Edwardian Insects on Film

In 1908, cinema audiences across the world were amazed

by the release of a British short film called The Acrobatic Fly.

Shot on a primitive, hand-cranked camera,

these images of a fly apparently juggling small objects

launched the career of cameraman and director Percy Smith.

Smith was passionate about two things. Firstly, natural history.

But secondly, the new and exciting medium of film.

Smith wanted to show ordinary people the wonders of the natural world.

He used complex film techniques never previously seen.

Oh, very good. Very good.

And his work would inspire the filmmakers

and naturalists who followed in his wake.

I saw those films and I was knocked out by them.

It was the first time we ever saw anything remotely like that.

My name is Charlie Hamilton James.

Oh, wow.

And I'm a professional wildlife photographer and cameraman.

I want to recreate Smith's insect classic, The Acrobatic Fly.

And I want to do it, if I can, using only original equipment

and techniques.

-CRACK!

-Oh!

HE LAUGHS

To learn how, I'll need to travel back to the very birth of cinema.

-You've got a picture.

-An image.

While I'm there,

I hope to piece together the forgotten story of Percy Smith,

a genius of natural history film.

Epping Forest, just a few miles from the heart of London.

It was here, in the closing years of the 19th century,

that Percy Smith fell in love with nature.

Percy especially liked spiders.

He was completely in awe of their incredible complexity

and their physiology.

And as a young man, he even improvised his own microscope

so that he could study their intricate bodies in detail.

So the obvious next step was to photograph them.

These images were used to illustrate lectures Percy gave

to London's Quekett Microscopical Club.

But he didn't just like spiders.

Still in his early 20s, Smith began editing the club journal,

filling its pages with a variety of surreal photographs.

Not least this striking image of a blowfly sucking honey

from the tip of a needle.

BUZZING

Well, Tim, I'll be honest, they're not my favourite animal,

but there's no denying they are pretty fascinating, aren't they?

They are gruesome, I'll give you that.

But I think maybe the reason why they are so gruesome is

because they are so different to us.

The scientific name of these flies is one of my favourite Latin names,

-which is Calliphora vomitoria.

-That is brilliant, isn't it?

And it's called this because the fly literally vomits up juices

in order to dissolve the food it's got to feed on.

-And that's why I don't like them.

-THEY LAUGH

That's why I DO like them!

Do you think Percy saw beauty in that incredible physiology

-and evolution?

-Definitely.

I think Percy was that classic example of an enthusiastic amateur,

and that's not saying that to put down Percy for being an amateur.

Some of the best scientists over the past few hundred years have been

amateurs. Like Charles Darwin, for example - he was an amateur.

So Percy wasn't doing this because it was his job.

He had a boring job during the day, an office job,

and he came home at night and he used to look into these things,

and that's because he was fascinated. That's what drove him.

Since leaving school at 14, Percy had in fact been employed

as a junior clerk at the Board of Education.

He hated it.

He once tied a bluebottle to a length of string,

tethered it to his desk and kept it as a pet.

Smith, though, wasn't just fascinated by insects.

The British film Institute

today preserves 275,000 films.

Among them are some of the 200 releases Smith made over 37 years.

Smith is usually credited as cameraman, and sometimes director.

Though in this early silent film,

he makes a rare appearance in front of the camera.

A friend of mine was in the basement of the BFI watching some films

and he spotted a film which was about animals and wildlife.

So I took a look at it and there he was.

Percy Smith.

We think the film is about 1912, it's difficult to say

because there's no records of it, which is why

we never knew about it before, so it's a very recent discovery.

There's a bit where he's got white rats crawling all over him

and in fact one bites him on the neck, which is worth watching for.

The delightful eccentricity is the thing that comes across.

It's an unusual personality type.

My favourite bit is a very touching bit where he has a baby chimp

on one side of him

and an orang-utan on the other, which has quite a soulful face.

There's an incredible continuity between the films

and the filmmaking style that began with Percy Smith,

all the way through early television to the big productions of today.

So he's like Attenborough.

Mainly he's an enthusiast and his job is to enthuse people

about this subject and, as a filmmaker,

with that job, there was none finer.

Plagued by repeated failure,

Percy's Acrobatic Fly took many weeks to shoot.

We tape this on here, a nice even white background.

'Before attempting to film my own fly, I want to photograph one.'

This is the world's smallest studio we're making.

'I hope to recreate Smith's own 1907 bluebottle still.'

OK, there's our pinhead.

So we've only got a very fine line where the fly will be in focus.

Is it a matter of millimetres at either side?

-I would have said it's in tenths of millimetres.

-Really?

-Yeah.

-So we have to be on the dot.

-Absolutely.

I could probably just cope with your hand moving the tiniest amount,

but even walking on the floor here it goes in and out of focus.

Really?

Do you think we can handle this fly without hurting it?

-Because, bizarrely or not, I don't actually want to hurt the fly.

-No.

The good thing about working with insects is, if you do this

with a hamster, we'd be worried about bruising it or damaging it.

But because with flies their skeleton is on the outside,

we can handle it. As long as we're careful,

we know we're not going to hurt it in any way, so I can pinch it

by the wings and we can let it go at the end, and it'll fly away.

Oh!

-OK, let's see if he's hungry.

-Here we go.

Come on, come on. It's so close, don't get your foot in the way.

He's really got his tongue out, this guy.

(Come on, come on.)

-Can you see it?

-Yes.

-It's trying...

-He's chasing it. Will we have a look?

-Yep.

It's pin sharp, so we can see all the detail in it,

but it's not Percy's shot, is it? The tongue isn't touching the honey.

There are so many that are almost there but just not quite.

Let's try one more.

-Here we go.

-Got his tongue out, ready.

OK...

Come on.

-That's him.

-This is the one.

I reckon I've got it.

Wow, look at these.

-Oh, that's it.

-Look at that.

THEY LAUGH

That's sensational.

We haven't got the full extension on the tongue going along

to the honey, but it doesn't matter cos he's still got the full...

You can see exactly what is going on, can't you?

It's not far off, is it?

It's amazing, all these tiny little hairs and all the detail in it.

Don't you think it's beautiful when you look close up?

It's even got the kind of gingery beard on the bottom.

You don't think of a bluebottle as having a ginger beard, really!

Even with the latest equipment, getting the shot was hard.

But getting it over 100 years ago,

that would have been something really impressive.

In May 1908, Smith's fly photo found its way to the London headquarters

of entrepreneur Charles Urban.

Urban, a film industry pioneer, had been in the business

since the 1890s.

His company, Kineto, sold state-of-the-art film

processing and cinema projection equipment, and it wasn't cheap.

The patented Urban DX camera would have cost Percy

and entire year's salary.

But Kineto had other business, too.

Urban didn't just want to make film equipment. He wanted to make films.

Charles Urban really was one of the world's first movie producers,

a kind of media mogul, if you like.

And, by the turn of the 20th century,

he was already producing hundreds of films a year.

And these were short films, some of them two or three minutes long.

But the public had a real hunger for them.

They had a real hunger for factual documentary,

which was really then in its infancy.

The Edwardians were fascinated by film.

But Urban himself was no populist.

He believed the new medium was being wasted

on trivial mass entertainment.

With his ambitious new Science Series,

he wanted to commission films which illuminated and educated.

But to do that, he needed the talent to make them.

When he met Percy Smith in 1908, he realised

he had the perfect person to shoot the Urban Science Series.

On the strength of Smith's bluebottle photograph,

Urban now gave him a job and new equipment.

At 28, Percy was now a professional wildlife cameraman.

Right here at the back of the camera we've got a little hatch,

which you open,

-and through there, you can actually look at the back of the film.

-Wow.

-Focus up and frame up your image.

-Mm-hm.

And then of course you retract the tube,

close that and you're ready to go.

To shoot my own Acrobatic Fly, I'm going to need one of these.

If we look inside the camera...

..you'll see the dots of the mechanism,

-the main power drive, if you like.

-That's beautiful.

-Beautifully engineered.

-It is, isn't it?

-Is this all the original workings?

-This is all original.

-It looks immaculate.

-It's beautiful. They're all handmade, essentially.

This side is actually geared so that you actually do...

One turn does eight frames,

so if you're filming at normal speed, you do two turns a second.

Lovely.

And effortless as well.

Amazing considering it's over 100 years old.

And let's have a look at the front.

-Here...

-Let's have a look.

-This is the film gate, where the film is exposed.

-Mm-hm.

Here, you can see the shutter, and it's a circular shutter.

That's doing that one frame at a time.

'The camera's engineered to deliver intermittent motion,

'which means it doesn't just run the film continuously past the shutter,

'it actually stops it 16 times a second,

'allowing one frame to be exposed before moving onto the next.'

So, I think having seen that,

let's have a look at the inside of the camera on this side.

The film is actually laced through the camera across these

sprocket rollers here, through the gate,

back through these sprocket rollers and into the take-up magazine.

-And these bits come out?

-They come out.

They just pull out.

So you would take that out and go into a darkroom or a changing bag,

put the film in, then you could just...the rest of it in daylight?

Yeah.

Unfortunately, I can't use this camera to shoot my film.

I'll need to get one somewhere else.

Smith's original fly film premiered during a lecture

he gave to the Royal Photographic Society.

The screening drew polite applause from an audience of academics.

What happened next stunned everyone.

Just going through Percy's archive

and all his scrapbooks.

It makes you realise just how he had affected the press.

He was all over it.

There's even here, amazingly, political cartoons based on

The Acrobatic Fly,

which means he really had infiltrated the national psyche.

The papers have really majored on an image of a fly

nursing a miniature doll.

Apparently the original film of the dressed-up nurse fly

doesn't exist any more, which is a shame because I would really love

to see a fly dressed up as a nurse, looking after a miniature doll.

Going through these articles, I can start to find out more

about how Percy was operating and some of his processes.

And particularly, when it comes to The Acrobatic Fly,

I've been trying to work out how he kept the flies where they were.

And here he's given an interview to the Daily Mail,

13th of November 1908, and there's a little clue here.

"To get a fly to sit on a chair, its wings have to be slightly gummed

"to the back to give it the necessary support."

So, basically, he's gluing them at the back into position.

Initially, Percy struggled with all the attention.

At his home in Islington, in those days, a poor,

working-class district of London, he was besieged by journalists.

Some accused him of faking the film

and demanded to know how it had really been done.

The episode triggered a minor nervous breakdown.

Percy was a solitary man, more at home with animals than people.

By now, the house was becoming a bit of a menagerie.

It had all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures living in it.

Insects, spiders, a freshwater crab,

a toad, a salamander, a ferret.

Apparently he even had a little owl living here.

And, of course, he hadn't forgotten spiders either.

In awe of their ability to weave webs, Percy now put one on film.

Or at least a model of one, which he made himself.

It's one of Britain's earliest natural history animation sequences.

Interestingly, it wasn't animal life that would deliver Percy

his next box office hit.

It was botanical life.

Filming flies had delivered Percy his first technical breakthrough.

Now he moved onto a second discipline.

So popular was his film that some audiences

apparently refused to leave

before it was rewound and played for a second time.

This film really is the birth of time-lapse photography

in filmmaking as much as it's the birth of a flower.

Today, we call this time-lapse photography

but back then, Percy called it speed magnification.

When this film came out,

cinemas weren't allowed to open on the Sabbath, on a Sunday.

But one newspaper called for that ban to be lifted,

claiming that it was so incredible,

watching it was a religious experience.

MUSIC: Rejoice In The Lamb

Today, time-lapse sequences on television continue

a tradition started by Smith.

In the modern era, no-one has witnessed the advance of these

filming techniques more than Sir David Attenborough.

That must be the, you know, the plant time-lapse rig...

Yeah, with those, the louvres are shut

so that you get the equal exposure, day and night.

God, he must have been a clever bloke, mustn't he?

'How much did Percy Smith inspire David Attenborough?'

-Reflex.

-Yeah, yeah.

-Shall we go have a look?

-Yeah.

'To find out,

'we're first going to look at some of Attenborough's own work.'

In 1995, Attenborough delivered a landmark series.

The Private Life of Plants.

'These are the germinating seeds of dodder.

'They have to find their host within a few days or they will die.'

'Computer-controlled time-lapse photography was used

'to mesmerising effect.'

It's like a leech, isn't it? A speeded-up leech.

'The dodder sucks the nettle's sap, which then fuels its growth

'and its hunt for another victim.'

'Eventually, the whole bed of nettles is overwhelmed

'by writhing dodder stems.'

Now it's computer-controlled there.

It is an astonishing shot, though, isn't it?

Really creepy.

Astonishing it may be,

but Attenborough wasn't the first to film the dodder.

65 years earlier, Smith had made his own version.

Ah, The Strangler! Horror lettering.

-THEY CHUCKLE

-Brilliant.

Some plants are born criminals.

For examples, the young dodder comes out of the seed case

all ready for a life of crime.

It's a fantastic voice-over.

HE CHUCKLES

-But technically, it doesn't really get any better, does it?

-No.

Now, there's a track-up over in time-lapse.

-Absolutely.

-He must've been moving the camera in-between each frame.

-And smoothly.

-Absolutely. I mean...

-This is all one shot, isn't it?

-Yes.

I'm sure that when I put out the proposal to do Private Life of Plants,

I had Percy's films in the back of my mind. And I did have the wit to say,

"Look, let's get this clear, time-lapse is not an invention of

"the 1990s or the 1980s."

But I'll tell you something, looking at that...

we did make a false claim for Private Life of Plants.

I said that we had never been able to move a camera

during a time-lapse sequence.

And it was only by having computers

and servomotors that would enable us to do that. But there it was.

And he was doing that, he moved the camera during time-lapse up the stem

of dodder, and he must have shifted it between each frame, mustn't he?

Amazing shot.

The light is stable the whole time as well.

I'll bet you it was over a week.

Today, time-lapse is achieved using an arsenal of high-powered

digital equipment.

But in the '30s - in fact, even before - Percy achieved

similar effects using mercury switches, bits of string

and old alarm clocks.

The dodder is a very quick-moving plant

and although we have hurried up its action a little in the film,

you will get some idea of the rate at which it really moves by...

Oh, very good. Very good.

..especially the second hand.

I can't think of any other films which dealt with the natural world

in as straightforward way as he did.

But I also know that I saw those films in the '30s in the cinema,

the shorts which accompanied the main feature film.

And I was knocked out by them.

Just looking at a bean

germinating was riveting.

I mean, it was the first time you ever saw anything remotely like that.

So yes, he was, it seemed, in my life, he was a great pioneer.

The film world has never seen such an out-and-out evil doer,

such a super strangler as the dodder.

That's a beautiful shot. It's a beautiful shot.

In the years up to the First World War,

Smith averaged one short film a month.

Audiences were still fascinated by insects doing tricks.

Now, though, Percy added gruesome scenes

of creatures being eaten alive.

But Smith didn't just want to film insects.

He experimented with aquatic life,

shooting, first, alligators and octopi in fish tanks,

and then, after building one of the first ever underwater filming chambers,

capturing stunning sequences in the wild.

Getting an original working camera to shoot my own Edwardian film

has so far proved a challenge.

Finally, though, I have one.

Trying to turn this at one speed, you know, while turning that slowly...

Could you have someone else to do that for you?

Well, I suppose you could have, but I have got a shot on film

of somebody operating one of these, and he is actually doing that.

This one's going round like that,

and that one's going slowly...

I don't know how he does it.

There's things to do, first of all, to make sure the camera works.

I'm really looking forward to doing that.

That lens, as lovely as it is, to me, it doesn't look like it's

going to do the job of getting us a decent close-up.

We need something that will give us

a much bigger magnification of a tiny fly.

We're going to have to...

I think that will be the problem, yes.

We may have to bring the lens out so that we can get down to a smaller...

-Make a macro lens.

-I think so. Yes, that's what we've got to do.

-That's what Percy would have to have done, wouldn't he?

-I think he would have done, yes.

'Getting the camera to work is, however, only the half of it.

'What I still don't know is just how Percy trained his flies.

'There are more clues in this old film textbook.'

And here is Percy Smith himself, filming.

'It was first published in 1912.'

Look at this bit - "Trickery is what they called it,

"trickery was the verdict when the film was first seen

"and it was hard to make people believe that the picture was genuine".

Well, people didn't understand how moving pictures got there,

I don't think, in the first place. It was still a great mystery.

It's interesting reading this,

because it explains how Percy got the fly to sit in the chair.

It says, "In this instance,

"the fly was secured by a thin

"strand of silk passed around its body".

Interesting, I've read in the old Daily Mail cuttings

-that he used gum and glued the fly.

-Really?

So I wonder whether it was either the press making things up,

or whether Percy was a bit reluctant to give out all his secrets.

Yes, or perhaps they did glue it down, I don't know.

But how would they actually get a thin strand of silk round the fly?

I suppose they'd have to subdue it in someway or other, so that

the fly was manageable before you could get it into position to film.

I think it's far more likely they glued it.

They glued it, gosh. Poor fly.

I'm starting to learn more about how Smith filmed his subjects.

But how did he light them?

Hello?

'In 1908, Percy wouldn't have had electricity at home.

'So what were his other options?'

I think we can show a few different bits and pieces

of the equipment and of the experiments that he would have

undertaken in trying to find that perfect light source.

So, the hotter the flame...

..the brighter it will glow.

'Smith could have used domestic gas light, which he did have.

'Trouble is, it doesn't burn brightly enough for film.

'So his next option was limelight.'

Wow.

I never knew you could do that with chalk.

'Burning limestone produces white hot light... But heating it, costs.

'Calcium carbide, on the other hand...'

And we've got some here. It looks a bit like gravel.

'..needs only water, where it reacts to produce flammable acetylene gas.'

-See, now, it's fizzing away.

-Whoa!

It's produced a little bit of a bang and we haven't even contained it.

Will it do it again?

'In a beaker, the gas just pops...'

-FAINT POP

-I mean, that was bright, then. As bright as a single flash.

'..but, ignite it under pressure...'

It's going to start fizzing immediately.

'..and you get a continuous acetylene jet.'

It's producing a lot of acetylene already.

Wow...

POPPING

Now, that is bright.

That's perfectly...

I mean, you can see how we've concentrated the flame

and we've produced a nice, bright light.

'To turn the jet into a light, Percy would next have needed

'a large supply of DIY acetylene.'

It's a vegetable steamer!

What we've got here is something very simple to generate our acetylene.

So this kind of absurdly dangerous experiment is what Percy

-would have routinely been doing just to create some light?

-Absolutely.

'The gas is fed into a purpose built four-point burner.'

That's so bright, so much brighter than it what we've done so far,

and I can't actually look at that now.

And now we have four of them in a row.

Just on its own, that's like having a light bulb.

'Finally, the burner is slotted into a lamp box with lenses

'and reflectors to focus the light.'

-And out at the far end, we can see we've got...

-There it is, yeah.

-Just like a light bulb.

-Absolutely.

It's ludicrously basic, but very ingenious at the same time.

I think he would have needed several of them,

because what he was using to film with back then, the lenses

and the actual film stock, would have required a lot of light.

'Percy's home-made acetylene jets were cheap,

'but there was a downside.'

It's not without its hazards.

'The final test shows what might have happened

'if Percy had had a gas leak at home.'

-Right.

-I stand back here, do I?

If you could. And then just... light the balloon, if you can.

-So, anywhere?

-Yes. It helps if you open your mouth when you do it.

-Why?

It just does.

Equalises the pressure through the station tube in your head.

-BANG

-Oh!

CHARLIE LAUGHS

Loud enough for you?

CHARLIE CONTINUES TO LAUGH

That was about 100 times louder and brighter than I expected.

Now, imagine the entire house filled with that.

You've got to hand it to the guy to work with a material that is

so dangerous and still produce what he did. It's pretty impressive.

So how many acetylene lights would you like for your fly sheet? CHARLIE LAUGHS

I'm going to go for none!

I think that's a step too far.

'Unfortunately, this kind of gas is just too dangerous.

'Percy had to use it, he had no choice.

'But for my shoot, I'm going to cop out and use modern light instead.'

'If you suddenly think you would like to have an aquarium,

'the cheapest way to get one is to fill a glass with water

'and then put in a wisp of hay.

'In a few days, if you look through a microscope,

'you will find your aquarium in full swing.'

The First World War, and later, a break with Charles Urban,

almost put the brakes on Smith's career.

But by the '20s, he was off again.

By now, London had begun to explode outwards...

..the three-bedroom semi replicating itself like one of the tiny

organisms Percy was now filming.

'They only move if compelled to by overcrowding.'

Smith had joined the exodus early on,

abandoning Islington for fashionable Southgate.

He would live and work at the new house for the rest of his life.

Strange coming here, really, because everything's changed.

The house has gone...

..we've got small garages,

an estate, probably built 20 or 30 years ago...

As soon as he moved in,

Percy set about converting the house into a series of tiny film sets.

With fresh backers and a new series in production,

Secrets Of Nature, he worked night and day,

delivering over two dozen cinema shorts during the rest of the '20s.

Audiences still enjoyed the time-lapse works,

but Smith was now working on a variety of other techniques.

Anticipating today's modern graphics, his animation

grew more elaborate.

As ever, he did everything himself, all from a complex

Heath Robinson rig he'd built in the front room.

'And now, here comes that old screen favourite,

'Bertie The Bee.'

The handmade models kept coming, too,

including a bee improvised from an old scarf

that once belonged to his wife.

'Here comes Bertie again.

'We simply can't keep him out of Secrets Of Nature.

'He gets a brushful of pollen on the face.'

But it was through the end of a microscope that Percy would

produce his most technically brilliant work.

Smith delighted in revealing tiny worlds from everyday life,

such as bacteria multiplying from a piece of rotten cheese.

And then his obsession kind of grew one step further,

because he became obsessed with fungal spores and mould.

He basically created an environment to grow them in,

and the environment was his house.

He dripped water down the walls

and he created a moist atmosphere in that house, which was perfect

for growing moulds and funguses, until eventually they took over.

The house couldn't take it.

In fact, the walls literally began to crumble,

forcing Smith and his long-suffering wife Kate to take on

a second home round the corner.

Percy, though, carried on regardless.

More at home with single cells than human beings,

his projects were now taking up to three years to make.

'Funny little things like tiny toadstools are sometimes

'to be found on dead wood or on decaying leaves.

'These little growths are called myxies.'

This film, Magic Myxies, I think, is one of the loveliest of the films.

"Myxies" is the name that they gave to myxomycetes,

which is the organism which produces slime mould, basically.

Magic Myxies is a life-cycle film.

You start at one stage in the cycle and you go through all the different

stages of the myxies' life, and you come back to where you started.

This wonderful sequence is so clever.

You see the myxy heading towards a piece of arsenic.

I love this sequence.

'When, for an experiment,

'a drop of arsenic was put in front of a myxy, it failed to

'detect the poison, flowed right over it,

'and was obviously taken very ill.'

Wonderful cinematic technique, lovely sequence.

'Suddenly, the myxy draws in its tail

'and changes into quite a different form.'

This whole sequence, this is Percy doing animation.

He can't actually get this degree of magnification with his microscope,

so he does it by animating.

It looks, to me, as though he is actually pushing round

a pool of some liquid and he's pretending this is the myxy.

It looks gorgeous, and actually,

this film is entirely at home in avant-garde circles.

Some of Percy's other films are shown at a thing called the London Film Society,

which is an institution in the late '20s.

All the intellectuals go there.

HG Wells is going to see these films.

This is the place where Battleship Potemkin, for example,

is first shown.

In the same programme,

it's very natural that you show one of Percy Smith's films.

With preparations complete, it's time to shoot The Acrobatic Fly II.

'For my studio,

'I've taken over the upstairs room at a film processing lab.

'We have just one day to get it right.

'As expected, David has had to have the lens extended

'so it can focus in tight on the fly.

'It is, though, the only modification we've made.'

-The problem we'll have today is to keep the fly in position.

-Yeah.

And Percy Smith said that he tied the flies down

with a fine band of silk.

I've tried this, and either it's impossible

and Percy Smith was lying, or he's a much better fly wrangler than I am!

So we'll just use some glue.

I've devised a glue that is safe to use on insects.

It's not going to harm them.

We'll stick a dot of glue to the back of the fly

and then afterwards, we'll be able to release it.

I've got to do this.

I can't feel that I done the job properly unless I have.

-So that pulls down, does it?

-Yes.

-Same loop size as the top?

Yes, that's right, yes, that's about right.

Just turn the handle to make sure it's taking up...

Just to make sure it's going OK.

That's it.

-That's all working all right.

-Looks smooth, doesn't it?

-Yes.

Right, shut the door.

We're now ready to film a fly.

OK.

'For our first shot, we want the fly on its back.'

-OK.

-Right, it's all up to you, now.

Come on.

Just wasting film, here.

-He must have spent a long time doing this.

-Yeah.

'An hour into the shoot, and we're struggling.'

Let's give it something else.

-We'll try the dumbbell.

-Yeah, give it a dumbbell.

Stop. Look, he's just cleaning his arms.

'Finally, something.

'But we still have attempted Percy's classic chair shot.'

Look at that, look at that. I'm going to start filming.

-So, crank it up...

-Faster, faster...

Just keep going.

Trying to get the rhythm right.

-Lovely.

-That's it.

-Got it, didn't we?

-That's the one.

'After a couple of hours, the film runs out.

'We definitely have something in the can...

'Or, should I say, "mahogany box"?

'But only when the film is processed, will we know WHAT.'

The good thing about this technique is that as soon as we're done

with the fly, we can just gently peel it off...

..and the glue comes off, and it's completely unharmed.

The fly is exactly as it was before.

'As a jumper, the frog takes a lot of beating, as slow motion shows.'

The 1930s began well for Smith.

There was a book deal, a screening attended by the Prime Minister

and a succession of journalists visiting the Southgate house

to interview and lionise him.

And, of course, the films kept coming, too.

'When the springtime comes, then the newt wakes up, too,

'and feels a call to life and romance.'

This film is called Romance In A Pond,

and it's a wonderful depiction of what happens when newts have sex.

'This lady is certainly leaving no worm unswallowed

'in order to achieve sex appeal.

'Now the gentleman newts leave the land and take the plunge.'

Ah, right. Here he comes...

I love the way it's couched in terms of a romance,

so we see the male newts going into the water,

seducing the lady newts with their lovely, spotty suits.

'No wonder this lady is transfixed by the gentleman's charms.'

They're so cute.

'And he appears equally struck by hers.'

There's going to be some romance, I can tell.

They are quite pretty, the male newts.

'For a brief time, the pond is the honeymoon home of the newts.'

Hm...

So, yeah, that was quickly done.

We don't see much of exactly what went on.

'But alas, in a newt world, marriage is brief, and divorce certain.'

It's all a bit silly,

but I think Percy said something about "administering

"the powder of education within the jam of entertainment".

'Meanwhile, down in the pond can be found

'reminders of the romance of the newts.'

One commentator said,

"The spoken commentary is literally exasperating and revolting."

But really, you know, this was entertainment for the masses,

and I think the commentaries are lovely.

I find them charming

and I'm sure that audiences of the time would have done, too.

'And now for adventure.'

When Percy made Romance In A Pond in the 1930s,

35mm film was high-end technology.

Today, the lab processing MY rushes is only one of a handful

like it left in Britain.

Right, let's hope it's sharp.

Here we are, look.

-There's our neg. We've got a picture.

-Oh, there's an image, yeah.

There it is. There's the fly.

Wow...and it looks, from what I can see, I haven't got a magnifier,

but actually, just with my naked eye, it looks really sharp.

Yeah, it's all there, isn't it?

'Like everything Percy did,

'the editing process is very much a hands-on affair.'

Now, it may seem rather crude and rather slow,

but this was the only way of doing it.

'No computer, just a long strip of film, scissors and a bottle of glue.'

I can get it out, then.

My first cut.

-Apart from the ones I've done on computers!

-Not the same!

If I try and gently pull it... It's quite solid, isn't it?

There we are, we've got a join and it's in frame... Yeah, that's...

In fact, you can barely see the...

A good join, you won't be able to see.

Actually... That's falling apart, that one!

Just need a little bit more film cement, on that one, I think.

Maybe I'm not going to pursue a career as a film editor!

Although Percy produced stunning work in the '30s, towards

the end of the decade, cinema audiences began to tire of it.

In the old days, his work had easily held up against the competition.

Now, he was up against Hitchcock and Bogart, Fred Astaire and King Kong.

To add to his troubles,

Smith was increasingly suffering long bouts of illness.

So here he is... Frank Percy Smith...

..24th March 1945, aged 65 years,

Oh, quite young.

Rank or profession... Biological cinematographer, photographer.

Cause of death... Coal gas poisoning.

"Deceased did kill himself whilst the balance of his mind was disturbed".

He committed suicide.

'So lovely are the bells as they furl and unfurl...'

Percy's death, just a few weeks before the end of the war,

made front-page news in The Times.

In its obituary, the paper said his work was "strangely beautiful",

adding that Smith himself was a filmmaker in a class of his own.

'Once more, there is a struggle of growth and endeavour.'

To see my film for the first time, I have, of course,

opted for the big screen.

The Electric Palace opened in 1911,

which means Smith's films have almost certainly been shown here.

I know there's an image on here, but I don't know how good that image is.

So, as well as being very excited to stick it up on the projector

and watch it in the cinema, I'm also very nervous.

-HE CHUCKLES

-So exciting!

Oh, look, yeah.

I never thought I'd get this far into the process of actually

having a finished short film...

The Acrobatic Fly, Part II.

And that's... It's great.

I kind of wonder what Percy would think

if he were sitting next to me now.

He'd probably say...

"Yeah, good try, but go and do it again,

"because you didn't do it quite right".

Which is fair enough, isn't it?

After all, everybody knows the sequel's never quite as good...

as the original.

A surreal masterpiece from the father of natural history film.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd