Earth - Alastair Fothergill 2007
Won 4 Primetime Emmys. Another 7 wins & 11 nominations

624 x 352 *********

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0795176/

Alastair Fothergill
Mark Linfield
Patrick Stewart

Groot Brittanni?? / Duitsland
Documentaire
96 minuten

geregisseerd door Alastair Fothergill en Mark Linfield
met de stem van Patrick Stewart

In de documentaire "Earth" wordt een tocht van Noordpool naar Zuidpool gemaakt en benadrukt daarbij de strijd om te overleven. "Earth" confronteert ons door middel van indrukwekkende beelden en landschappen, uitgelicht door een oogverblindende zon, met de harde realiteit van het leven op onze planeet. De documentaire volgt hiertoe een ijsberenfamilie, een kudde olifanten en twee bultrug walvissen in hun vaste leefomgeving en toont de invloed van seizoenswisselingen daarop. Het wordt duidelijk hoe de opwarming van de aarde de overlevingskansen van vele diersoorten bedreigt. Het lukt de makers om in gebieden te filmen waar nog nooit eerder filmopnames zijn gemaakt. Zo wordt er gefilmd op ijzingwekkende hoogte op de Mount Everest.

Onmogelijk. Zo mooi is de natuur nu ook weer niet. Die achterdocht bekruipt je een enkele keer bij het zien van Earth, een compilatie uit de succesvolle natuurserie Planet Earth, een coproductie van Discovery Chanel en de BBC, die nu van het televisiescherm verhuist naar het bioscoopdoek en in premi?¨re is gegaan op Idfa. Maar de producenten verzekeren dat er geen enkel digitaal effect voor de film is gebruikt, al lijkt dat soms wel zo.

Voor de serie en de film is door tientallen cameramensen 4000 dagen gedraaid, voor een gecombineerd budget van 40 miljoen dollar. Dat maakt Earth (van dezelfde makers als de onderwaterdocumentaire Deep Blue) duurste documentaire ooit. De film zet onbeschaamd in op vertedering; Earth is opgebouwd rond drie moeders en hun jongen; een ijsberin die met haar onder de grond geboren kroost na de winterslaap is ontwaakt en naar buiten krabbelt, een olifant en een nakomeling die in een troep een lange trek moeten maken door uitgedroogd zuidelijk Afrika op zoek naar water, en een walvis die met jong de halve wereld overzwemt, van de evenaar naar de zuidpool.

Earth heeft ook een voorliefde voor grote getallen: hoe groter de scherm vogels of de troep olifanten hoe beter. Die nadruk op het belang van het collectief voor dieren om te kunnen overleven en bij implicatie ook voor de mens heeft ook een ge??ngageerd tintje. De film eindigt met een oproep ?? la Al Gore om in actie te komen voor het mondiale milieu. De film houdt het hoge niveau van het een tikje bombastische begin op de zuidpool, ondersteunt door aanzwellende strijkers, niet de hele film lang vol. Daarvoor worden teveel zijpaden bewandeld, met beelden die, hoe mooi ook, geen duidelijke functie hebben voor het verhaal. Een aap die vijf vruchten tegelijk in zijn mond propt, of de paradijsvogel en zijn complexe verleidingsritueel; allemaal grappig en leuk, maar het zijn ook tamelijk willekeurige uitstapjes.

De structuur van de film is goed en zou nog beter zijn geweest, als de makers zich er wat strakker aan hadden gehouden. Het perspectief is mondiaal. De film volgt zowel de migratiepatronen van dieren, en patronen van vegetatie van zuidpool naar toendra, naadbomen en loofbomen tot en met de evenaar en daarna door de zee weer terug. De boodschap: alles hang met alles samen en de zon is de baas. Dan is de link met het broeikaseffect snel gelegd. De film eindigt met een pleidooi om in actie te komen voor het milieu, inclusief de inmiddels onvermijdelijke website.



Earth - Alastair Fothergill 2007
Won 4 Primetime Emmys. Another 7 wins & 11 nominations

For all my life (since I was a very wee toddler anyway) I have loved David Attenborough. Well a€“ not kissed loved, but I really liked him on TV and what he did.

Though you never see him up on screen in this series (as he is only the narrator), he does an excellent job. Not only is HE good, but the photographers who risked their lives to film animals and planet earth from all four corners of the globe definitely deserve praise.

Each episode explains how the animals live in particular habitats. It shows captivating (often ugly) descriptions of this habitat and the animals there in a breathtaking waya€|

I recommend this series to animal lovers, fans of David Attenborough, naturalists and for people who would like to watch an educational series!

AFTER completing the nature documentary a€?The Blue Planeta€? a€” a $$10 million, eight-part BBC series that took 20 camera teams five years to shoot, spawned an international concert tour based on its Emmy-winning score and eventually was shown in more than 50 countries a€” its producer, Alastair Fothergill, could have taken a well-deserved break.


A male Superb Bird of Paradise (seen from front) performing a courtship display to a female in Papua New Guinea, from a€?Jungles,a€? in the a€?Planet Eartha€? series.
Instead, immediately following a€?Blue Planeta€?sa€? September 2001 debut, Mr. Fothergill, a longtime BBC producer, began work on another ambitious project.

His new series, a€?Planet Earth,a€? a€?is trying to do for the whole planet what a€?Blue Planeta€? had done for the oceans,a€? Mr. Fothergill said in a telephone interview. a€?To be honest, thata€?s a pretty tall order.a€? The new 11-part series, shown last summer in Britain, will have its United States premiere on March 25 on the Discovery Channel.

a€? a€?Blue Planeta€? was very successful internationally, and when that series did as well as it did, the feedback I got was very, very clear,a€? Mr. Fothergill said. a€?People enjoyed three things: its epic scale; the fact that they were seeing a lot of animals they had never seen before, particularly in the open and the deep ocean; and they really enjoyed its cinematic style.a€?

To help him up the ante, the BBC, which says a€?Planet Eartha€? is its most ambitious documentary project to date, laid out up to $$2 million per episode, and Mr. Fothergill didna€?t waste a cent.

a€?Until we started a€?Planet Eartha€? the only aerials you could film in nature documentaries were wide angles because if you flew close enough to get a tighter shot youa€?d frighten the animals,a€? Mr. Fothergill said. Among the various photography systems employed by his vagabonding camera crew a€” 70 men and women who traveled to more than 200 locations on five continents a€” during their five years traveling the globe, the Cineflex heligimble was by far the most revolutionary. The gyroscopic stabilizing mechanism, once reserved for Hollywood studios, can support a lens four times more powerful than any previously used in nature photography.

a€?As far as animals on the ground are concerneda€? the helicopter a€?is just a distant buzz, an annoying mosquito in the sky,a€? he said. The technology allowed his team to film, without interruption, wild dogs hunting gazelle in Africa and wolves chasing caribou in northern Canada. a€?If you go up to the high arctic tundra and just sit there, you might be unbelievably lucky if a wolf would run past you. It would be gone in a matter of seconds. We were able to film a complete hunt continuously from the air and get a complete sequence, which in the past would have been impossible,a€? Mr. Fothergill said.

Whata€?s more, a€?Planet Eartha€? is the first landmark series that the BBC and Discovery have produced in tandem in high-definition. The result is a crystal-clear creaturea€?s-eye view of the entire globe: from long tracking shots up a 500-meter tall guano mound in Deer Cave in Borneo to ground views of Emperor penguins shivering through a minus-70 degree winter in Antarctica to a haunting overhead shot of a male polar bear struggling to find tenable ice floes after swimming 60 miles in the Arctic.

a€?What interested me and my producers was to say: a€?O.K., if youa€?re a polar bear living out on the ice, what does this really mean? What does it mean to live out on an endless flat world that literally melts beneath your feet during your life?a€? a€? Mr. Fothergill said. They are prescient questions a€” especially when the United States Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the polar bear as a€?threateneda€? under the Endangered Species Act this December a€” and the film raises many more.

a€?When we see the polar bear struggling on the ice, we say that this is something that with global warming may become more of a problem. I personally believe that part of the environmental message is raising peoplea€?s awareness,a€? Mr. Fothergill said. a€?A lot of the animals in a€?Planet Eartha€? people have never seen before. How can you expect anybody to care about a snow leopard if theya€?ve never seen one?a€?

The a€?Planet Eartha€? team made three eight-week journeys to Nepal and Pakistan over the course of two years to capture the first-ever intimate images of snow leopards, the rare, wide-pawed snow cats, struggling to hunt the worlda€?s largest goats down near-vertical slopes. a€?The first two trips were in the Nepalese Himalayas, and we literally got 10 seconds of footage on the standard long lens,a€? Mr. Fothergill said. a€?Finally we got this tip-off about a location in the Karakorum. At that stage the U.S. Marines were searching for Bin Laden in this area, and BBC safety wouldna€?t allow us to go therea€? for a year. a€?That was a real feat of endurance, but the images, I think, are unbelievably special.a€?

Equally impressive were his teama€?s efforts to film the only freshwater seal gliding beneath luminous, three-foot-thick ice sheets in the freezing water world of Lake Baikal in Siberia. a€?One-fifth of the free-standing fresh water in the world is in Baikal,a€? Mr. Fothergill said. a€?Ita€?s 400 miles long, a mile across. Getting under that ice was really pretty tricky.a€? His team drove two beat-up Volkswagen camper vans over a precarious ice field only to submerge two divers with cables and rebreather systems, which were treated with scalding water each morning to prevent against freezing.

On the plains of Botswana a crew drove around in open-top Land Rovers with special infrared lenses to film a pride of 30 lions on the prowl for elephants. a€?This whole pride, 30-strong, jumps on the back of the elephant and kills it,a€? he said. a€?Ita€?s really amazing.a€? Viewed in standard analog, each of the 11 hourlong episodes a€” a€?Pole to Pole,a€? a€?Mountains,a€? a€?Deep Ocean,a€? a€?Deserts,a€? a€?Ice Worlds,a€? a€?Shallow Seas,a€? a€?Great Plains,a€? a€?Jungles,a€? a€?Fresh Water,a€? a€?Forestsa€? and a€?Cavesa€? a€” make previous conservation films look pedestrian. Viewed in high definition they actually dwarf Mr. Fothergilla€?s past efforts. He even agrees, sort of.

a€?I think we particularly took the cinematic style beyond a€?Blue Planet,a€? a€? he said. a€?And what I mean by that is going for emotionally engaging sequences, a very big cinematic score, a pretty minimal narrationa€? by Sigourney Weaver. With glowing reviews and nine million viewers watching the debut episode in Britain, Mr. Fothergilla€?s message a€” that the rarities of the natural world, while majestic and peculiar, are being obliterated a€” certainly seemed to have an impact.

a€?In the U.K. ita€?s gone out at absolute prime time, the top soap operas,a€? he said. a€?It hasna€?t been hidden away at the back of the TV schedule, ita€?s been right out there. And Discovery is just the same, ita€?s pretty exposed. But if you have confidence in the material, and you can photograph it the way that we have, I think the audience will come to it.a€?