All language subtitles for Attenborough.60.Years.In.The.Wild.S01E01.HDTV.x264-FTP

In a lifetime of natural
history filmmaking

I've seen many odd animals,
but few odder than these

proboscis monkeys in Borneo.

I first saw them 50 years ago.

ARCHIVE: 'Late one evening,
we had a great stroke of luck.'

'For a troupe of the extraordinary
long nosed proboscis monkey

'had come down to the river
bank to feed.'

'When I started filming
such creatures,

'it was quite easy to show viewers
animals that hitherto had only

'been seen in the wild by
intrepid explorers.'

'As the years passed,
one way and another, we got better

'and better shots and in the
process, I had some memorable
encounters.'

Boo!

This is a very
intelligent animal.

And top of the menu right now
is salmon.

SNARLING

I think that was pretty clear!

I've been lucky enough to live
through what might be

considered the golden
age of natural history filmmaking.

Almost every year it seemed we found
some new way of revealing

new things about the natural world.

'In the 1950s, much of the wildlife
of the planet was still unfilmed,
even unknown.

'And in the following 60 years,

'a succession of technical
innovations enabled us to reveal
more

'and more of the natural
world in increasing detail.'

This is the first natural history
film I ever saw - in 1934,
when I was eight.

And I thought it was wonderful.

Ladies and gentlemen.

Let me put you out of your
misery at once.

You're not going to see me
for long, although I am inviting

you to come on this trip with me,
you will only see me occasionally.

The man in the pith helmet is
Cherry Kearton, one of the first

people to try and capture
the lives of wild animals on film.

There are five million penguins
on this island, which are called

the jackass penguins.

I'm always polite to animals,

and as I intend to stay with
the penguins for several months,

I am naturally adopting my most
friendly manner.

Kearton travelled around the world
filming wild animals that

had never been filmed before.

His approach was hardly scientific,

but nonetheless he was
very entertaining.

His sister, a typical flapper,

not content with being one of
the fair sex, wants to join
the air sex

But resigns herself to just a
flip here, a flap there,

and a flop in between.

For all its obvious flaws, his films
captured my childish imagination

and made me dream of travelling to
far-off places to film wild animals.

And this is one of the very cameras
Cherry Kearton used.

It's enclosed in a wooden box.

It was driven by hand
and used 35mm film.

This distance across.

Within a few years, it was
superseded by improved models like
this one,

which had a metal box
and it worked by clockwork

and it had a variety of lenses.

But it still used hefty 35mm film.

Happily however, there were smaller
versions available.

A camera like this.

This used 16mm film which was
only half the size

and it was powered by clockwork.

But unfortunately the BBC
thought cameras like
this were unprofessional.

And there was a huge row as to
whether or not I could be allowed
to take it.

But in the end I did,
and it was with this I set off

to ramble around the jungles of the
world looking for unfilmed animals.

My first natural history series,
Zoo Quest,

recorded the progress of animal
collecting expeditions

arranged with the London Zoo
and brought to the screen,

places and animals that had
never before been seen on
television,

or in the cinema, come to that.

One targeted the largest
lizard in the world which

lived on the small Indonesian
island of Komodo.

Few people had heard of it
and Indonesia no-one seemed sure
where the island was.

Eventually, we set off with a
fisherman who said that he did,

but after a couple of days at sea,
I had my doubts.

I said to the captain, "You have
been to Komodo before, haven't you?"

And he said, "Baloom."

And I didn't know what baloom meant.

So I had to go and find my
Indonesian dictionary and looked
it up

and it said, "Not yet."

So, it was clear
he didn't know the way.

After a week at sea and having
survived encounters with coral reefs

and whirlpools, we arrived
at what I thought must be Komodo.

And I remember wading
ashore across a coral lagoon

and finding a tiny little village
and saying, "Excuse me,
is this Komodo?"

HE CHUCKLES

And they, "Komodo". So it was OK.

The locals recommended
we should use a dead goat as bait.

Once in the bush we began to build
a trap using materials

gathered from nearby,
as I recorded in my journal.

This was the dragon trap
with a little bait in there.

When the dragon, if he went
in the front end, trod on there,

it pulled it down which then pulled
the ring down which released the
rod,

which then pulled down, because
of the lump of rock on the bottom.

So, clunk, down it would go.

And now, all we had to do was
to wait.

There was a rustle in the bush
and there was the dragon.

Our first sight of this
magnificent monster.

To my surprise, we were looking at
the trap and I heard a noise
behind me.

I turned round
and there was the dragon.

That was taken at that
particular moment.

Looking at me straight in the eye
from only about a couple of
yards away.

We looked at each other and I
thought, at least I might take
your photograph.

So that was the photograph
I took of him.

Then, he rather wearily heaved
himself up and strolled round us

and went down into the dry riverbed
where we'd made the trap.

And down came the door.

Hastily we piled boulders on the
door so he couldn't lift it up.

We'd got him.

Those early films seem pretty
ordinarily these days,

but they were nonetheless popular

because what ever we showed was new
to most of our viewers.

So, in the 1950s we were taking
cameras like this
all over the world.

And then, an Austrian biologist
and filmmaker decided to try

and take it under water.

His name was Hans Hass,

and he developed his own special
housing to do that.

Hans and his wife Lotte

were the first to bring the wonders
of life under the sea to television.

And their programs were all
the more sensational

because few people at that time
had scuba dived.

Take care, down there are sharks.

We are right on the reef's edge.

In the '50s, sharks
had a terrible reputation.

They were the killers of the sea.

Anybody in water alongside a shark
was clearly courting certain death.

Here were Hans and Lotte swimming
alongside them.

The nation was astounded.

The sequence certainly had shock
value, but perhaps it was also

the first step in changing
our perceptions of sharks.

And like all television, it was
still shown in black and white.

So, during the Zoo Quest series
I had to describe an animal's
colour in words.

This one was among the most
brilliantly coloured of all

chameleons in the world.

His eyeballs are bright, rust-red
and his body and legs striped

and blotched with a vivid green.

But, television was changing fast.

In the 1960s, the BBC was given
a second television network

operating on a higher technical
standard with the specific

job of introducing colour
television.

And in 1965, I was
put in charge of it with an office

here in the
Television Centre in London.

To demonstrate colour
on television could be both accurate
and not garish,

I commissioned a series about
the history of art.

It was called Civilisation.

I'm standing in the Sistine Chapel

and above my head is
one of the greatest works of man,

Michelangelo's ceiling.

It was presented by Kenneth Clarke
and became a great success.

So we followed it with other series
on a similar scale about science,

economics and the history
of America.

But I knew the most dazzlingly
colourful series would be
one about wildlife.

After eight years in administration,

I decided I wanted to go back
to making programs.

And I put up a suggestion we should
make 13 one-hour programmes

in colour tracing the whole history
of life on Earth.

Thanks to the development of
jet air travel,

we were able to film in 30 countries
around the globe.

And as I traced the history of life
on the planet, I could appear

to move from one continent to
another in the space of a single
sequence.

The South American
rainforests are the richest

and varied assemblage
of life in the world.

These limestones in Morocco...

Macaques live in many parts of
Japan.

WHINING

Life On Earth was
shown in 100 different countries

and seen by perhaps as many as
500 million people.

Natural history television was now
a global phenomenon,

revealing our wonderful
world in colour to all.

During the series,
we made full use of both colour

and scuba gear to help show the
underwater world as never before.

I even tried to follow Hans Hass'
lead exploring the underwater world.

One of the problems with underwater
films was you cannot talk
underwater.

Most of the time if you have a
breathing apparatus on your back,

you have something in your mouth.

But Alistair, one of my producer
colleagues, was very keen we should

try and introduce the presenter
talking to camera underwater.

There was a wonderful new invention
called the bubble helmet
and this is it.

You can put a microphone in one
side of it.

So, we went down to the swimming
pool in the hotel where we
were staying

and this was screwed on my head.

It took a long time to screw
it down tight to make it watertight.

I put it on like this.

I waded it into the water
and I hadn't gone more than
a foot underwater,

When suddenly, water started
bubbling in, very alarming.

It was rising around you
and I was going to drown.

How long would it take to
get this off?

So I came out in a hurry.
There was a fault, I said.

"Nonsense," said Alistair, "give
it to me." He put it on
his shoulders.

And I, with some pleasure screwed
it down quite tight

and he waded into the pool.

And he came out even quicker
than me with water

and he was gesticulating
to get it off.

And I finally took it off and
he said, "There's a fault."

I said, "Yes, there is".

So I happily left the helmet behind
and reverted to my old mask

and scuba gear when it came
to my next underwater assignment -

to reveal the extraordinary social
behaviour and intelligence
of dolphins.

They are full of curiosity,

they play with odd things they find,
such as twigs,

and swimming among them leaves you
in no doubt

that they are highly intelligent.

CONSTANT CLICKS AND SQUEAKS

They will even mimic you as you spin
or hang in the water.

Until the 1980s, you could only
shoot 10 minutes of film under water

before you had to come back
to the surface,

open the underwater housing,
take out the camera,

put in a new roll of film.

But then video cameras
solved that problem.

Videotapes ran for 30 minutes.

And now, at last, we had the chance

of properly recording
animal behaviour underwater.

In addition, video cameras
were far more sensitive,

so we could record at much lower
light levels,

making artificial lights
unnecessary.

It was a huge breakthrough
for underwater filming,

and crucial to the success
of The Blue Planet series.

Now it was possible to record
for the first time marlin hunting.

The seas and oceans were full
of animals

whose extraordinary behaviour,
up till now, no one had ever seen.

And the shots just got better
and better.

Cameramen could now stay underwater
long enough

to capture every moment
of the action,

and be in the right place
at the right time

for the most dramatic events.

So now we can capture previously
unseen animal behaviour

throughout the seas of the world.

On land it had, until now, been
impossible to film animals

behaving naturally at night,
when most mammals are active.

All we could do was shine
a spotlight on them

and film them as they ran away.

And it was the same problem wherever
animals lived in darkness.

Caves are fascinating places,
but difficult places to work in.

When I first came here to this one
in Gomantong in Borneo back in 1972,

we had to bring
a lot of lights with us

in order to film the many
millions of birds and bats

that live in here.

And the droppings of all those
creatures

make the cave wreak of ammonia.

HE INHALES

The smell brings it all back to me.

When I was here 40 years ago,

the director said,
"There's a pile of droppings

at the far end of the cave

that goes right up to the roof."

"Why don't you climb up to the top?"

And when I got to the top
he shouted, "Say something!"

So I tried.

And...what it is is...these bats...
packed tight on the roof here.

They're flying now all around
my head.

This cave,
this particular part of it,

Oohh! ..makes... (COUGHS)

This ammonia is really
quite, quite choking.

..makes a very perfect place
for a home.

HIGH-PITCHED CHATTERING

One of the really astounding things
is that this immense number of bats

flying round here in a panic -

not one is colliding with the other.

Nor, indeed, am I in any danger
whatsoever of being hit by them.

And then the director said, "Cut!",
the camera stopped,

the lights went out,

and a bat flew straight in my face.

So perhaps their much praised
echo location

is not quite as perfect
as people say.

The film cameras we used then needed
normal white light, like these.

But the problem with that is that
they disturb animals

accustomed to living in the dark.

But then the security industry
developed a new type of camera

like this one, which uses infrared
light and doesn't need these lights,

but nonetheless can see in the dark,
as you can see -

I turn off one,
I turn off the other...

..and now, even though
it's pitch dark, you can see me.

Most animals, like us,
can't see infrared.

And that meant that
with these cameras,

we could now watch them behave
perfectly normally in the dark.

And that revealed some
extraordinary behaviour.

And also led to one or two pretty
uncomfortable moments.

Lions are mostly active at night,

and seldom roar during the day.

We tried to persuade them to do so
with the help of scientists,

by playing back the roar of a
strange lion to a resident pride.

LION ROARS

ROARS MORE LOUDLY

ROARS

Even that didn't work.

But 12 years later, I set off in
an open-sided Land Rover with

the latest infrared technology
to try again.

As usual, they were sleeping.

I would have to wait for darkness.

INSECTS CHIRP

GROWL/ROAR

We drive up.

I go on one side,
the camera goes on the other.

And the lion starts roaring.

But the problem is,
I can't see where it is.

I can't even see
where the camera is.

"Cue", says the producer.

So I start trying to say my piece.

Trying not to be too frightened
of this lion

which is somewhere in the blackness,
and, as far as I can make out,

within a couple of yards of me
and no side on the Land Rover.

And I then had to do my piece
to camera looking around,

seeing where on earth
the camera was.

And now in the darkness there are
a number of them roaring...

just around here.

There are two, I know, within
three or four yards of where I am,

and a third,
perhaps 20 yards over there.

Though it's difficult to tell
because it's pitch black.

REPEATED SHORT ROARS

Those are not aggressive roars,
they are communication roars,

but they are quite enough
to chill the blood

in the blackness of the night.

SHORT ROARS CONTINUE

A few years later, similar technology
made it possible to film

one of the most extraordinary
hunting sequences ever recorded,

using whole batteries of infrared
lights mounted on vehicles.

ELEPHANT TRUMPETS

A solitary lion stands no chance,

but the whole pride is here.

There are 30 of them,

and they are specialist
elephant hunters.

THUNDERCLAPS

This remarkable behaviour could not
have been filmed in any other way,

and it proved conclusively what many
others had doubted -

that a big pride of lions can indeed
bring down and kill

an animal as big as an elephant.

Other cameras were developed that
worked simply by concentrating

what little light comes
from the stars and moon.

And we used such a starlight camera
to record an encounter I had

with a wonderful New Zealand
nocturnal bird,

the kiwi.

We heard of a place where kiwis
came out of the bush

and walked along the beach

looking for sandhoppers.

Now they find their way by smell,

so I thought,
how can I conceal myself?

So I lay on the tideline where
all the rotting seaweed was lying.

And I just lay on it.

And this little...enchanting little
creature came slowly along,

probing its beak into the sand.

Phwff! Blowing out the sand.
Coming closer. Phwff!

'Probing sand with your nostrils
is all very well,

'but it does clog them up.

'So you need to blow them
clear every now and then.'

'It's sense of smell is so acute,

'it can pick out the largest
juiciest hoppers deep in the sand

'without even seeing them.'

Our starlight camera can see much
better than I can.

'I need a torch to see this
extraordinary creature properly.

'But he doesn't seem to mind.'

OCEAN CRASHES NEARBY

He comes right up to me
because his eyes are very small.

Poor eyesight is putting it mildly.

But he can smell, but he didn't.

Because the seaweed was even
stronger smelling than me.

There are other ways of filming
in the dark -

by using thermal cameras
like this one.

Up above me there are a lot of bats.

And the camera shows them
as different colours.

The yellow lights here are bats
that have just flown in

and are still
warm from their exertion.

as well as revealing where animals
are,

the thermal cameras can also
reveal something of the condition
they are in.

For example, my face now,
because I'm rather hot,

is likely to be an orange colour.

Where I am cooler it will be red,
and this probably, is verging
on blue.

But if I take a bottle of cold
water, that's likely to be black.

Ahhh! Very good, too.

Thermal cameras also proved useful
in the Galapagos,

to demonstrate some

of the remarkable physiological
adaptations of reptiles.

Once they are thoroughly warmed up,

marine iguanas can maintain their
body temperature

just about as constantly as I can.

And what's more,
at about the same level,

or indeed, slightly higher
- around 37 degrees centigrade.

But when they go into the cold sea
to feed on submerged seaweed,

their temperature falls
very rapidly.

A recently emerged iguana is black.
It's chilled to the bone.

Now they need heat in order to be
able to digest that meal of seaweed,

and they get that by spread-eagling
themselves

on these black,
hot, sun-baked rocks.

So, thermal cameras reveal
just how skilled

reptiles are at harnessing
the power of the sun.

One of the things we discovered
when starting work

on the Trials of Life

was a new lens which enabled you to
have an object close to the camera -

a small little creature, perhaps -

and yet have all the distance to
the far horizon in complete focus.

So I would be able to walk up from
the distance to something close
to camera,

all the time being in focus.

It's not always easy to
decide in these partnerships,

which is exploiting which.

The balance of advantage
is often very delicate.

Take for example these ants
in Australia.

They are extremely ferocious,

and normally they will

rip apart any caterpillar.

But see
how they're treating this one.

When we first saw that
shot in the viewing theatre...

We all went down to the canteen for
a cup of tea and talked about it,

and I heard someone next to me,
who'd just joined the team

talking to her friend, and she said,
"Fantastic stuff they've got
in Australia. Amazing!

"But I would never want to
go there myself,

"because they have caterpillars
there that are two feet long!"

So, sometimes with all our optical
tricks, we can get too clever.

BIRDSONG

Never the less, insects filmed
in close-up are truly fascinating.

These are tree ants in Borneo,

and they have a wonderful
way of making their nests.

I first tried to film
how they did so,

when I was here in Borneo
back in the '50s.

'Then we noticed this group

'with their jaws locked tight
in the lower leaf,

'and their hind legs attached
to the upper leaf.

'The colony is constructing
a new nest.

'And these patient workers

'are holding two leaves
of the future nest in position,

'so that other members

'can fasten them together

'to form the outer wall
of their new home.'

To get those shots,
we had to tear apart the nest to get

the ants to work out in the open.

These days we can do
better than that.

This is an optical probe that
I can make mover forwards or

backwards
and even...from side to side.

And so with that,
you can go into the nest

and get shots of the ants behaving
totally naturally.

That is a stranger in the nest.

That is a little bug which
they are attacking.

It was technical developments
like these that allowed us

eventually to enter
the world of the insect.

A motorised jib arm enables
filmmakers to suspend a camera above

a column of aggressive driver ants
and watch the organised way

they hunt through the forest.

Workers carry the colony's larvae.

Ferocious soldiers link legs to form
a defensive roof and walls,

enclosing the column.

Were the camera or cameraman
to accidentally touch

just one of these soldiers,
they would all immediately attack.

But they're blind,

and they can't see the camera
hanging just centimetres above them.

So we can track along with them
as the army takes its prey

back to the bivouac where
the queen is waiting.

Wildlife film-making can take
a lot of patience.

Cameramen may have to spend hours
and hours,

if not days and weeks,
to film one particular action.

But that can be helped using modern
security technology.

And we used such technology to get
a shot of something

that as far as I know, had never
been filmed before in the wild.

Rattlesnakes hunting.

Scientists working in New York State
had implanted radio transmitters in

a group of rattlesnakes so that each
could be found by using an aerial.

There he is.

The camera crew placed remotely
controlled cameras

and infrared lights next
to a snake lying in ambush.

The cameras were attached to motion
detectors that would turn them on

if anything moved in their
field of vision.

The following night
I checked the replay.

There's a mouse.

It's pitch dark and the mouse
clearly has no idea the snake
is there.

Bu the snake is well
aware of the mouse.

He's worked out that that is the
path along which the mice run.

Oh, my goodness!

That's a dead mouse, all right.

So it was that technology designed
to keep burglars out of our homes,

enabled us to record the
rattlesnake's hunting strategy
in the wild.

Another revelatory film technique
involves playing with time -

slowing down the action.

Cameramen have long down that,

simply by increasing the number
of images taken per second.

Kestrels are known as wind-hoverers,

because of their apparent ability
to hang motionless in the air.

And slow motion photography
enables us to see details

of their flying technique that we
can't see with the naked eye.

By filming this trained bird,
with this special camera,

we can slow down the motion
and see exactly how they do it.

It's flying at the same speed
as the oncoming wind, and the air

flowing over its wings provides just
enough lift top keep it airborne.

By flying as slowly as this,
they risk stalling,

because the windflow over the wing
doesn't provide enough lift.

Slowing down the action by ten
times, we can see how the

kestrel extends the finger-like
projection on the leading edge
of its wing

and spreads its tail-feathers
to generate more lift.

Commercial airliners do
the same thing

when they adjust their wing flaps
to slow them down for landing.

If a kestrel is to see its prey
successfully while hovering,

it has to keep its head
perfectly still,

not easy when the wind is constantly
trying to blow you off position.

But in slow motion,

you can see how the kestrel responds
immediately to changes in the wind.

Constantly adjusting
the set of its wings

and allowing it's neck
to stretch and contract.

So that while its body
is constantly moving,

its eyes stay fixed
and can spot the slightest movement
on the ground below.

One of my favourite
slow-motion moments

was when I was able to fool a
lovesick hoverfly with a peashooter.

It might seem
that he's absolutely motionless,

but, in fact, he's having to make
continual changes to adjust
for slight currents in the air.

It's an amazing piece of acrobatics,

far better than anything that
we could do in a helicopter.

And it's all done in order
to impress the female

to show her that he is superb
at holding his territory.

With his superb eyesight,
he's ready to spot anything

that might whiz by him at high
speed that could be a female.

And I might just be able to fool
him with a peashooter.

By watching his response
slowed down by about 50 times,

it's clear that the male is indeed
so hyped up that he will pursue
any fast-moving object

that comes near him in the hope
that it might be a female.

Those poor males
must have been exhausted by the time
I'd finished with them.

By combining the best macro-lenses
with digital slow-motion cameras,

we were able to reveal
the extreme athletic prowess
of some even tinier creatures.

These springtails, as they're name
suggests, have a rather novel way of
jumping.

They have a tiny two-pronged lever
beneath their abdomen.

One small flick from it can
catapult them six inches, some 15
centimetres, into the air.

It's the equivalent of a human being
jumping over the Eiffel Tower.

So with slow-motion cameras,

we can watch actions and distinguish
details that are impossible to see
with the naked eye.

At the other end of the scale,
we can manipulate time to speed up
excessive slow action.

This is a time-lapse studio

where you can control lights
and cameras very precisely.

A film camera
shoots 25 frames per second,

but if you modify one so that it
only shoots one frame per second

and then show the film
at normal speed,

well, then, you increase the speed
of action by 25m times.

And as the sophistication
of time-lapse photography
has increased,

so we've been able to show that
plants can be as competitive
and aggressive as many an animal.

And it was the mastery of time-lapse
that allowed us to make a series
called The Private Life of Plants.

Condense three months
into 20 seconds,

and the desolation of winter quickly
warms into the riot of spring.

Speed a week into a minute,
and you can sense the urgency

with which the ground-living plants
race to unfurl their flowers.

Of all the woodland plants,
the humble bramble
is one of the most aggressive.

It waves its shoots agitatedly
from side to side

as if feeling
for the best way forward.

The invading stem's
backward-pointing spines

give it the grip it needs
to climb almost anything
that stands in its way.

It can advance as much as seven
centimetres in a day.

Now digital cameras allow us
to see how a shot is developing
while we are still taking it,

instead of having to wait till it
was finished as we used to
have to do with film cameras.

And we can also use computers
attached to small motors

to move a camera
in-between exposed frames,

so that the camera can, in fact,
travel alongside the plant.

Using this new technology,
it became possible to condense
the arrival of spring in a woodland

into a few seconds.

But the wonderful thing about
wildlife film making

is that no matter how much you've
seen and filmed,

there's always going to be something
to surprise you.

I remember back in 1994,

we were filming nepenthes rajah, the
largest pitcher plant in the world,

growing up
in the mountains of Borneo.

And I made an assumption
about how it obtained
its nitrogen fertiliser.

I guess this one...

contains...
two or three pints of liquid.

It's so big that it catches not just
insects but even small rodents.

And one was recorded that has in it
the body of a drowned rat.

So if ever there was a carnivore
among plants, this is it.

But I was wrong.

In 2010, scientists discovered that
the plant gets its nitrogen

in a quite different way.

And we couldn't resist going back
to see of we could find out
what the truth was.

Mount Kinabalu in Sabah is home
to many rajah pitcher plants.

BUZZING
They certainly seem
to attract insects.

that fall into their bowls
just as other pitchers do,

but they also have larger visitors.

A tree shrew.

It's licking
the underside of the lid

where the pitcher secretes nectar
with which it lures visitors.

But even though its backside is
hanging over the bowl,

it doesn't seem to be in any danger
of falling in and drowning.

So what's going on?

It leaves a clue.

A dropping.

So the pitcher
is a tree shrew toilet.

The tree shrew feeds
by licking the secretions
from the pitcher plant's lid

and the pitcher plant
gets its fertiliser by collecting
the tree shrew's droppings.

Wildlife cameramen are always
trying to film

some piece of animal behaviour
that no-one has ever see before.

And aerial photography
enable then to do just that.

In the early days, we occasionally
managed to get up in a small plane
to get a shot of the landscape.

But the plane vibrated so much
that you couldn't use long lenses
to get close-ups of animals

and if you went low the roar
of the engine frightened them.

So we tried
other forms of aerial transport.

Balloons were a little quieter, but
they took you where the wind blew
them, not where you wanted to go.

And getting steady shots
was still difficult.

It wasn't until the invention
of a kind of mount

that could hold the camera almost
miraculously free of vibration

that it was possible to use
the long lenses necessary

in order to film animals
from a height and they didn't
even know you were there.

It's almost impossible to follow
a wild dog hunt at ground level

through the treacherous swamplands
of the Okavango Delta in Africa.

But the Planet Earth series
used a helicopter

with a new stabilising mount that
kept the camera vibration-free

and you could get close-ups from
so high up that the animals below
didn't know you were there.

There they go.
They're racing. They're racing.

Four dogs all spread out.

Tighten up a much as you can.

By inter-cutting aerial shots
and shots from the ground,

we could show how the dogs
worked as a team,

with fresh animals joining the hunt
to harry their prey
and cut off its escape.

This new perspective
gives us the big picture,

helping us to understand behaviour
we could only see fragments
of before.

Stay with him. He's almost got him!

They're heading towards the water.

Ooh!
The croc's gonna get the impala.

So now we have the techniques
to film almost anything on land
or in the sea or in the air.

But to get pictures of animals
that lived in the past,
you have to recreate life.

In the early days, our attempts
were pretty crude.

We used solid models of extinct
fish placed in swamps to show the
arrival of amphibians on land.

We moved on to line drawings
of dinosaurs and I even appeared
alongside one.

It's easy to imagine some 12 foot
species of peragasaurus
like Dimetrodon

lying basking on the rocks
in the early morning sun.

And then we began to animate
the drawings, but not very
realistically.

It would take the advent of
computer animation to make them
move like real animals.

We wanted to use these new computer
techniques to bring to life a moa,

the giant, extinct
ostrich-like bird on New Zealand.

First of all,
I had to walk into a woodland glade

holding a moa bone.

Then what would happen would be that

that bone would be suspended,
I would take my hands away,

and all the rest of the bones
and the skeleton
would appear from nowhere

and materialise
to form the complete skeleton.

So I had to walk in,
hold the bone,

then take my hands away
and let it drop, which seemed
a silly thing to do.

But electronic trickery
made it stay there

and then added the rest of the bones
of the moa's skeleton.

It had just three toes.

Its pelvis and its spine lead up
to an extraordinarily long neck.

This bird stood over six feet,
two metres tall.

But then we wanted it
to walk away.

And so what the computer expert
got us to do was to imagine
where it was going to stand

and then conceal
ourselves in the vegetation,

each of us holding a bit of
fishing line attached to a branch.

And with our computer expert
conducting us as though he was
conducting an orchestra,

the moa came in,
this branch was brushed away,

and then it reached up and pecked
another leaf and the leaf moved

and then it moved away
and the bushes moved.

It was really quite convincing.

The first human settlers
on these islands

saw these giants alive
and called them moas.

Among them were the tallest birds
that ever existed, that weighed
over 200 kilos, 400 pounds.

So now we could recreate extinct
creatures whenever we liked,

in their entire full-colour,
animated glory.

A succession of technological
advances has certainly changed the
way we make natural history films.

These days,
with every year that passes,

we seem to get
more and more equipment.

Longer lenses,
more electronic bits of kit.

But in the end, often the most
memorable shot comes

from just one camera and one person

with a deep understanding
of the natural world.

To film a wild snow leopard

was once the ultimate challenge
for a wildlife cameraman.

Doug Allen went to the Himalayas

to attempt to do what so many
cameramen before him

had tried but failed.

I guess this is where
you could say it really starts.

We're up here
in snow leopard country.

You look around and anywhere and at
any time, you might just see it.

These are big, big mountains and
there are not many snow leopards.

Nevertheless, Doug took to his hide
and waited.

HE SIGHS

This is tedious stuff.

Not a sign.

If you got just a little bit
of a hint, a wee bit of a sighting
now and again,

your spirits would be lifted.

But right now, I'd swap a little
bit of this animal's charisma

for a little bit more visibility.

And things didn't improve,
even after two weeks.

Yeah, of course, it's boring.

It's as boring as hell.

After seven weeks of patiently
sitting and watching

these distant shots
are all Doug managed to film.

So he had to return home
empty-handed.

The following winter cameraman
Mark Smith took up the challenge and
tried a different location

this time in Pakistan.

We've just got a lot of snow and
we'll be able to track snow leopard.

So we'll have a lot better chances
of filming it. It's just fantastic.

After that promising start,
things didn't go so well for Mark.

He and the crew spent a fruitless
month trudging through the snow.

Mark spent all Christmas
in the mountains with no sign
of a snow leopard.

But it was a much happier New Year.

Just... We just got a report
that there's a snow leopard
up on the ridge.

And we were too low
where we were before,

so we're just trying to get some
height to get a better view of it.

Finally, Mark was rewarded
with his first ever glimpse.

I looked up onto the ridge

and I could see
this leopard-shaped rock,

which I'd seen
a million times before.

And I looked through binoculars
and it was a leopard just sat there.

It was perched
just on the top of a rock

and it looked down at us
and sat down

in a sort of sphinx-like posture.

A few days later,
Mark's patience paid off.

There was not jut an adult female,
but with her a one-year-old cub.

Overall,
Mark spent eight months in Pakistan.

And his dedication enabled him
to document the most intimate
moments of a snow leopard's life.

Including a hunt.

Silently she positions herself
above her prey.

BLEATING

SCREECHES

The revelations brought by wildlife
films today

were beyond my imagination
when I set out 60 years ago.

They have transformed not only
our understanding
of the natural world,

but our attitudes towards it.

There have been a lot of changes
in the way that we've filmed
the natural world

during the last 50-60 years,

but there's also been a great change
in the way we understand that world

and that's what I'll be looking at
in the next programme.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd