Filming Techniques
Several special filming techniques were devised to obtain some of the footage of rare and elusive animals. One cameraman spent hundreds of hours waiting for the fleeting moment when a rare frog, which incubates its young in its mouth, finally spat them out. Another built a replica of a mole rat burrow in a horizontally-mounted wheel, so that as the mole rat ran along the tunnel, the wheel could be spun to keep the animal adjacent to the camera. To illustrate the motion of bats' wings in flight, a slow motion sequence was filmed in a wind tunnel. The series was also the first to include footage of a live (although dying) coelacanth.
The cameramen took advantage of improved film stock to produce some of the sharpest and most colourful wildlife footage that had been seen to date.
The programmes also pioneered a style of presentation whereby David Attenborough would begin describing a certain species' behaviour in one location, before cutting to another to complete his illustration. Continuity was maintained, despite such sequences being filmed several months and thousands of miles apart.
Read more about this topic: Life On Earth (TV series)
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