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Will the BBC's Planet Earth 2 be even bigger (and more expensive) than Planet Earth?
It has been hailed as the most ambitious and spectacular series ever shown on British television. On Sunday, Sir David Attenborough will introduce Planet Earth 2, the BBC’s epic new natural history show that took more than three years to bring to the screen.
A decade after its predecessor attracted audiences of more than 11 million people, the BBC will be hoping the show will be another Sunday night ratings triumph. And the corporation has spared little expense, spending millions on cutting-edge technology to delve into unknown corners of the natural world.
On Saturday night Sir David said: "It's very important that television should, every now and then, take an in-depth view of something quite important.
"They're great stories, important stories, they're stories that take time and, of course, money, and the BBC is prepared to devote both."
The first series took five years to make and at £8million was the most expensive nature documentary ever filmed by the BBC. It went on win an Emmy award and be shown in over 130 countries. The new show's producers have described the great lengths taken to make sure the second series is even more spectacular. Episodes were filmed in ultra-high definition by six separate teams gathering ground-breaking footage from around the globe. They managed to film four snow leopards together in the wild for the first time, as well as footage of baby iguanas battling hordes of hungry snakes and a sloth going for a swim.
New technology has allowed the teams to bring viewers further into the animals' worlds than ever before. Gyro-stabilised cameras allow cameramen to move at speed alongside the animals, and drones captured aerial action sequences. Advanced camera traps were placed so close to wild animals that they even captured the sound of breathing. Producer Elizabeth White worked on the first episode, Islands, which shows penguins being battered by waves as they attempted to bring back food for their young on Zavodovski, an Antarctic island home to the largest penguin colony in the world.
Her team also travelled to the Galápagos Islands, where they captured heart-stopping footage of baby marine iguanas hatching in the sand and trying to make their way past a gauntlet of hidden racer snakes into the safety of the sea - something biologists were not aware happened.
Speaking to BBC Earth magazine, Ms White said: "It’s a raw, brutal story. The first time we saw a little one come out of the sand, we watched it run towards the rocks.
"Then it was spooked by something and jumped up. As it did so, the wall came alive with snakes, like a Medusa’s head. We didn’t expect to see snakes pouring out of the rocks; seeing it was like witnessing something from a horror film."
The episode on mountains used sophisticated high-definition camera traps to catch footage of a snow leopard and her cub encountering two rival males. Only 3,500 of the rare and elusive animals remain in the wild, and so many have never been filmed in the same place at the same time.
Sir David Attenborough, who narrates the show, said: "That was certainly the sequence I found revelatory and most moving. It captured my heart.
"You see this lonely animal padding through the vast wilderness. Then, finally, they encounter one another. Snow leopards are beautiful animals.
"And I hadn't seen racer snakes in the Galápagos islands before. Of course, you have to be in the right place and at the right time of year."
Biologist Chadden Hunter, who produced the episode on grasslands, said that filming in Botswana's Okavango Delta turned out to be trickier than he had expected. He told BBC Earth magazine: "The cameraman, a local, said, 'We have to take our shoes off because the best thing is to feel for crocodiles with your feet, so that you can jump away. If you tread on one with your trainers on, they’re likely to snap at you.' It was getting dark, we were lost and there was a group of angry hippos in front of us – I was thinking, we should have had a Plan B."
However, the team managed to capture one of the most stunning sequences in the series, showing a group of lions attacking a bull buffalo.
There is also an episode devoted to the wildlife in cities, which shows monkeys stealing food in India and peregrine falcons chasing pigeons through the skyscrapers of New York, which series producer Tom Hugh Jones described as "almost like a scene from Spiderman."
The week devoted to jungles sees footage of a jaguar, which usually eats small mammals, attacking a caiman. Producer Emma Napper said that the crew spent six weeks searching the Brazilian rainforest with stabilised cameras on their boats to try and catch the phenomenon on film.
"We went out every day, searching the river edges for jaguars that looked hungry. Incredibly, we got footage of a big male killing a caiman and also a scrap between a male and female. Being able to spend time with cats like that was very cool," she told BBC Earth magazine.
Other impressive sequences that feature in the series include close-up shots of a harvest mouse bounding from one stalk of grass to another in Norfolk, and elephants walking for up to 30 miles a day to find water in the Namib Desert.
Sir David praised the corporation for commissioning the series despite a series of cuts.
He said: "The moment comes when the knife hits the bone and you can't do any more. The effect will be seen on the screen. So I'm just delighted the BBC thinks it's so important to lavish the amount of care and attention as it would if it were putting on a Shakespeare play."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11 ... expensive/
