Hot Picks: Hidden Planet

The upcoming natural history series Hidden Planet essentially serves as a follow-up to the landmark plant series The Green Planet, focusing on the little-known behaviours of insects and other invertebrates.

Series producer Paul Williams wanted to ensure that the series was every bit as dramatic and emotionally engaging as the “familiar world of lions, tigers and bears”. Following individual insect ‘characters’ was, he felt, the surest way to achieve this.

“We wanted it to feel less like looking through a microscope and more like going on safari. It had to be a series about individuals rather than species, or ‘heroes, not swarms’ as our commissioner Jack Bootle put it.”

The real challenge lay in the scale, speed and complexity of the insect world, forcing the team to create new macro filming techniques and working out solutions as fascinating new stories unfolded before them.

One of the most important pieces of technology, according to Williams, was a portable robotic arm, affectionately known as Ely, which started life as a factory robot before the team started relying on it as a mechanism for moving cameras with incredible precision.

“We like to think of her as our way of flying through the insect world,” says Williams. “She’s been adapted to do something quite different from her original job, following our tiny insect ‘stars’ and allowing us to film them with the same visual grammar that we use with much larger animals.

“As our cameras move through that world, they reveal textures and detail that are normally invisible to us. We spend time with individual characters displaying astonishing levels of intelligence - building, dancing, caring for each other and using weaponry and deception to take on rivals many times their own size.

“We were able to get to know and relate to them, rather than simply presenting them as freakish species with bizarre biology.”

The closer the team looked, he continues, the more they discovered. “Technology has been crucial in allowing us to look in new ways, taking us into places and revealing behaviours that were previously beyond our reach. It isn’t just helping us film the natural world differently, it is allowing us to discover more of it.”

But, he insists, there must be a careful balance to ensure the tech does not become “the spectacle”. “The best technology is the one you stop noticing because you’re completely absorbed in the story.”

Because wildlife audiences are becoming increasingly hard to surprise and ‘wow’, Williams suggests that bringing previously unexplored species to the screen is one of the best ways to keep them engaged.

“The bar keeps rising,” he says. “The question is no longer simply whether you can produce a beautiful or spectacular shot. It’s whether you can show people something they genuinely haven’t seen before.

“Until now, we’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to telling the stories of insects. But this series is packed with moments that make you think, ‘How have we never seen this before?’

“That is what excites me most about natural history filmmaking. We have incredibly powerful tools, but there is still so much of the natural world that remains unseen. Sometimes you just have to look closer.”