Life on Camera Attenborough: 60 Years in the Wild

In a lifetime of natural history filmmaking

I've seen many odd animals, but few odder than these

proboscis monkeys in Borneo.

I first saw them 50 years ago.

ARCHIVE: 'Late one evening, we had a great stroke of luck.'

'For a troupe of the extraordinary long nosed proboscis monkey

'had come down to the river bank to feed.'

'When I started filming such creatures,

'it was quite easy to show viewers animals that hitherto had only

'been seen in the wild by intrepid explorers.'

'As the years passed, one way and another, we got better

'and better shots and in the process, I had some memorable encounters.'

Boo!

This is a very intelligent animal.

And top of the menu right now is salmon.

SNARLING

I think that was pretty clear!

I've been lucky enough to live through what might be

considered the golden age of natural history filmmaking.

Almost every year it seemed we found some new way of revealing

new things about the natural world.

'In the 1950s, much of the wildlife of the planet was still unfilmed, even unknown.

'And in the following 60 years,

'a succession of technical innovations enabled us to reveal more

'and more of the natural world in increasing detail.'

This is the first natural history film I ever saw - in 1934, when I was eight.

And I thought it was wonderful.

Ladies and gentlemen.

Let me put you out of your misery at once.

You're not going to see me for long, although I am inviting

you to come on this trip with me, you will only see me occasionally.

The man in the pith helmet is Cherry Kearton, one of the first

people to try and capture the lives of wild animals on film.

There are five million penguins on this island, which are called

the jackass penguins.

I'm always polite to animals,

and as I intend to stay with the penguins for several months,

I am naturally adopting my most friendly manner.

Kearton travelled around the world filming wild animals that

had never been filmed before.

His approach was hardly scientific,

but nonetheless he was very entertaining.

His sister, a typical flapper,

not content with being one of the fair sex, wants to join the air sex

But resigns herself to just a flip here, a flap there,

and a flop in between.

For all its obvious flaws, his films captured my childish imagination

and made me dream of travelling to far-off places to film wild animals.

And this is one of the very cameras Cherry Kearton used.

It's enclosed in a wooden box.

It was driven by hand and used 35mm film.

This distance across.

Within a few years, it was superseded by improved models like this one,

which had a metal box and it worked by clockwork

and it had a variety of lenses.

But it still used hefty 35mm film.

Happily however, there were smaller versions available.

A camera like this.

This used 16mm film which was only half the size

and it was powered by clockwork.

But unfortunately the BBC thought cameras like this were unprofessional.

And there was a huge row as to whether or not I could be allowed to take it.

But in the end I did, and it was with this I set off

to ramble around the jungles of the world looking for unfilmed animals.

My first natural history series, Zoo Quest,

recorded the progress of animal collecting expeditions

arranged with the London Zoo and brought to the screen,

places and animals that had never before been seen on television,

or in the cinema, come to that.

One targeted the largest lizard in the world which

lived on the small Indonesian island of Komodo.

Few people had heard of it and Indonesia no-one seemed sure where the island was.

Eventually, we set off with a fisherman who said that he did,

but after a couple of days at sea, I had my doubts.

I said to the captain, "You have been to Komodo before, haven't you?"

And he said, "Baloom."

And I didn't know what baloom meant.

So I had to go and find my Indonesian dictionary and looked it up

and it said, "Not yet."

So, it was clear he didn't know the way.

After a week at sea and having survived encounters with coral reefs

and whirlpools, we arrived at what I thought must be Komodo.

And I remember wading ashore across a coral lagoon

and finding a tiny little village and saying, "Excuse me, is this Komodo?"

HE CHUCKLES

And they, "Komodo". So it was OK.

The locals recommended we should use a dead goat as bait.

Once in the bush we began to build a trap using materials

gathered from nearby, as I recorded in my journal.

This was the dragon trap with a little bait in there.

When the dragon, if he went in the front end, trod on there,

it pulled it down which then pulled the ring down which released the rod,

which then pulled down, because of the lump of rock on the bottom.

So, clunk, down it would go.

And now, all we had to do was to wait.

There was a rustle in the bush and there was the dragon.

Our first sight of this magnificent monster.

To my surprise, we were looking at the trap and I heard a noise behind me.

I turned round and there was the dragon.

That was taken at that particular moment.

Looking at me straight in the eye from only about a couple of yards away.

We looked at each other and I thought, at least I might take your photograph.

So that was the photograph I took of him.

Then, he rather wearily heaved himself up and strolled round us

and went down into the dry riverbed where we'd made the trap.

And down came the door.

Hastily we piled boulders on the door so he couldn't lift it up.

We'd got him.

Those early films seem pretty ordinarily these days,

but they were nonetheless popular

because what ever we showed was new to most of our viewers.

So, in the 1950s we were taking cameras like this all over the world.

And then, an Austrian biologist and filmmaker decided to try

and take it under water.

His name was Hans Hass,

and he developed his own special housing to do that.

Hans and his wife Lotte

were the first to bring the wonders of life under the sea to television.

And their programs were all the more sensational

because few people at that time had scuba dived.

Take care, down there are sharks.

We are right on the reef's edge.

In the '50s, sharks had a terrible reputation.

They were the killers of the sea.

Anybody in water alongside a shark was clearly courting certain death.

Here were Hans and Lotte swimming alongside them.

The nation was astounded.

The sequence certainly had shock value, but perhaps it was also

the first step in changing our perceptions of sharks.

And like all television, it was still shown in black and white.

So, during the Zoo Quest series I had to describe an animal's colour in words.

This one was among the most brilliantly coloured of all

chameleons in the world.

His eyeballs are bright, rust-red and his body and legs striped

and blotched with a vivid green.

But, television was changing fast.

In the 1960s, the BBC was given a second television network

operating on a higher technical standard with the specific

job of introducing colour television.

And in 1965, I was put in charge of it with an office

here in the Television Centre in London.

To demonstrate colour on television could be both accurate and not garish,

I commissioned a series about the history of art.

It was called Civilisation.

I'm standing in the Sistine Chapel

and above my head is one of the greatest works of man,

Michelangelo's ceiling.

It was presented by Kenneth Clarke and became a great success.

So we followed it with other series on a similar scale about science,

economics and the history of America.

But I knew the most dazzlingly colourful series would be one about wildlife.

After eight years in administration,

I decided I wanted to go back to making programs.

And I put up a suggestion we should make 13 one-hour programmes

in colour tracing the whole history of life on Earth.

Thanks to the development of jet air travel,

we were able to film in 30 countries around the globe.

And as I traced the history of life on the planet, I could appear

to move from one continent to another in the space of a single sequence.

The South American rainforests are the richest

and varied assemblage of life in the world.

These limestones in Morocco...

Macaques live in many parts of Japan.

WHINING

Life On Earth was shown in 100 different countries

and seen by perhaps as many as 500 million people.

Natural history television was now a global phenomenon,

revealing our wonderful world in colour to all.

During the series, we made full use of both colour

and scuba gear to help show the underwater world as never before.

I even tried to follow Hans Hass' lead exploring the underwater world.

One of the problems with underwater films was you cannot talk underwater.

Most of the time if you have a breathing apparatus on your back,

you have something in your mouth.

But Alistair, one of my producer colleagues, was very keen we should

try and introduce the presenter talking to camera underwater.

There was a wonderful new invention called the bubble helmet and this is it.

You can put a microphone in one side of it.

So, we went down to the swimming pool in the hotel where we were staying

and this was screwed on my head.

It took a long time to screw it down tight to make it watertight.

I put it on like this.

I waded it into the water and I hadn't gone more than a foot underwater,

When suddenly, water started bubbling in, very alarming.

It was rising around you and I was going to drown.

How long would it take to get this off?

So I came out in a hurry. There was a fault, I said.

"Nonsense," said Alistair, "give it to me." He put it on his shoulders.

And I, with some pleasure screwed it down quite tight

and he waded into the pool.

And he came out even quicker than me with water

and he was gesticulating to get it off.

And I finally took it off and he said, "There's a fault."

I said, "Yes, there is".

So I happily left the helmet behind and reverted to my old mask

and scuba gear when it came to my next underwater assignment -

to reveal the extraordinary social behaviour and intelligence of dolphins.

They are full of curiosity,

they play with odd things they find, such as twigs,

and swimming among them leaves you in no doubt

that they are highly intelligent.

CONSTANT CLICKS AND SQUEAKS

They will even mimic you as you spin or hang in the water.

Until the 1980s, you could only shoot 10 minutes of film under water

before you had to come back to the surface,

open the underwater housing, take out the camera,

put in a new roll of film.

But then video cameras solved that problem.

Videotapes ran for 30 minutes.

And now, at last, we had the chance

of properly recording animal behaviour underwater.

In addition, video cameras were far more sensitive,

so we could record at much lower light levels,

making artificial lights unnecessary.

It was a huge breakthrough for underwater filming,

and crucial to the success of The Blue Planet series.

Now it was possible to record for the first time marlin hunting.

The seas and oceans were full of animals

whose extraordinary behaviour, up till now, no one had ever seen.

And the shots just got better and better.

Cameramen could now stay underwater long enough

to capture every moment of the action,

and be in the right place at the right time

for the most dramatic events.

So now we can capture previously unseen animal behaviour

throughout the seas of the world.

On land it had, until now, been impossible to film animals

behaving naturally at night, when most mammals are active.

All we could do was shine a spotlight on them

and film them as they ran away.

And it was the same problem wherever animals lived in darkness.

Caves are fascinating places, but difficult places to work in.

When I first came here to this one in Gomantong in Borneo back in 1972,

we had to bring a lot of lights with us

in order to film the many millions of birds and bats

that live in here.

And the droppings of all those creatures

make the cave wreak of ammonia.

HE INHALES

The smell brings it all back to me.

When I was here 40 years ago,

the director said, "There's a pile of droppings

at the far end of the cave

that goes right up to the roof."

"Why don't you climb up to the top?"

And when I got to the top he shouted, "Say something!"

So I tried.

And...what it is is...these bats... packed tight on the roof here.

They're flying now all around my head.

This cave, this particular part of it,

Oohh! ..makes... (COUGHS)

This ammonia is really quite, quite choking.

..makes a very perfect place for a home.

HIGH-PITCHED CHATTERING

One of the really astounding things is that this immense number of bats

flying round here in a panic -

not one is colliding with the other.

Nor, indeed, am I in any danger whatsoever of being hit by them.

And then the director said, "Cut!", the camera stopped,

the lights went out,

and a bat flew straight in my face.

So perhaps their much praised echo location

is not quite as perfect as people say.

The film cameras we used then needed normal white light, like these.

But the problem with that is that they disturb animals

accustomed to living in the dark.

But then the security industry developed a new type of camera

like this one, which uses infrared light and doesn't need these lights,

but nonetheless can see in the dark, as you can see -

I turn off one, I turn off the other...

..and now, even though it's pitch dark, you can see me.

Most animals, like us, can't see infrared.

And that meant that with these cameras,

we could now watch them behave perfectly normally in the dark.

And that revealed some extraordinary behaviour.

And also led to one or two pretty uncomfortable moments.

Lions are mostly active at night,

and seldom roar during the day.

We tried to persuade them to do so with the help of scientists,

by playing back the roar of a strange lion to a resident pride.

LION ROARS

ROARS MORE LOUDLY

ROARS

Even that didn't work.

But 12 years later, I set off in an open-sided Land Rover with

the latest infrared technology to try again.

As usual, they were sleeping.

I would have to wait for darkness.

INSECTS CHIRP

GROWL/ROAR

We drive up.

I go on one side, the camera goes on the other.

And the lion starts roaring.

But the problem is, I can't see where it is.

I can't even see where the camera is.

"Cue", says the producer.

So I start trying to say my piece.

Trying not to be too frightened of this lion

which is somewhere in the blackness, and, as far as I can make out,

within a couple of yards of me and no side on the Land Rover.

And I then had to do my piece to camera looking around,

seeing where on earth the camera was.

And now in the darkness there are a number of them roaring...

just around here.

There are two, I know, within three or four yards of where I am,

and a third, perhaps 20 yards over there.

Though it's difficult to tell because it's pitch black.

REPEATED SHORT ROARS

Those are not aggressive roars, they are communication roars,

but they are quite enough to chill the blood

in the blackness of the night.

SHORT ROARS CONTINUE

A few years later, similar technology made it possible to film

one of the most extraordinary hunting sequences ever recorded,

using whole batteries of infrared lights mounted on vehicles.

ELEPHANT TRUMPETS

A solitary lion stands no chance,

but the whole pride is here.

There are 30 of them,

and they are specialist elephant hunters.

THUNDERCLAPS

This remarkable behaviour could not have been filmed in any other way,

and it proved conclusively what many others had doubted -

that a big pride of lions can indeed bring down and kill

an animal as big as an elephant.

Other cameras were developed that worked simply by concentrating

what little light comes from the stars and moon.

And we used such a starlight camera to record an encounter I had

with a wonderful New Zealand nocturnal bird,

the kiwi.

We heard of a place where kiwis came out of the bush

and walked along the beach

looking for sandhoppers.

Now they find their way by smell,

so I thought, how can I conceal myself?

So I lay on the tideline where all the rotting seaweed was lying.

And I just lay on it.

And this little...enchanting little creature came slowly along,

probing its beak into the sand.

Phwff! Blowing out the sand. Coming closer. Phwff!

'Probing sand with your nostrils is all very well,

'but it does clog them up.

'So you need to blow them clear every now and then.'

'It's sense of smell is so acute,

'it can pick out the largest juiciest hoppers deep in the sand

'without even seeing them.'

Our starlight camera can see much better than I can.

'I need a torch to see this extraordinary creature properly.

'But he doesn't seem to mind.'

OCEAN CRASHES NEARBY

He comes right up to me because his eyes are very small.

Poor eyesight is putting it mildly.

But he can smell, but he didn't.

Because the seaweed was even stronger smelling than me.

There are other ways of filming in the dark -

by using thermal cameras like this one.

Up above me there are a lot of bats.

And the camera shows them as different colours.

The yellow lights here are bats that have just flown in

and are still warm from their exertion.

as well as revealing where animals are,

the thermal cameras can also reveal something of the condition they are in.

For example, my face now, because I'm rather hot,

is likely to be an orange colour.

Where I am cooler it will be red, and this probably, is verging on blue.

But if I take a bottle of cold water, that's likely to be black.

Ahhh! Very good, too.

Thermal cameras also proved useful in the Galapagos,

to demonstrate some

of the remarkable physiological adaptations of reptiles.

Once they are thoroughly warmed up,

marine iguanas can maintain their body temperature

just about as constantly as I can.

And what's more, at about the same level,

or indeed, slightly higher - around 37 degrees centigrade.

But when they go into the cold sea to feed on submerged seaweed,

their temperature falls very rapidly.

A recently emerged iguana is black. It's chilled to the bone.

Now they need heat in order to be able to digest that meal of seaweed,

and they get that by spread-eagling themselves

on these black, hot, sun-baked rocks.

So, thermal cameras reveal just how skilled

reptiles are at harnessing the power of the sun.

One of the things we discovered when starting work

on the Trials of Life

was a new lens which enabled you to have an object close to the camera -

a small little creature, perhaps -

and yet have all the distance to the far horizon in complete focus.

So I would be able to walk up from the distance to something close to camera,

all the time being in focus.

It's not always easy to decide in these partnerships,

which is exploiting which.

The balance of advantage is often very delicate.

Take for example these ants in Australia.

They are extremely ferocious,

and normally they will

rip apart any caterpillar.

But see how they're treating this one.

When we first saw that shot in the viewing theatre...

We all went down to the canteen for a cup of tea and talked about it,

and I heard someone next to me, who'd just joined the team

talking to her friend, and she said, "Fantastic stuff they've got in Australia. Amazing!

"But I would never want to go there myself,

"because they have caterpillars there that are two feet long!"

So, sometimes with all our optical tricks, we can get too clever.

BIRDSONG

Never the less, insects filmed in close-up are truly fascinating.

These are tree ants in Borneo,

and they have a wonderful way of making their nests.

I first tried to film how they did so,

when I was here in Borneo back in the '50s.

'Then we noticed this group

'with their jaws locked tight in the lower leaf,

'and their hind legs attached to the upper leaf.

'The colony is constructing a new nest.

'And these patient workers

'are holding two leaves of the future nest in position,

'so that other members

'can fasten them together

'to form the outer wall of their new home.'

To get those shots, we had to tear apart the nest to get

the ants to work out in the open.

These days we can do better than that.

This is an optical probe that I can make mover forwards or

backwards and even...from side to side.

And so with that, you can go into the nest

and get shots of the ants behaving totally naturally.

That is a stranger in the nest.

That is a little bug which they are attacking.

It was technical developments like these that allowed us

eventually to enter the world of the insect.

A motorised jib arm enables filmmakers to suspend a camera above

a column of aggressive driver ants and watch the organised way

they hunt through the forest.

Workers carry the colony's larvae.

Ferocious soldiers link legs to form a defensive roof and walls,

enclosing the column.

Were the camera or cameraman to accidentally touch

just one of these soldiers, they would all immediately attack.

But they're blind,

and they can't see the camera hanging just centimetres above them.

So we can track along with them as the army takes its prey

back to the bivouac where the queen is waiting.

Wildlife film-making can take a lot of patience.

Cameramen may have to spend hours and hours,

if not days and weeks, to film one particular action.

But that can be helped using modern security technology.

And we used such technology to get a shot of something

that as far as I know, had never been filmed before in the wild.

Rattlesnakes hunting.

Scientists working in New York State had implanted radio transmitters in

a group of rattlesnakes so that each could be found by using an aerial.

There he is.

The camera crew placed remotely controlled cameras

and infrared lights next to a snake lying in ambush.

The cameras were attached to motion detectors that would turn them on

if anything moved in their field of vision.

The following night I checked the replay.

There's a mouse.

It's pitch dark and the mouse clearly has no idea the snake is there.

Bu the snake is well aware of the mouse.

He's worked out that that is the path along which the mice run.

Oh, my goodness!

That's a dead mouse, all right.

So it was that technology designed to keep burglars out of our homes,

enabled us to record the rattlesnake's hunting strategy in the wild.

Another revelatory film technique involves playing with time -

slowing down the action.

Cameramen have long down that,

simply by increasing the number of images taken per second.

Kestrels are known as wind-hoverers,

because of their apparent ability to hang motionless in the air.

And slow motion photography enables us to see details

of their flying technique that we can't see with the naked eye.

By filming this trained bird, with this special camera,

we can slow down the motion and see exactly how they do it.

It's flying at the same speed as the oncoming wind, and the air

flowing over its wings provides just enough lift top keep it airborne.

By flying as slowly as this, they risk stalling,

because the windflow over the wing doesn't provide enough lift.

Slowing down the action by ten times, we can see how the

kestrel extends the finger-like projection on the leading edge of its wing

and spreads its tail-feathers to generate more lift.

Commercial airliners do the same thing

when they adjust their wing flaps to slow them down for landing.

If a kestrel is to see its prey successfully while hovering,

it has to keep its head perfectly still,

not easy when the wind is constantly trying to blow you off position.

But in slow motion,

you can see how the kestrel responds immediately to changes in the wind.

Constantly adjusting the set of its wings

and allowing it's neck to stretch and contract.

So that while its body is constantly moving,

its eyes stay fixed and can spot the slightest movement on the ground below.

One of my favourite slow-motion moments

was when I was able to fool a lovesick hoverfly with a peashooter.

It might seem that he's absolutely motionless,

but, in fact, he's having to make continual changes to adjust for slight currents in the air.

It's an amazing piece of acrobatics,

far better than anything that we could do in a helicopter.

And it's all done in order to impress the female

to show her that he is superb at holding his territory.

With his superb eyesight, he's ready to spot anything

that might whiz by him at high speed that could be a female.

And I might just be able to fool him with a peashooter.

By watching his response slowed down by about 50 times,

it's clear that the male is indeed so hyped up that he will pursue any fast-moving object

that comes near him in the hope that it might be a female.

Those poor males must have been exhausted by the time I'd finished with them.

By combining the best macro-lenses with digital slow-motion cameras,

we were able to reveal the extreme athletic prowess of some even tinier creatures.

These springtails, as they're name suggests, have a rather novel way of jumping.

They have a tiny two-pronged lever beneath their abdomen.

One small flick from it can catapult them six inches, some 15 centimetres, into the air.

It's the equivalent of a human being jumping over the Eiffel Tower.

So with slow-motion cameras,

we can watch actions and distinguish details that are impossible to see with the naked eye.

At the other end of the scale, we can manipulate time to speed up excessive slow action.

This is a time-lapse studio

where you can control lights and cameras very precisely.

A film camera shoots 25 frames per second,

but if you modify one so that it only shoots one frame per second

and then show the film at normal speed,

well, then, you increase the speed of action by 25m times.

And as the sophistication of time-lapse photography has increased,

so we've been able to show that plants can be as competitive and aggressive as many an animal.

And it was the mastery of time-lapse that allowed us to make a series called The Private Life of Plants.

Condense three months into 20 seconds,

and the desolation of winter quickly warms into the riot of spring.

Speed a week into a minute, and you can sense the urgency

with which the ground-living plants race to unfurl their flowers.

Of all the woodland plants, the humble bramble is one of the most aggressive.

It waves its shoots agitatedly from side to side

as if feeling for the best way forward.

The invading stem's backward-pointing spines

give it the grip it needs to climb almost anything that stands in its way.

It can advance as much as seven centimetres in a day.

Now digital cameras allow us to see how a shot is developing while we are still taking it,

instead of having to wait till it was finished as we used to have to do with film cameras.

And we can also use computers attached to small motors

to move a camera in-between exposed frames,

so that the camera can, in fact, travel alongside the plant.

Using this new technology, it became possible to condense the arrival of spring in a woodland

into a few seconds.

But the wonderful thing about wildlife film making

is that no matter how much you've seen and filmed,

there's always going to be something to surprise you.

I remember back in 1994,

we were filming nepenthes rajah, the largest pitcher plant in the world,

growing up in the mountains of Borneo.

And I made an assumption about how it obtained its nitrogen fertiliser.

I guess this one...

contains... two or three pints of liquid.

It's so big that it catches not just insects but even small rodents.

And one was recorded that has in it the body of a drowned rat.

So if ever there was a carnivore among plants, this is it.

But I was wrong.

In 2010, scientists discovered that the plant gets its nitrogen

in a quite different way.

And we couldn't resist going back to see of we could find out what the truth was.

Mount Kinabalu in Sabah is home to many rajah pitcher plants.

-BUZZING

-They certainly seem to attract insects.

that fall into their bowls just as other pitchers do,

but they also have larger visitors.

A tree shrew.

It's licking the underside of the lid

where the pitcher secretes nectar with which it lures visitors.

But even though its backside is hanging over the bowl,

it doesn't seem to be in any danger of falling in and drowning.

So what's going on?

It leaves a clue.

A dropping.

So the pitcher is a tree shrew toilet.

The tree shrew feeds by licking the secretions from the pitcher plant's lid

and the pitcher plant gets its fertiliser by collecting the tree shrew's droppings.

Wildlife cameramen are always trying to film

some piece of animal behaviour that no-one has ever see before.

And aerial photography enable then to do just that.

In the early days, we occasionally managed to get up in a small plane to get a shot of the landscape.

But the plane vibrated so much that you couldn't use long lenses to get close-ups of animals

and if you went low the roar of the engine frightened them.

So we tried other forms of aerial transport.

Balloons were a little quieter, but they took you where the wind blew them, not where you wanted to go.

And getting steady shots was still difficult.

It wasn't until the invention of a kind of mount

that could hold the camera almost miraculously free of vibration

that it was possible to use the long lenses necessary

in order to film animals from a height and they didn't even know you were there.

It's almost impossible to follow a wild dog hunt at ground level

through the treacherous swamplands of the Okavango Delta in Africa.

But the Planet Earth series used a helicopter

with a new stabilising mount that kept the camera vibration-free

and you could get close-ups from so high up that the animals below didn't know you were there.

There they go. They're racing. They're racing.

Four dogs all spread out.

Tighten up a much as you can.

By inter-cutting aerial shots and shots from the ground,

we could show how the dogs worked as a team,

with fresh animals joining the hunt to harry their prey and cut off its escape.

This new perspective gives us the big picture,

helping us to understand behaviour we could only see fragments of before.

Stay with him. He's almost got him!

They're heading towards the water.

Ooh! The croc's gonna get the impala.

So now we have the techniques to film almost anything on land or in the sea or in the air.

But to get pictures of animals that lived in the past, you have to recreate life.

In the early days, our attempts were pretty crude.

We used solid models of extinct fish placed in swamps to show the arrival of amphibians on land.

We moved on to line drawings of dinosaurs and I even appeared alongside one.

It's easy to imagine some 12 foot species of peragasaurus like Dimetrodon

lying basking on the rocks in the early morning sun.

And then we began to animate the drawings, but not very realistically.

It would take the advent of computer animation to make them move like real animals.

We wanted to use these new computer techniques to bring to life a moa,

the giant, extinct ostrich-like bird on New Zealand.

First of all, I had to walk into a woodland glade

holding a moa bone.

Then what would happen would be that

that bone would be suspended, I would take my hands away,

and all the rest of the bones and the skeleton would appear from nowhere

and materialise to form the complete skeleton.

So I had to walk in, hold the bone,

then take my hands away and let it drop, which seemed a silly thing to do.

But electronic trickery made it stay there

and then added the rest of the bones of the moa's skeleton.

It had just three toes.

Its pelvis and its spine lead up to an extraordinarily long neck.

This bird stood over six feet, two metres tall.

But then we wanted it to walk away.

And so what the computer expert got us to do was to imagine where it was going to stand

and then conceal ourselves in the vegetation,

each of us holding a bit of fishing line attached to a branch.

And with our computer expert conducting us as though he was conducting an orchestra,

the moa came in, this branch was brushed away,

and then it reached up and pecked another leaf and the leaf moved

and then it moved away and the bushes moved.

It was really quite convincing.

The first human settlers on these islands

saw these giants alive and called them moas.

Among them were the tallest birds that ever existed, that weighed over 200 kilos, 400 pounds.

So now we could recreate extinct creatures whenever we liked,

in their entire full-colour, animated glory.

A succession of technological advances has certainly changed the way we make natural history films.

These days, with every year that passes,

we seem to get more and more equipment.

Longer lenses, more electronic bits of kit.

But in the end, often the most memorable shot comes

from just one camera and one person

with a deep understanding of the natural world.

To film a wild snow leopard

was once the ultimate challenge for a wildlife cameraman.

Doug Allen went to the Himalayas

to attempt to do what so many cameramen before him

had tried but failed.

I guess this is where you could say it really starts.

We're up here in snow leopard country.

You look around and anywhere and at any time, you might just see it.

These are big, big mountains and there are not many snow leopards.

Nevertheless, Doug took to his hide and waited.

HE SIGHS

This is tedious stuff.

Not a sign.

If you got just a little bit of a hint, a wee bit of a sighting now and again,

your spirits would be lifted.

But right now, I'd swap a little bit of this animal's charisma

for a little bit more visibility.

And things didn't improve, even after two weeks.

Yeah, of course, it's boring.

It's as boring as hell.

After seven weeks of patiently sitting and watching

these distant shots are all Doug managed to film.

So he had to return home empty-handed.

The following winter cameraman Mark Smith took up the challenge and tried a different location

this time in Pakistan.

We've just got a lot of snow and we'll be able to track snow leopard.

So we'll have a lot better chances of filming it. It's just fantastic.

After that promising start, things didn't go so well for Mark.

He and the crew spent a fruitless month trudging through the snow.

Mark spent all Christmas in the mountains with no sign of a snow leopard.

But it was a much happier New Year.

Just... We just got a report that there's a snow leopard up on the ridge.

And we were too low where we were before,

so we're just trying to get some height to get a better view of it.

Finally, Mark was rewarded with his first ever glimpse.

I looked up onto the ridge

and I could see this leopard-shaped rock,

which I'd seen a million times before.

And I looked through binoculars and it was a leopard just sat there.

It was perched just on the top of a rock

and it looked down at us and sat down

in a sort of sphinx-like posture.

A few days later, Mark's patience paid off.

There was not jut an adult female, but with her a one-year-old cub.

Overall, Mark spent eight months in Pakistan.

And his dedication enabled him to document the most intimate moments of a snow leopard's life.

Including a hunt.

Silently she positions herself above her prey.

BLEATING

SCREECHES

The revelations brought by wildlife films today

were beyond my imagination when I set out 60 years ago.

They have transformed not only our understanding of the natural world,

but our attitudes towards it.

There have been a lot of changes in the way that we've filmed the natural world

during the last 50-60 years,

but there's also been a great change in the way we understand that world

and that's what I'll be looking at in the next programme.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd