There are moments in Life, the Discovery Channels follow-up to the widely acclaimed nature series Planet Earth, when a viewer cant help wonder: How in the world did they capture that on camera?
To find and unobtrusively film animals, youve got to get down into their world, said Kevin Flay, a veteran cameraman who devoted more than 15 months to Life.
For an astonishing sequence in the first episode, which has its premiere on Sunday, that meant finding a way to be on eye level with a frog the width of a human fingernail.
Wildlife series are defined by the impossible-to-get shot the same way that summer blockbusters are defined by a nail-biting car chase or an over-the-top explosion. The bar is set so high now, said Mike Gunton, the executive producer of Life. Still, the sequences in the series could fill more than a few movie trailers.
In that first episode viewers see a strawberry dart frogs tadpoles come to life, then watch the mother carry each baby up a rainforest tree to a safe perch inside a bromeliad plant. Then they see the mother lay eggs to feed the newborns until they can move on their own, weeks later. Without any dialogue the shots tell a gripping story about a mothers commitment to her offspring.
For Mr. Flay, who camped out for weeks in the Costa Rican jungle to get the shots, a miniature camera was critical, and having patience was probably almost as important.
He planned for the trip carefully, mapping out what types of cameras he would need. He settled on something called an Iconix, a camera a bit bigger than a ladys lipstick, he said, that can be placed close to the animals.
Local experts helped Mr. Flay and his production partner, an assistant producer named Tom Clarke, find spots in the rainforest where male frogs were guarding groups of eggs. From there we knew we had a story, and we had a starting point, Mr. Flay said. Soon the mother would be there to feed her tadpoles.
Mr. Flay mounted the Iconix camera on a tripod and a track to capture the mother making her way across the canopy floor. Then he had to find a way to show the frog making the arduous climb up a tree to find a new home for her tadpoles.
For that, we decided we needed to take some sort of crane device, he said, just to help give the sense of the epic journey the frog was taking.
After the cameras were set, its just patience waiting for the frog to do the right thing for you, he said.
Mr. Flay, 51, first entered the natural history field in the mid-1980s, and has contributed to many of the landmark nature programs by David Attenborough, including Trials of Life and Life in Cold Blood.
While on location the cameramen work the same hours as the animals they are tracking. To film the frogs, that meant entering the rainforest by 6 a.m. and staying until dusk. Merely keeping the frogs in camera focus was difficult because of their small size.
More often than not, Mr. Flay said, he finds himself living in the vicinity of the animals. Costa Rica was an exception, he said, because there was a hotel just down the road. But in the jungle in Madagascar recently, he said, he stayed in a wooden shack that was infested with snakes and rats.
For Life he filmed Komodo dragons, star-nosed moles and other animals.
Like Planet Earth, which wowed viewers with stunning high-definition sequences three years ago, Life was commissioned by the BBC in partnership with Discovery, which owns the rights in the United States. The BBC generally shows the series first, and Discovery follows months later. After Life comes Human Planet, a look at indigenous peoples and their relationship to their environment, and Frozen Planet, about the north and south poles. Discovery has not specified when it will show either series, but premieres in 2011 and 2012 are likely.
In the United States the 11 hours of Life will be screened two hours at a time on Discovery on Sunday nights. For Discovery its a great brand-definitional show, said David M. Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery Communications, the channels parent company.
The first two episodes will be shown simultaneously on seven of the companys channels, in an effort to promote the other installments of the series. After Life completes its run on Discovery, the episodes will be shown again in order on the Animal Planet channel.
The company hopes that Life which is narrated in the United States version by Oprah Winfrey has the same impact as Planet Earth, called the most expensive nature documentary ever produced.
Mr. Gunton is now starting work on a series about Africa. He said each of the series take between three and five years to make.
The pressure placed on the cameramen to capture never-before-seen animal and plant behaviors makes them very strange people, actually, Mr. Gunton said.
They have the ability to chill and cope with long periods of boredom, yet when the moment comes, they have the ability to switch on instantly, he said. Theyre like gunfighters.
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