- [Sharmila] The technology
in natural history filming has always played a huge role.
- Viewed with a new specialist camera,
the mud flats, which reflect polarized light, are bright.
- [Sharmila] But, to tell you the truth,
really, there's nothing more important than a good story.
For any film, whether it's factual or fiction,
the driving force has to be the narrative,
and interestingly, the natural world seems to have
an infinite variety of stories to tell.
- Animals can use color
for all kinds of different reasons.
- The natural world,
to us, is absolutely stunningly beautiful
and colorful, and yet we tend
to take these colors for granted most of the time.
They're simply a source of beauty and wonder,
but we don't realize that, for the animals,
they're actually mostly tools for survival.
Have you ever wondered why a tiger has orange fur
or why a flamingo's pink?
So it was those kind of stories
that we wanted to tell in this series.
One of the challenges that we knew from the outset was
the fact that we've known for quite a while now
that some animals see colors very differently
to the way we do.
Quite a lot of animals can see colors
that are beyond our range.
So they can see colors of the ultraviolet,
and there are even some animals that can see
and detect and use polarized light.
We would have to push the boundaries
for the series to try and make those colors visible
to the audience, but how do you do that
when we can't actually see those colors?
We had to team up with scientists
that were either developing the cameras already
for scientific purposes
or had used them for other purposes in the laboratories.
- This camera here can see the world as we see it
and then how the insects see the world at the same time.
- There's a lot of very detailed planning
that goes into a natural history production like this.
We have researchers
who obviously find the stories at the beginning,
and they're in contact with scientists
who can make sure that you've got all the facts correct
and that you're looking at the right animal
in the right place, but a lot of the planning goes
into knowing that, when you send the crew out,
they're there at the right time,
in exactly the right position to see the behavior
that you're trying to capture.
- A lot of times with natural history,
you have to have very small crews.
You're often going to places that are fragile ecosystems,
and so they don't allow a lot of people in the first place
or planes are very small or access is very, very limited.
Australia is just such an extreme environment.
The sun is harsh, everything's harsh.
The mud is caustic mud, so it literally will start
to peel your skin off because it's just so salty and rough.
Then you'd have to go back
and, not only after very long, long days,
try to deal with downloading footage
in extreme heat and small places
with limited electricity and often no Wi-Fi,
but you would also have to deal with the problems
of the cameras, and then try to communicate that
back to the team.
You wish that you could have
that behind-the-scenes person there more often,
because a lot of times, the drama is involved
in capturing these shots.
- Before we set out, I thought was a really exciting story,
was a little hummingbird in California.
It was a hummingbird that had been studied by a scientist,
and he'd found out this amazing display that this bird has,
which is very, very quick.
We can hardly see it with our eyes,
but when we got there, there was this vast landscape
and you just could not imagine hummingbirds surviving there.
I didn't even know what it would feed on.
There didn't seem to be a flower there,
but then as your eye got tuned into it, you saw
that there were these tiny little red flowers on bushes.
Then the next question was, where were the hummingbirds?
And, I kid you not, I could not see them,
but I could hear them.
Suddenly, there was this whiz of air past your ear
and it was gone, and it was so fast and so tiny.
And it hides its colors most of the time,
but when it spots a female,
it displays by swinging in front of her,
directly in front of her face,
and it exposes this incredible gorget
of pink iridescent feathers, just stunning.
It all happens so fast
that we use the fastest high-speed camera
that there is virtually on the market at the moment,
which can slow down the action about 20 times,
and that was the only way we could really see that behavior.
But filming it was an incredible challenge
'cause these birds are so fast
and you literally cannot see it,
so we had to have the camera man being assisted
by one or two people who would say,
"Okay, it's to your left on Bush 22."
"It's to your right on Bush Number 3."
We'd label all the bushes by numbers,
and he would just swing the camera around and start rolling.
We were there for two or three weeks.
By the end, I thought, "We're not going to get this,"
and we literally got it on the last day.
It was amazing when we did get it.
- Sometimes you think, "Oh, there's nothing right here."
"I don't see a big shark or a big, colorful bommie
of a reef," and if you just settle down
and you start to really, really look,
so many different animals, behaviors, colors,
and patterns really start to rise up,
and that's where you can start to focus
and tell those stories.
It was wonderful to have all that research
to go in and try to patiently tell
these many different stories, but it was very fun
to have this new technology to tell them.