After four years, Our Planet is back with Our Planet II.
It's a completely fresh story.
We've got completely new behaviors
and we're very excited to bring this
to the global Netflix audience.
I would sum up our team with just one word.
Determined.
It takes a team that has to work together
through really difficult circumstances.
This is a program about animals on the move, animals migrating,
so we have to move with them and that makes some challenges for us.
I could not imagine how much gear
those two people bring into New Zealand.
It was just like insane.
There was a moment in my mind when I was like,
''This car is going to go over.''
I genuinely thought we were a goner.
It was a bit of a heart in the mouth moment as
the bear came to a screeching stop a couple of meters from us
salmon in mouth.
So we're living in these incredibly cramped living conditions
with nine of us in one dorm room.
Hope there's no snorers.
I hope I don't snore.
There's so many challenges to overcome.
Rigging the boat.
So, yeah, you had some arms of steel at the end of the-
at the end of the shoot.
This is the really glamorous part of natural history filmmaking.
Currently cleaning penguin poo off a lense.
A good team dynamic is, like, essential for the shoot.
This series would just not have been possible
without hundreds of experts in the field all over the world.
Scientists, field assistants all helping us to film.
You have to have people that are willing
to keep pushing for the best stories possible
and we had that on this series.
Tawaki penguins.
So I've had to practice how to pronounce it for a while.
I was saying ''towakie.''
That's not right.
Ask Thomas because he'll get this 100 percent right.
Tawaki.
Easy.
There's no special pronunciation.
Just read what you see on the paper and it'll come out right.
Thomas calls them tawaki penguins,
but they're also known as Fiordland crested penguins.
I mean try using that name in a sentence you know,
without sounding ridiculous.
Thomas is a lovely mad penguin scientist.
Well, I study the Fiordland crested penguin.
Now, tawakis just...
and it's out of the way.
Because they're actually the least studied penguin in the world,
the work he's doing is incredibly important.
This journey that they make is about 6,000 kilometers,
which is an insane distance.
They do that for no apparent reason whatsoever.
They travel all the way to the polar front, feed there,
and then burn all the energy they gained there on the way back,
only to gorge themselves again when they're back home.
So this this whole migration is...
it is pointless.
When we first met Thomas, he came to pick us up
in Eric, which is his 30 year old research car.
We were a bit concerned we weren't going to fit all of our kit in it.
Yeah, that was a shocker.
I mean,
I could not imagine
how much gear those two people bring into New Zealand.
It was just like insane.
Tawaki penguin mums are super mums.
They never stop working.
That involves traveling from the nest to the sea multiple times a day
to make sure that chick has got enough food.
They have to fight their way through often super rough
seas to get back onto the rocks.
And then they have to run all the way up the rocks,
sort of through this crazy jungle obstacle course back to the nest,
feed the chick, and then turn around and go and do the same thing again.
Penguins are probably less happy to see us than we were to see them.
Tawaki are notoriously secretive and afraid of humans.
So they design their whole life around hiding from us,
which doesn't make them easy to film.
We'd be hiking through the forest with all of our heavy kit.
We came over the crest of the hill, all three of us.
We were chatting and
I was in front of the other two behind me and I look forward.
There were four penguins sitting right on the track in front of us.
I said,
''Stop!''
And we just had to freeze.
The four penguins were looking at us.
I was like, ''They're going to move soon.
They're going to move soon.''
Nah, they didn't move.
They just sit there.
''You want to go past? Nah. No.''
And we'd be there for
however long the penguin wanted to go about doing its thing.
But you never knew how long that was going to be.
You could be caught in a penguin trap for 15 minutes.
This was a really hard sequence to film,
and every single shot was a really hard one.
I remember when I-
when I was discussing the whole shoot with Emily before,
and I told her,
''Hey, expect the worst, and then it's going to be even worse than that.''
Our camera operator John Brown spent 10, 12 hours a day
sat inside a hide, just waiting for single moments to happen.
They had these motion triggered cameras.
They had, I don't know, six or seven of them, and none of them worked.
How's it going there John?
How's your morning?
It's been one the best mornings of my life.
Cameras aren't working,
penguins have all disappeared.
One of the moments we really needed to capture was
a Tawaki chick being fed.
And often that happens right deep in the recess at their burrow.
So two weeks into the shoot, finally John came back and said,
''I've got it!''
Mum delivered.
So yeah, it was really great that we got that moment.
It doesn't take long
to just be completely enthralled and in love with these guys.
He loves those penguins
and he really shares that enthusiasm with everyone he talks to.
So yeah, it was amazing to to learn a lot from Thomas.
They can climb up the steepest mountains.
They travel thousands of kilometers out at sea
and, you know,
if I walk up to my office, I'm sometimes I'm puffed.
So, yeah, I think I would,
I would like to have their stamina.
Yeah, that's it.
Absolutely.
And the looks, the good looks, of course!
No, strike that.
I want to have their good looks.
So I've been going up to Svalbard for
13 years now.
Well, frankly, it is probably the best
place in the world to film polar bears.
I like bears because there's always an element of jeopardy in it, whether-
whether you're crashing into ice or sinking or
or about to get chewed by a bear.
You know, there's is a bit of adrenaline to it always
and I kind of enjoy that.
With polar bears, it's very difficult to know what you're going to get.
You can go up with a set of ideas of what you want to film and
probably come away with something completely different.
We had four weeks on the boat
and in that time you'd expect to see quite a few bears.
But we really struggled and we covered huge distances and it's
24-hour daylight, so we'd be up in shifts, just staring through binoculars.
We have a rota system where somebody is awake
and looking for bears 24 hours a day.
To the point that, you know, you feel like your eyeballs are bleeding
it hurts so much.
And someone found a bear
way up ahead on a tiny island in the middle of this big field.
And as we got closer, it became apparent that she wasn't on her own.
She had two very small cubs with her.
This was a family that was on the edge, you know, no question.
So we wanted to make sure that we didn't
do anything that might impact them.
We didn't want to do anything that might cause them stress or
do anything that might cause the death of that weaker cub.
You feel for the mum.
You definitely feel for the mum.
You can see that it's a struggle for her to
a) eat enough for herself,
let alone feed the cubs and provide for them as well.
But this is when it really started to get a bit heartbreaking
because at this point
the younger cub was left halfway up a cliff on its own
and it started screaming and I mean, like really, really screaming.
We could hear it on the boat and it was panicking.
It was running backwards and forwards.
And it just didn't have the strength to haul itself back up this cliff.
You know, we were all noticing this and, you know, feeling
really quite upset that we were watching this cub really struggling.
It was quite an emotional thing to film.
One of the hardest things I've filmed
because we genuinely thought the little cub wasn't going to make it.
Eventually just got the right paw grip in
to that bit of rock that it was struggling with
and made it up exactly the same way as the other two that got up.
I think the whole boat just erupted like just, ''Come on!''
And we heard later on that the first mate
was in tears watching this.
It was a happy ending, certainly for us in that
they made it all the way over to the mainland,
and they disappeared over a mountain top and that was them gone.
So I don't know what happened to them after that,
but certainly that epic journey that they had across the field,
they managed successfully.
We went to Tanzania to film the most incredible
migration story on the planet.
There's probably no more famous migration
in the world than the wildebeest migration.
It's nervous energy.
And there's this build up of anxiety and stress and not just
the animals want to cross,
you can feel the energy in the water.
The crocodiles are all waiting, the vultures are circling overhead.
It's all about to happen.
When they do go, oh, my God, it's like nothing I have seen.
Yeah, we kind of had our own crossing to make.
Our own little brush with death.
We had one of these days when not a lot was going on
and we were kind of looking at the sky and thinking,
''Oh, look at that cloud.
That's a big cloud.''
And it got bigger and bigger.
And then the rain started and it was truly biblical.
Seemingly the entire sky downpouring
on us in the space of about five minutes.
So we were full speed back to where we thought that the bridge was.
It was completely underwater, raging torrents.
Obviously contested opinions about how it played out.
Depending on which car you were in.
Jesse was in the first car.
I was thinking, ''This is a really bad idea.
We shouldn’t be doing this.''
But they decided to go for it.
We slightly held back just to watch them.
That's when I think me and Jesse think,
''Maybe this is not the best idea.''
We have no choice.
Well, we did have a choice.
We could be damp and cold and sit in our vehicles for the night
and that would be fine.
I was quite up for that because the alternative
was having to cross this river, which was now
at full flood.
It was just absolutely crazy.
Water came straight into the Land Rover
and washed us sideways.
So obviously I'm trying to stay calm in the situation and be like,
it'll be fine.
We've done a risk assessment.
Somehow we started to get through it and yeah, it was awful.
I genuinely thought we were a goner.
Finally we, like, pulled out the other side
and we just breathed this, like, sigh of relief.
So much nervous laughter.
It was pretty frightening.
I know if you speak to Jesse,
he'll probably say that we were, like, inches away from death.
If we hadn't drowned the crocs would have got us.
I'm not sure it was quite that bad.
And we just gunned it and
it was, for us, actually quite exciting.
That was a very silly idea.
I guess that's what the wildebeest think when they get to the other side.
''Whose idea was this?''
I don't think there were crocodiles right there.
I certainly didn't see any.
Then I might have been a little bit more worried.
Was it worth nearly dying for?
Well...
I guess I'm not going to be the judge of that, am I?
Whether people like the footage or not, I thought it was-
it was great.
So almost every animal on the planet needs to move to survive.
And we should all be aware of exactly how challenging
it is getting for these migratory animals every single year.
It's often the case that we have fantastic
protections for a species in one area,
but they might spend the rest of the year
in a totally different part of the world.
It's important to be documented that things are changing very quickly.
I really hope the audience enjoy it as much as we did making it.