04 / SPOTLIGHT
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EXTRAORDINARY ANIMALS IN
BBC’S SEVEN WORLDS Seven Worlds One Planet is BBC Earth’s latest show – and it is incredible, with one particular episode focussing solely on the African continent. Scott Alexander, Series Producer, and Jonny Keeling, Executive Producer, share their thoughts on this breath-taking new series.
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BC Earth’s content is synonymous with raw, natural beauty. We’ve all been awe-struck by the Blue Planet and Planet Earth series and their fellow mates, but Seven Worlds One Planet is a breath of fresh air. Not only does it change the format to focus on a different continent in each episode, but the footage and stories told are both captivating and extraordinary, almost beyond belief. We hear more from Series Producer Scott Alexander and Exec Producer Jonny Keeling. What’s the idea behind Seven Worlds, One Planet? Scott Alexander: This is the first time we’ve done a series based on the seven continents at a time when the biodiversity of each of the continents is at its greatest. It comes at a pivotal moment because we could be entering biodiversity’s fastest decline – the sixth extinction. Normally we’ve broken up the natural world by habitat: this is an entirely new
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way to look at the planet. It consists of seven standalone films because each continent has its own identity, its own characteristics and its own unique wildlife. This is first and foremost a wildlife behavioural show. We went out looking for the newest and latest stories, new species, and new behaviours. Even where we show animals that you’ve seen before hopefully they will be doing things you haven’t seen them doing before. Jonny Keeling: The other thing that’s really important is that we want people to relate to the animals, to feel for the animal, fall in love with it, and watch a characterbased story and experience a full range of emotions. Would you give us an example of this? Scott: A classic example comes in the Africa episode. The one I really like is the elephant story. Everyone’s seen elephants but we’ve shown two particular
elephants that have learnt to stand up on their back feet and balance so they can reach higher up into the trees and get those last bits of fruit that no other elephants can reach. That’s very helpful in times of drought and it’s astonishing to see. Take us through running a production of this magnitude. How long does it take to put it together? Jonny: The whole production takes about four years – generally it’s about a year to dig up stories and leads, then about two years filming, and about a year in the edits. Then we bring in David Attenborough to do the narration, Hans Zimmer to do the music, so the quality of it is high because the people who work on it are at the top of their game. We all come from a wildlife background – I have a PhD and have worked with animals for 30 years – and we’re working with 1 500 people around the world who have expertise and knowledge for shoots, which
are generally five or six weeks long. And although all of these are planned out, what’s lovely about the natural world is that something always happens that you’d never expect. We film somewhere approaching 2 000 hours of footage or maybe more, and for each episode it’s about 300 hours of footage so it’s a huge undertaking. We’re on location for about 1 700 or 1 800 days, which is crammed into two years. At any one time, we would have four or five shoots out on location. How has wildlife filmmaking changed in the last decade? Scott: All the big talk is about the technological advances. You go from film to Beta, you go to HD then you go to 4K and on this series we’ve been shooting in 8K. But actually I think that where we’ve really evolved is in our storytelling and how we characterise our stories. I think we’re making the big advances by improving on our storytelling.
