Original subtitles

(soft music)

Much about the super colony,

remains unknown and for good reason.

These ants move incredibly quickly.

So you can see why it's so difficult to study,

and even more difficult to film.

At around 8 millimeters in length,

these are bigger than many ants,

but to us they're still tiny,

and rarely stay still for more than an instant.

To keep track of their frantic movements,

while also getting down to eye level with their world,

needed a very special camera.

The brainchild of film maker Martin Dawn.

This is Franken-Cam.

It's a device for positioning tiny cameras,

and small wide angle lenses into awkward corners,

with extreme precision.

It's called Franken-Cam because,

it's got so many different bits in it.

It has been said that it is an unholy alliance,

between other bits of equipment,

that should never have been put together.

Now known by all of us as Frank,

it enables us to follow tiny creatures,

as they go about their lives, without disturbing them.

(dramatic music)

I first met Frank back in 2005,

when filming for the BBC series, Life In The Undergrowth.

Back then, he wasn't quite a sophisticated as he is now,

but he still allowed us to see ants in a new way.

12 years on, the equipment has grown into this.

And this, enables us to enter the world of the ants,

in a way that has never been achieved before.

Mark, there's a lot of things going on over here.

And long cabling allows operators,

to take the control box away from the camera,

so biting insects are less of a problem.

What's going on?

But of course, it doesn't stop the ants coming to us.

(chuckles) I'm covered in ants.

I'm finding it a little hard to concentrate.

(soft piano music)

With Frank's fluid movements,

keeping th cation in focus is far simpler,

than it would be using a conventional close up camera.

It's incredibly easy to find focus,

to go right in for the close up,

so we can pull out for the wide shots,

and we can see the detail, we can see the distance.

We can put the whole scene in this meadow,

so we can see it's this meadow,

and it makes it easier to feel as if you're there.

And now for the first time,

the ants are in focus no matter where they're moving,

and even I am too.

However, while Frank's body parts cost many thousands,

and it's construction needed the help

of a mathematician and an engineer,

ironically, the layers used for many

of the most spectacular images,

cost just £8 on the internet.

This wasn't a cost cutting measure.

This lens has amazing abilities,

and it's perfect for the job, but it's only so cheap,

because lenses like it are made in their many millions,

for the cameras on your mobile phone.

(dramatic music)

One of the clever ways Frank's lenses

takes us into the ant's world,

is by changing the way we see distances.

To an ant, five feet might as well be half a mile.

This behind the scenes image, recorded on a normal camera,

shows just how close I'm sitting to the nest,

but if we view the same scene using Franken-Cam,

it appears as though I'm much farther away.

It's this magnifying of distances,

that allows the operator to steer so precisely,

between every blade of grass,

and enables us to appreciate the world on ant scale.

But even with Frank, there's one factor

that effected every aspect of the ant's behavior,

that we couldn't control.

The weather up here is extraordinarily unpredictable.

You never know what's gonna happen.

This morning it was lovely sunshine, look at it now.

Difficult to believe, but yesterday,

these meadows were under three inches of snow.

So you have to be prepared for anything,

whether your an ant, or indeed, a naturalist. (chuckles)

The ants have worked out how to survive here, we're novices.

It was meant to be Spring now,

and this was meant to be the shoot we did six weeks ago.

With the weather so variable,

predicting the ant's behaviors was difficult.

We've just arrived,

and found the nest covered in Wind Ants,

which we weren't expecting at all.

We were kind of expecting them to come out,

in about a week, or two weeks time.

Even the scientists are pretty surprised.

Matters aren't helped,

by Frank being just as fickle as the weather is.

Unfortunately with Frank, it's tempremental,

and sometimes he's brilliant,

and as soon as you admit that he's brilliant,

he decides to stop working,

which is exactly what happened this morning.

The focus box has received a knock,

or it's being sad it's not working anyway.

Kit failure is always a concern,

but when there is only one of your camera in the world,

you just need to find a way to carry on.

And doing so, enabled us to record behavior,

scientists can't normally observe in such detail.

Like the intricacies of antenna movements,

when ants interact.

Or following a parasitic queen through the undergrowth,

as she slowly builds her chemical disguise.

To obtain new observations,

leading to a new understanding of the ants,

the team filmed for over 100 days, spread over a year.

And the ants love it.

I'm happy, great, lovely thanks guys.

With the help of Franken-Cam,

they took us into the world of the super colony,

and remarkably, using a tiny lens,

just like the one on the phone in your pocket.

(dramatic music)