After completing the nature documentary “The Blue Planet” — 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 — its producer, Alastair Fothergill, could have taken a well-deserved break. Instead, immediately following “Blue Planet’s” September 2001 debut, Mr. Fothergill, a longtime BBC producer, began work on another ambitious project.

His new series, “Planet Earth,” “is trying to do for the whole planet what ‘Blue Planet’ had done for the oceans,” Mr. Fothergill said in a telephone interview. “To be honest, that’s a pretty tall order.” The new 11-part series, shown last summer in Britain, will have its United States premiere on March 25 on the Discovery Channel. “ ‘Blue Planet’ was very successful internationally, and when that series did as well as it did, the feedback I got was very, very clear,” Mr. Fothergill said. “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.”

To help him up the ante, the BBC, which says “Planet Earth” is its most ambitious documentary project to date, laid out up to $2 million per episode, and Mr. Fothergill didn’t waste a cent. “Until we started ‘Planet Earth’ the only aerials you could film in nature documentaries were wide angles because if you flew close enough to get a tighter shot you’d frighten the animals,” Mr. Fothergill said. Among the various photography systems employed by his vagabonding camera crew — 70 men and women who traveled to more than 200 locations on five continents — 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.

“As far as animals on the ground are concerned” the helicopter “is just a distant buzz, an annoying mosquito in the sky,” he said. The technology allowed his team to film, without interruption, wild dogs hunting gazelle in Africa and wolves chasing caribou in northern Canada. “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,” Mr. Fothergill said.

What’s more, “Planet Earth” is the first landmark series that the BBC and Discovery have produced in tandem in high-definition. The result is a crystal-clear creature’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.

“What interested me and my producers was to say: ‘O.K., if you’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?’ ” Mr. Fothergill said. They are prescient questions — especially when the United States Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the polar bear as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act this December — and the film raises many more. “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 people’s awareness,” Mr. Fothergill said. “A lot of the animals in ‘Planet Earth’ people have never seen before. How can you expect anybody to care about a snow leopard if they’ve never seen one?”

The “Planet Earth” 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 world’s largest goats down near-vertical slopes. “The first two trips were in the Nepalese Himalayas, and we literally got 10 seconds of footage on the standard long lens,” Mr. Fothergill said. “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 wouldn’t allow us to go there” for a year. “That was a real feat of endurance, but the images, I think, are unbelievably special.”

Equally impressive were his team’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. “One-fifth of the free-standing fresh water in the world is in Baikal,” Mr. Fothergill said. “It’s 400 miles long, a mile across. Getting under that ice was really pretty tricky.” 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. “This whole pride, 30-strong, jumps on the back of the elephant and kills it,” he said. “It’s really amazing.” Viewed in standard analog, each of the 11 hourlong episodes — “Pole to Pole,” “Mountains,” “Deep Ocean,” “Deserts,” “Ice Worlds,” “Shallow Seas,” “Great Plains,” “Jungles,” “Fresh Water,” “Forests” and “Caves” — make previous conservation films look pedestrian. Viewed in high definition they actually dwarf Mr. Fothergill’s past efforts. He even agrees, sort of.

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

“In the U.K. it’s gone out at absolute prime time, the top soap operas,” he said. “It hasn’t been hidden away at the back of the TV schedule, it’s been right out there. And Discovery is just the same, it’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.”
(Por Michael Slenske, The N.Y.Times, 19/03/2007)