The Trials of Life - Background

Background

The series took over three-and-a-half years to film, during which time Attenborough travelled almost a quarter of a million miles. The production team sought to further push the boundaries of natural history filmmaking, following on from the advances made in The Living Planet, and were provided with several new challenges.

The sequence of chimpanzees hunting colobus monkeys was only possible through the efforts of Hedwige and Christophe Boesch, who had spent five years studying the apes in the Ivory Coast forests of West Africa.

Meanwhile, a bivouac of army ants in Panama was able to be filmed internally with the aid of a medical endoscope. Furthermore, a new type of camera lens enabled tree ants to be filmed in enlarged close-up just in front of Attenborough — with both subjects in sharp focus. This gave the illusion that the insects were much larger than their actual size.

Filming critical moments in the life of a herd of elephants necessitated the expertise of Cynthia Moss, who had devoted 25 years to researching the animals in Kenya. She was able to advise the production team on the right moments to film specific events.

The camera team had only one chance to film a 60,000-strong flock of waders flying over David Attenborough's head in Norfolk, and the RSPB was enlisted to predict their flightpath. By contrast, the Florida scrub jays couldn't have been more co-operative: since the particular group being filmed had been studied closely and were used to humans, a bird could land on Attenborough's hand right on cue.

The inside of a termite mound proved especially challenging for Attenborough: it was so cramped that he could only face in one direction. He therefore had to slowly crawl backwards out of shot when performing re-takes.

Behaviour seen for the first time included the sequence that was eventually selected to illustrate the series' DVD cover: that of a killer whale pouncing on a colony of sea lions on a Patagonian beach and 'playing' with its young prey before consuming it. This meant some risks being taken by the cameramen, as they placed themselves in the water just feet away from the creatures in order to obtain close-ups of an attack run.