In the Jungles episode of the BBC’s Planet Earth II, there’s a stunning scene of hummingbirds
in Ecuador, flying in slow motion.
And when it aired in the UK, some viewers wondered if the BBC actually created the footage
with computer graphics.
And you can’t blame them.
With our own eyes, we’ll never see hummingbirds looking like this, just like we’ll never
see plants growing like this.
That’s because the camera is warping time.
Slow motion shots are made by increasing the camera’s frame rate.
To slow down action without losing quality, you have to capture more frames.
Like the hummingbirds, many of the shots in Planet Earth II are at least somewhat slower
than real time, or what producers call “off-speed.”
Shooting at 60 or 100 frames per second, with playback at 25 frames per second — that
tends to heighten the drama and smooth out camera movements in the footage.
But slow motion can do more than that — it can also give us a chance to look at processes
that our naked eyes could never catch.
That’s why ultra high speed cameras were invented in the first place - Cameras that
can shoot thousands, even tens of thousands of frames per second.
They gave scientists and engineers a way to study all sorts of physical and mechanical
processes that happen over milliseconds.
And when trained on animals, high speed cameras can teach us about anatomy and behavior, like
the function of these drumstick-shaped organs on flies.
ATTENBOROUGH: By beating very fast, and here they’re slowed down 120 times, they give
the fly stability in the air.
The BBC’s Natural History Unit filmed this crane fly around 40 years ago.
We’re used to seeing this kind of thing now, but it was much more of a challenge in
the days of film.
GUNTON: You almost always had to do it in a kind of almost a studio setting and you’d
kind of sit there with this button.
And you wait and hope that something will happen.
You press the button and the camera goes whirrrr to speed up.
You then get about two seconds of shot and then you hear the film going shhshhhshh out
of the camera as it spun out.
You then get it off to be developed and find that, you know, in those the two seconds that
you had, the animal had lept out of the frame so you throw it away and start again.
The switch from film to digital cameras changed everything.
For one thing, they could review the footage on monitors, to see if they got their shot.
But also, digital high speed cameras came with a continuous recording feature.
Instead of pressing a button to start recording and then pressing it again to stop, they could
press the button as soon as they saw some action, and the camera would save the seconds
that happened before the button was pressed.
That’s how the cameraman captured this great white shark coming out of the water, not just
in the air, for this sequence in the 2006 Planet Earth series.
Unpredictable action was still a challenge -- this took them a couple of weeks on a boat to get.
But with digital cameras, the BBC brought high speed photography out of the studio and
into the wild, where they could capture things like a chameleon hunting in Madagascar.
GUNTON: They're notorious for these tongues that fly out and catch things and they're
really hard, I mean really hard to film.
GUNTON: When we filmed this- you saw how the tongue kind of unfolds as it goes out.
And everybody thinks they’re sticky, they’re not.
At the end of the tongue is a kind of a muscular blob at the end.
It's almost like a hand inside a glove and this end goes like this and almost grabs the
head of this creature and then drags it back which is sort of ghoulishly ghastly but also
amazing.
Digital cameras also transformed the process of making timelapse sequences -- for when
real life isn’t too fast but too slow.
The timelapse process is basically the opposite of slow motion.
Instead of capturing more frames, you take fewer over a longer period of time.
Timelapses can help show animal behaviors that take hours to unfold, like these sand
sand bubbler crabs that make balls of sand as they look for food at low tide.
But the BBC’s timelapse work really got started when they decided in the 1990s to
make a series entirely about plants.
Timelapse would be the key tool for bringing the drama of plant growth into our timescale.
But no technology existed at the time to automate time lapse photography.
So, they invented their own.
NIGHTINGALE: So we developed little computer boxes, about this size, which would drive
the time lapse cameras, would drive the flash guns, which we'd use to make sure the light
was the same whether there was a cloud out or the sun was out, the sun was in and so on.
And we built these little programmable computers and we took them all around the world long
before we had laptops like you've got, you know, sitting on your lap there.
Some shots could take place out in the wild, but others required more controlled conditions
and elaborate sets.
These waterlily leaves were grown from seeds in huge vats.
The water levels, temperature, and lighting all had to be controlled for consistency from
shot to shot.
NIGHTINGALE: Then, of course, we had to get lots of different shots, closeups, wideouts.
We wanted to get shots in the tank, looking up, seeing —So I mean, it took months.
Just a huge, huge, effort and hopefully when you look at it, it'll feel seamless.
That series also introduced the technique of tracking timelapse, where the camera moves too.
Now, digital cameras come with the ability to program a timelapse sequence, and motorized
sliders can automate tracking timelapses.
So the BBC keeps pushing the technique further.
In 2009’s Life, they took the it underwater in the frigid Antarctic ocean to show ribbon
worms and sea stars feeding on a dead seal.
And in the cities episode of Planet Earth 2, they showcased a new type of timelapse
called “hyperlapse.”
Now, instead of just moving the camera slightly on a slider, the camera’s moving through
whole cities, taking thousands of huge images that get stitched together in precise ways
on a computer.
GUNTON: So it gives you a kind of a journey in timelapse.
It might not look like the style of traditional wildlife films, but in fact the tradition
at the BBC has always been to seize new technology and techniques to capture the world in brand
new ways.
GUNTON: That’s one of the things that’s so wonderful about television — is when
you can take an audience and show them something that no human eye could ever see, that only
the camera can see.
Thank you for watching!
You can find Planet Earth 2 on BBC America.
It will be airing Saturdays through March 25th.
You can also find tons of clips from their archive on BBC Earth’s mobile app.
It’s called Story of Life and it’s actually where I found a lot of the clips that I used
in this video.
And it’s free!
So check it out.