in the middle of the Kalahari Desert, but it floods once a year. Ten million cubic kilometres of water comes down from Angola and seeps into the Kalahari. It’s not a fast flood — it trickles. The water moves at a metre an hour.’

Charles, who filmed the Okavango with camera operator Martin Dohrn, said: ‘The water was the key thing. We decided we’d always travel with the water and show it at all its different levels.’

Martin Dohrn, who runs independent production house Ammonite Films in Bristol, has a reputation for developing camera technology. Ammonite is known for two products: starlight cameras, which use image intensifiers to enable filming at night without using infrared or any additional lighting; and motion control camera systems, which allow cameras to make precisely-controlled movements to follow events on a small scale.

It was the latter that attracted Charles. ‘It’s not that common for a camera operator to develop their own cameras, but Martin is unique,’ he said. ‘They will generally just hire some cameras and go and shoot with them, but Martin is a different breed.’

Dohrn says developing cameras is a throwback to an earlier era of film-making. ‘There’s such a lot of kit now available, and there’s a perception from young people entering the field that you buy your camera then the important thing is your own ability in framing and getting the exposure with these tools. Twenty years ago film offered plenty of possibilities, but there were many more possibilities if you were to meet an engineer and have lenses or mounts built for you.’

The technology that took Dohrn and Charles to the Okavango was the Frankencam — a macro camera capable of filming extreme close-ups of tiny subjects, which is mounted on a head linked to a complex system of motors that allows it to move in any direction. This system, known as motion control, was developed for special-effects-heavy filming, where many elements have to be combined into a single shot and each filmed with identical camera moves. Dohrn has adapted this system for filming insects.

‘It really has evolved,’ he said. ‘It started off as a one-axis motor to do time-lapse tracking, looking into a fishtank. All it could do was go backwards and forwards at a set speed. Then we added two axis movement, then three; and we realised that even three axes was impossible for a normal human to control; the effect of the rotating axis completely melted your brain. So we invented electronics that allowed the three axis motors to talk to each other, so the operator didn’t have to work out which way the axes was pointing; you could just drive the camera by looking at the monitor.’

At this point, the system was known as Ant-cam, because Dohrn was using it to film the behaviour of ants within a hive. ‘That took about five years to develop from the first version, and it was a great device; you could put a miniature camera on it and drive it anywhere within a 2m cube. But because of the motors on it, it wasn’t very good at precision. It was good at speed, but not so good at stopping.’

This led to the further development into Frankencam, a three-axis system using a camera mount stabilised by counterweights and moved by DC drives from Swiss firm Maxon Motor. ‘The controller has a double-joystick set and a focus controller. You make sure all the motors are set to zero, turn on the power, then it’s much like driving — move the right lever to go forward or backward, the left lever to steer. You can follow a woodlouse with it — it’ll look like it’s a couple of feet long — go around to look at its head, start off behind it, overtake and track back so it walks towards the lens. You can do all the sort of shots you’d take on a large scale with a helicopter, but just six inches above the ground and looking at things a millimetre across.’

Dohrn added: ‘We always refer to Frankencam as ground-breaking equipment. That’s because, quite often, it hits the ground and breaks.’