Life
Planet Earth & Life Box Set [Blu-ray][Region Free]
Life was the follow-up series to Planet Earth and Blue Planet from the BBC’s renowned Natural History Unit. Four years in the making, the NHU documented animals and plants using innovative filming techniques. I joined the ‘Plants’ team headed by Neil Lucas as camera assistant to Tim Shepherd and making-of cameraman. Tim is an outstanding cameraman specialising in timelapse photography. Although much of the shooting is done on location, owing to the length of the shots and need to control the environment for the timelapse to succeed, a lot of the photography was done in a studio. In a little barn in Devon we re-created English woodlands, tropical canopies, arctic tundra and marshes; in some cases concurrently.
All the timelapse is shot on stills cameras as they are easy to control frame by frame and are of incredibly high resolution even when compared to 1080p HD. Some of the shots were relatively simple and others complex requiring the camera to pan, track and rack focus over a course of days, weeks or months. Lighting is paramount, both to match the mater shot which could typically be a wide and also to make the shot natural.
There were a couple of locations close to the barn which we used outside to shoot. The challenges are immediately different, rain being the main one – finding a window of opportunity to get a timelapse shot done in when it’s not going to rain in England is quite some challenge.
Timelapse is incredibly rewarding, but it’s a slow process. Not only are the subjects normally doing things very slowly, but setting the shots up is a pain-staking process which takes days if not weeks to achieve before you roll on the shot.
Another incredible challenge we had was the opening sequence of the programme; the mystical wood. To show in 90 seconds an entire year of an English woodland in a panning and tracking timelapse shot. The master was shot in a wood near Devon and then over the following months the shot was re-created in the studio on a blue screen so we could composite the plants in the studio onto the master shot. The trees and rocks in the woodland had to be recreated in a 1:1 scale in the studio based on laser measurements taken in the wood. Chicken wire, polystyrene and blue screen cloth over the course of a week started to resemble the wood. The large problem was it had to be accurate in 3D space since the camera was tracking back and panning all the time.
In addition to assisting Tim I was shooting material for the making-of film, called Life On Location. Mini making-of docs have become a standard addition to many larger budget natural history productions where they take a segment from the programme and show how it was made. I shot the material on my Sony Ex1 and I’ve managed to find the making-of sequence on Youtube (probably shouldn’t be there, but someone has put it up, so here it is).
Working on BBC1's landmark natural history series 'Life'; timelapse photography for the plant programme to show plants in a whole new light
Buy the DVD of Life
Planet Earth & Life Box Set [Blu-ray][Region Free]
Life was the follow-up series to Planet Earth and Blue Planet from the BBC’s renowned Natural History Unit. Four years in the making, the NHU documented animals and plants using innovative filming techniques. I joined the ‘Plants’ team headed by Neil Lucas as camera assistant to Tim Shepherd and making-of cameraman. Tim is an outstanding cameraman specialising in timelapse photography. Although much of the shooting is done on location, owing to the length of the shots and need to control the environment for the timelapse to succeed, a lot of the photography was done in a studio. In a little barn in Devon we re-created English woodlands, tropical canopies, arctic tundra and marshes; in some cases concurrently.
All the timelapse is shot on stills cameras as they are easy to control frame by frame and are of incredibly high resolution even when compared to 1080p HD. Some of the shots were relatively simple and others complex requiring the camera to pan, track and rack focus over a course of days, weeks or months. Lighting is paramount, both to match the mater shot which could typically be a wide and also to make the shot natural.
There were a couple of locations close to the barn which we used outside to shoot. The challenges are immediately different, rain being the main one – finding a window of opportunity to get a timelapse shot done in when it’s not going to rain in England is quite some challenge.
Timelapse is incredibly rewarding, but it’s a slow process. Not only are the subjects normally doing things very slowly, but setting the shots up is a pain-staking process which takes days if not weeks to achieve before you roll on the shot.
Another incredible challenge we had was the opening sequence of the programme; the mystical wood. To show in 90 seconds an entire year of an English woodland in a panning and tracking timelapse shot. The master was shot in a wood near Devon and then over the following months the shot was re-created in the studio on a blue screen so we could composite the plants in the studio onto the master shot. The trees and rocks in the woodland had to be recreated in a 1:1 scale in the studio based on laser measurements taken in the wood. Chicken wire, polystyrene and blue screen cloth over the course of a week started to resemble the wood. The large problem was it had to be accurate in 3D space since the camera was tracking back and panning all the time.
In addition to assisting Tim I was shooting material for the making-of film, called Life On Location. Mini making-of docs have become a standard addition to many larger budget natural history productions where they take a segment from the programme and show how it was made. I shot the material on my Sony Ex1 and I’ve managed to find the making-of sequence on Youtube (probably shouldn’t be there, but someone has put it up, so here it is).
