Ill say, Yeah, we were there to film mammoths.
Yeah, people, were here to film a T-Rex.
But it also required much more planning.
This had an extended phase of research and development before we even went into the field and shot stuff.
There was so much to get our heads around.
Where do you even start with essentially 500 million years of complex life?
From there, the next step is playing with dinosaur toys andLego.
It makes the VFX feel much more real in my view, says Lanfear.
This also helped make our VFX scenes blend in really well with our modern-day natural history ones.
In finding those locations to film, scientific veracity was the watchword.
But sometimes, the search for that veracity took the team to surprising places.
For instance, an early episode features the tree fern forests where Arthropleura, the giant millipede, lived.
Theres a microclimate that these things can grow in.
Theyre over head height, the size of trees, these ferns.
While scientific veracity was always the priority, other more prosaic concerns also came into play.
The act of getting the shot you needed also had a role in the location choice.
The basalt that erupts from it, its very light, like meringue, but its really sharp meringue.
Then theres that black dust, recalls Lanfear.
Strangely enough, none of them seem to mind.
I was in my element; the more remote it can be, the better!
We got special permission to camp [near the volcano].
At the time, it was some of the newest earth on the planet.
Thats such an amazing place to be, McPherson agrees.
Camping near volcanoes is very exciting, a boyhood dream.
Volcanoes almost didnt happen for us, Tapster says.
We almost thought we were going to have to use FX or library footage.
Then suddenly Iceland erupted and kept erupting for weeks.
Then, three months later, La Palma erupted and we were spoiled for choice!
He got access to the volcano and was there within about six hours of it erupting.
So, he was one of the very first people that got there.
And he sent us back some amazing footage, Tapster says.
Filming volcanoes to stand in for prehistoric landscapes, however, brings its own challenges.
Grass was a common problem, given that it only evolved a relatively recent 55 million years ago.
Grass was the bane of our lives.
But that didnt make the act of filming them any less involved.
But we film them dynamically as if thereis a creature there.
McPhersons dynamic filming style proved integral to makingLife on Our Planetfeel like a naturedocumentaryshowing living creatures.
Jamie is one of the leading camera operators in natural history filmmaking.
We are trying to shoot it like a high-end natural history series, McPherson says.
Were moving, using tracking vehicle work quite often to make it all come to life.
Its a very exciting process.
He adds: I always filmed them running, so weve got bloopers.
Sometimes, however, there isnt even a stick on set.
Then he looks at the landscape and has this inherent understanding of animal behavior.
And then wed go filming.
Its finding the best-case scenario, he says.
We were going to shoot what we had written in our scripts.
It meant we could focus on the style of the series and the visual spectacle of it.
In shooting these animals,Life on Our Planets film crews achieved spectacular footage.
Imagine if they were stranded in Komodo for six months!
As well as the Komodo dragon shoot, Covid also disrupted the crew shooting snow leopards in Nepal.
That was so remote, Tapster says.
They could only get comms once a week by undertaking a seven-hour round trip to the nearest village.
And so, they had this weird experience of the growth of Covid.
This team also captured one of the most dramatic and unexpected scenes of the entire series.
But still not that reliable, which is why the shoot was so long.
Sadly, both snow leopard and ibex fell and died in the struggle.
But that was the behavior we were trying to get.
He had become locally known for jumping at these mountain goats and rolling down the cliff with them.
Yet this time, he just got the timing wrong.
Back in the day, these systems were used for helicopter filming.
There are these huge gimbals that allow you to stabilize a very long 1,500-millimeter lens, he says.
you could shake the camera, and it just looks like its on rails.
It doesnt move at all.
But the whale shoot marked the first time the technique was used underwater.
Its basically an underwater camera gimbal that you remotely operate on the surface, explains McPherson.
That brings its own challenges.
It causes so much drag as soon as you put it underwater and accelerate the boat, says Tapster.
It had to be really over-engineered to cope with the forces it was under.
Life On Our Planetis out now on Netflix.
