BBC IGUANA ESCAPING LOTS OF SNAKES TV

Random clips were used, but those were for closeups of the iguana and the snakes, not for the actual chase portion: But the accusation in the Daily Mail's article is somewhat different - not that the BBC enhanced a chase, but that they basically built a chase out of random clips.īut the Mail appears to misunderstand what White was saying, and what actually happened. Watching 8 hours of boring footage before something exciting happens with crappy recorded sound is not exactly riveting TV. It's certainly true that nature documentaries are manipulated to a certain extent, and we're pretty much okay with that. She added: 'For continuity, it was better to crop the scenes together based off of the two cameras we had at the time to create the best possible scene.' She went on to explain that the Bafta-winning moment was the product of two cameras, which were both trained on the beach in the Galapagos as the newly-hatched marine iguanas were chased by racer snakes. 'Unfortunately lizards, snakes and iguanas aren't good at 'takes'.' The Mail reported on an answer given by one of the show's producers at a talk:Įlizabeth White, who was in charge of the 'Islands' episode, shocked the audience at the Media Production Show yesterday when saying: 'It wasn't the same iguana no, and often we have to augment it with other clips. Walt Disney’s brother Roy admitted: “There was a time when we were presenting a lot of footage – that we knew was staged – as having occurred naturally.The Daily Mail delivered a distressing news item on Tuesday: that amazing Planet Earth II clip of a snakes chasing a baby iguana from last year was faked, the result of cobbled together footage of different iguanas. They were eventually taken to the Bow river and pushed off the bank, the Guardian reported. It was revealed that the crew had in fact disturbingly paid children in Canada’s northern Manitoba region to round up some lemmings. In a classic example, Walt Disney’s lemmings sequence portrays hundreds of the animals committing mass suicide in the sea, which was later proved to be a myth. “In one case a crew tied down a ferret to a rock to lure a hawk.” “When it goes further than editing footage to crews intervening with nature and potentially harming animals, that’s where it crosses the line,” she said. Ms Smaill added that there was, however, an ethical line that filmmakers should not cross. We can see the camera move, we can see changes of perspective,, we see close-ups turn to wide shots and vice versa.” The wide tracking shot as the iguana makes it escape as the snakes come out of the earth - I experienced it as a kind of horror film. “The clip from Earth is absolutely compelling filmmaking, it is suspenseful, its production values are impeccable and it makes no attempt to disguise the fact that it is stitched together.

“Most nature documentaries try to show the survival of the fittest in the most readily understandable form - a challenge, an annual pilgrimage, a miraculous escape. This is perhaps one of most dramatic and universal stories we have,” he said. “The nature documentary is really only ever about one thing: death and survival - the primal forces of natural life. University of Sydney film studies lecturer Dr Richard Smith backed Ms Smaill’s assessment, claiming that documentaries are “stitched together all the time”. “And it’s the mastery of the audio-visual, footage being sped up or slowed down to tell a story and make a spectacle.” “Wildlife documentaries are highly crafted - it’s not a matter of ‘point the camera and shoot'”, she said. Ms Smaill said it was common practice for programmes such as BBC’s Planet Earth II to heavily edit footage for documentaries, especially when it comes to nature films and camera-shy reptiles.

BBC IGUANA ESCAPING LOTS OF SNAKES TV

“I think that in the age of reality TV and fake news, we’re well-versed as consumers and it’s up to the viewer to discern what’s true.”

Bbc iguana escaping lots of snakes