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By Peter Rejcek
How do you top what many have called the most popular
natural history television program in history?
Set the sequel at the literal ends of the Earth —
the Antarctic and Arctic.
BBC and the Discovery Channel have teamed once again
on a new documentary series, following closely on the
heels of “Planet Earth,” an 11-episode extravaganza
shot almost entirely in high-definition (HD) video. Filming
on “Frozen Planet” began last year, and a team
of filmmakers will head to McMurdo Station and beyond
this summer field season with the support of the National
Science Foundation (NSF) .
The BBC natural history team chose the polar regions
because the original “Planet Earth” episode
called “Ice Worlds” seemed to possess the most
potential for a series of its own, according to Chadden
Hunter , a director who has worked on both wildlife series
and has been coordinating the field plan on the Ice.
“The feeling was the polar regions are landscapes
so vast and relatively unexplored and uninhabited that
these new technologies that we had [used on “Planet
Earth”] lent themselves to showcasing the polar regions
like never before,” Hunter said.
That technology included a camera system called the
Cineflex, which fits a HD camera with a telephoto lens
inside a gyro-stabilized bubble. Attached to a helicopter,
the camera system allowed filmmakers to get tight, close-up
shots of wildlife from hundreds of meters away in the
air, including an epic hunt by African wild dogs for “Planet
Earth.”
Antarctica has been the subject of numerous film projects
in the last few years. Most recently, Hollywood director
Werner Herzog turned his unique looking glass on the continent
in the Oscar-nominated documentary, “Encounters at
the End of the World,” another project supported
by the NSF. And, of course, “March of the Penguins,”
about the triumphs and travails of an emperor penguin
colony, became one of the highest-grossing documentaries
of all time.
Hunter said the BBC-Discovery project hopes to create
the “ultimate portrait” of the polar regions.
The 17-member film crew heading to Antarctica next month
actually consists of several teams, which will dive under
the sea ice, buzz around the mouth of an active volcano
in a helicopter and spend an entire season with an Adélie
penguin colony at Cape Crozier.
“It’s a lot of people coming and going. A lot
of stories we’re trying to cover,” said Hunter,
himself a PhD who studied primates in Ethiopia.
The large team has offered some challenges to the people
charged with equipping and moving the filmmakers to various
field camps and locations, including South Pole Station
and sites on the sea ice for underwater diving.
“It is complicated and it is all over the place
just because it is a lot of people,” said Rob Edwards,
Science Planning Support manager for Raytheon Polar Services
, the prime contractor to the NSF for the U.S. Antarctic
Program . “This is pretty big. It’s so many
people over so long a time.”
The first filmmakers will arrive shortly after the summer
field season begins on Sept. 29. The diving team wants
to get in the water as soon as possible to take advantage
of the excellent visibility during that time of the year,
Hunter said.
“The one thing we’re really trying to capture
is that alien world under the ice,” he added. “Above
the ice, the conditions are horrific and it feels like
a desolate wasteland, but once you get under the sea ice,
there’s this whole rich and colorful world of life
going on down there.”
Divers will also film emperor penguins at the Cape Washington
colony along the Victoria Land coast using super slow-motion
cameras that can record 1,000 frames per second, according
to Hunter.
“I think with the penguins rocketing around, the
bubble streams come off them like comet trails; putting
this high-speed camera underwater will be a completely
new look — a very stylized sequence, quite balletic,”
he said.
Most of the episodes in the seven-part “Frozen Planet”
series will feature the stunning wildlife cinematography
that marked “Planet Earth,” but will also focus
on people and conservation in the final two episodes,
a departure from the previous project.
Hunter said filming in the Antarctic and Arctic, in
some ways, has been harder than the globetrotting of “Planet
Earth” given the distances and extremes in climate.
“I don’t think any of us have worked as hard
logistically,” he said. “Sometimes just to get
a film crew to one of the locations that you want to be
in requires so much support and infrastructure and money,
really, that it’s out of the scope of many documentary
budgets.”
Among the field team will be Sir David Attenborough ,
the 83-year-old naturalist who narrated the “Planet
Earth” series. The plan is for Attenborough to spend
about two weeks on the Ice, including a possible trip
to South Pole to complement a similar sequence at the
North Pole.
Edwards said Attenborough, like all the documentary crew,
would be a part of the McMurdo community like any other
science or media event. That means living in dorm buildings
while at the research station and eating in a communal
dining hall. Still, he said he expects there to be some
buzz around the film team even by a group of people who
hobnob with artists and filmmakers nearly every year.
“We’re used to pretty exciting stuff every
year,” Edwards said. “However, at least for
some people, the idea of working with the BBC — these
guys are the top pros in the natural history business
— I’m sure some people are very excited to meet
[them].”
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