A 'Planet Earth' for Plants

July 03, 2022

New BBC natural history series ‘The Green Planet’ reveals the secret lives of plants in ways we’ve never seen before.

The Green Planet had a simple enough aim, to show viewers the world of plants from the plants’ perspective — a first for the ecosystem of televisionary nature programs. As with so many things on planet Earth that seem simple at first, it proved to be anything but. And yet here it is: an absorbing, life-affirming, five-part docudrama that takes in tropical worlds, desert worlds, water worlds, seasonal worlds and, in the all-summing human worlds, how plants have adapted over time to human habitation. The Green Planet opens our eyes to a side of nature we see every day, and yet rarely think about.

The climate emergency is the hot topic of the moment. Green Planet executive-producer Mike Gunton, a longtime creative associate and producing partner of series-presenter and de facto tour guide David Attenborough, wanted to do more than just view the world of plants through the prism of the world’s accelerating climate crisis, though. The Green Planet is about giving viewers a broader understanding of the role plants play in nature, and how vulnerable they are to intrusion from outside.

Plants, Gunton told writers at a recent conference, are the foundation of life on Earth — and an ally in the campaign against climate change.

“Plants are these extraordinary, unseen, heroic allies for us and they may yet prove to be our salvation,” Gunton said. “But we need to look after them and we need to make sure that we let them do their work for us.”

The reason many of us are blind to plant life, Gunton continued, is because they appear to do nothing. “They just sit around waiting to be trodden on or eaten. If you take this journey through this portal into their world, you suddenly see they live these extraordinary lives, lives not that dissimilar to the lives of animals."

As with Prehistoric Planet before it, The Green Planet relies on recent breakthroughs in camera technology to convey its theme in visual terms that anyone and everyone can understand — everything from specially designed cameras to drones and robotics rigs called Triffids, after the John Wyndham classic about rogue plants taking over the Earth. This technology captures plants in all phases of their life’s curve, in real time and using time-lapse photography. The Green Planet reveals the world of plants as they give birth, grow toward the sky, procreate and then wither and eventually die, all the while attacking and defending themselves from predators. Plant species — and the ecosystems where they’re found — were “cast” based on their unique back stories and their visual impact on the screen.

The Green Planet debuted in the UK earlier this year to widespread acclaim. Gunton admitted one of his more unexpected reactions, and the one he appreciates most, came from the scientists themselves, by affording real-world botanists a glimpse of how the plant world really works, by showing them life as it actually is. While field biologists and botanists might know what a particular plant does, few have actually seen it happen with their own eyes. Until now.

Series producer Rupert Barrington cited a parasitic plant in Chile, for example, called Tristerix aphyllus.

“Their seeds are carried in bird droppings,” Barrington explained. “They attach themselves to the spines of these huge hedgehog cacti. The seeds produce a projectile that shoots out and pulls around the skin of the cactus. It waits until nighttime to open, then it burrows in and lives inside the body of this cactus.

“Scientists knew it did this, but no one had actually seen this living thing actually do this. It's amazing.”

Lofty ambitions aside, at its core The Green Planet had to tell a complex story in simple terms, Gunton noted.

“We did this in two ways. First, we had to find compelling stories, through research. When trying to take an audience into the world of plants — which live in this kind of parallel universe in a different time frame — we had to devote an enormous amount of time thinking of ways we were going to do that technically. We relied on time-lapse photography in many cases — seeing plants in their timeframe. We’ve used time lapse in our BBC Natural History programs over many years, so we had a considerable amount of experience in knowing how to get a look and feel similar to a Planet Earth.

“It meant we had to think of some new technology that would allow us to do that, to immerse the audience in this extraordinary world. We probably devoted a year of scientific research to find the stories, and we spent the same amount of time trying to find and develop these new pieces of tech that would allow the audience to come on this extraordinary journey.

“In the same way we go about choosing stories for Planet Earth, where it’s all about the animals, we looked for stories that the audience could connect with, that are dramatic, that tell us something remarkable about the lives of these living things. We were trying to find stories where there’s an intrinsic drama, and often that means conflict. Conflict in the animal world is paralleled in the plant world. Plants compete with each other for light, for nutrients, for mates, and for sex. We looked for those kinds of stories, stories where the plants themselves were very active. When we put our time-lapse cameras on them and sped up time and entered their world, you start to see this dynamism in action. Rather than just reveal this in a kind of tableau, we wanted the camera to move this world as if we were following animals and looking at their lives through these different perspectives.”

The Green Planet premieres Wednesday, July 6 on PBS at 8E/7C. New episodes air Wednesdays through Aug. 3.

PBS Nature's ‘Animals with Cameras’ goes Down Under.

January 23, 2022

The idea was disarmingly simple but, like many simple ideas, hard to execute.

Filming animals in the wild — whether to study their behaviour, or for a nature program, or for a combination of the two — has always been easier said than done. First, you have to find the animal. Then, having found the animal, hope that it’s doing something more than just sleeping. And, finally, be able to trust that when it does do something, the resulting images will be in focus, the sound clear enough to hear and interpret without having to mix in artificial effects in editing.

Why not attach a camera to an animal, then, and let it go about its day-to-day routine, relatively unbothered by human presence. After all, trap cameras — remote-controlled cameras in predetermined, fixed locations, triggered by movement or a sudden change in the light — have revolutionized both wildlife photography and zoological science.

In the summer of 2020, the resulting footage from wild animals fixed with cameras formed the basis for a PBS Nature docuseries, Animals with Cameras.

Despite initial misgivings — would it work? Would it harm the animals in some way? Would it affect the animals’ behaviour, and in so doing defeat the whole purpose of studying wild animals in their natural habitat? — Animals with Cameras worked. It revealed never-before-seen behaviour: cheetahs on the hunt, seen from their point of view; Magellanic penguins navigating life as a flightless bird; an orphaned chimpanzee learning about life without the benefit of its mother, and others.

Animals’ production team worked closely with researchers to design lightweight, attachable cameras that would be both unobtrusive and easily removed.

Now Animals is back with a second season, with close-up views of the lives of seas turtles, sharks and, in the Jan. 26 episode, kangaroos, fruit bats and other animals of the Australian ecosystem. The vantage point provided by these state-of-the-art cameras reveal answers to scientists studying these species in ways they might not otherwise be able to, and in so doing reshape conservation efforts to protect and hopefully save them. How do kangaroos survive being pushed out of their environment by urban development, for example? By better understanding the personal, private lives of endangered species, conservationists are better able to calibrate ways to save them.

The new episodes feature several on-camera firsts, from a male koala bellowing at night to assert its territory — the first time this behaviour has been witnessed in such close proximity — to the view from above an Australian cityscape from a fruit bat’s perspective.

This is not jaws-’n-claws sensationalism. For 40 years now, PBS Nature producer-filmmakers have prided themselves on pioneering an entire television genre, through bringing the natural world to millions of viewers in the US and across North America, in the same way David Attenborough’s early natural history programs shaped the way viewers in the UK and elsewhere viewed the natural world. Nature has won 20 Emmy Awards and three Peabody Awards during its decades on the air. Junk programming it is not. “I think the large amount of people enjoy nature programming are turned off by graphic/violent nature films,” veteran Nature executive producer Fred Kaufman tweeted — back in 2011.

“This series takes nature filmmaking and animal research to a whole new level by letting the animals be the cinematographers,” Kaufman told reporters prior to Animals with Cameras’ debut in 2020. “It was inevitable that this would happen eventually.”

The new episodes are hosted once again by veteran wildlife cameraman and motivational speaker Gordon Buchanan, who has said his life’s mission is to raise awareness of the fragility of the world’s remaining wild spaces and the species that live there. His previous works in the field include BBC One’s Life in the Snow and Elephant Family and Me, and BBC Two’s Tribes, Predators and Me and Life in Polar Bear Town.

“It’s an easy thing to say but actually the discussions over how we were going to do this were really lengthy,” Buchanan told reporters, at that same conference. “I suppose I got the best part out of it, because I got to go out to most of the locations and I didn't really have to do any of the planning of all these logistics. It was a lot of work just to convince scientists that we’d be happy to help them in their studies.

“In most cases, the scientists were really blown away — more blown away than we were by the images that we were able to get. So in the end, it was really quite rewarding. Because that’s a tough audience — a scientist, say, who’s been studying fur seals for more than 20 years.”

The experience allowed Buchanan to appreciate wildlife filmmaking in ways he hadn’t experienced before.

“As a wildlife cameraman, I've spent years trying to film a particular animal,” he said. “In most cases, they don't really want to be observed or followed. So, for any person, I could use my camera skills with a long lens and try to document their day, which I would be able to do fairly accurately.

“But if, say, instead we fitted that person with one of these cameras, we'd learn a lot more about that person and their day-to-day life. With animals, you're recording everything, every kind of intimate moment of that animal's life. . . . You get the sense of their world. It has revealed a side to theirlives that we’ve never rewally seen before. That’s what we setout to do —witness never-before-seen behaviour, and I suppose forge new relationships with animals around the world.”

Animals with Cameras: Australia premieres Wednesday, Jan. 26 on PBS at 8/7c.

PBS goes Green: public broadcaster lands Sir David Attenborough’s ‘The Green Planet’ for a US audience.

January 18, 2022

“Public television has an important role, and I look forward to all that we will do moving forward,” PBS CEO and president Paula Kerger told journalists today during a Zoom teleconference on behalf of the US’s public broadcaster.

Kerger’s words were carefully calibrated to the UK government’s announcement over the weekend that it’s ending the BBC’s licence fee earlier than expected, and will take a hard look at public funding for the BBC in the near future.

PBS has been embraced by larger audiences during Covid lockdowns and, perhaps more importantly, has shown itself to be one of the few mainstream broadcasters resilient enough to hold its own against streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+ during the pandemic.

If anything, Kerger is “doubling down” — her words — on programming other broadcasters can’t or won’t produce.

To that end Kerger announced that PBS has landed the exclusive US rights to The Green Planet, Sir David Attenborough’s critically acclaimed five-part nature series about plant life.

The Green Planet has already debuted to a UK audience — ironically on the very same beleaguered public broadcaster that the UK government is determined to cut — to near-record numbers and widespread acclaim.

Kerger was guarded in her comments about BBC’s latest s, saying simply that the world’s public broadcasters work together on numerous projects and PBS in particular enjoys bipartisan support from both conservative and liberal politicans in the US Congress. Though they are both public broadcasters, PBS and BBC are notably different in both content and in funding. PBS has traditionally prided itself on being a source of news and information programming, and not entertainment.

The Green Planet is an audacious and ambitious move on PBS’s part.

Attenborough’s high-profile documentarty programs have traditionally been shown to US audiences by BBC America, now owned by the AMC group of networks; Discovery Channel, part of the Discovery Networks group of worldwide channels; and in Canada by BBC Earth, a relatively new streaming service across Canada. Another Attenborough series, Our Planet, was produced and streams exclusively on Netflix.

The Green Planet will debut on PBS in July. It’s an auspicious occasion for the Attenborough program because PBS, being a public broadcaster, is available in every home in the US with a TV. BBC America, Discovery and others use the cable/streaming model, and so reach a smaller, more niche segment of the audience. By airing on PBS, The Green Planet is poised to become the most watched Attenborough nature program in US history.

The Green Planet builds on “our rich legacy of science and natural history programming that is committed to addressing issues around conservation and climate change,” Kerger told writers during her morning announcement. “The Green Planet is a deeply immersive portrtayal of the world of plants, which are the backbone of our ecosystem. Not only is the content compelling; it’s visually stunning. It’s groundbreaking, too, with new filming techniques and caerma rigs that were specifically invented for this project to capture plant behaviour.”

The Green Planet is both a cornerstone and a signal of PBS’s increased emphasis on science and nature programming during the next weeks and months, Kerger added. PBS’ long-running science program NOVA is prepping a program about Arctic sinkholes, and PBS’s multiple Emmy-winning news program Frontline is readying a three-part program about the link between climate change and the fossil fuel industry.

“We’re here to bring light to the beauty and fragility or our planet,” Kerger said.