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<p>Shedding some light on the Dark Continent of Africa has been the singular goal of a small army of digital cinematographers, producers and other crew members who collectively spent nearly 1,600 days on location, consumed 6,526 malaria pills and carried 50 tons of camera gear over 27 countries to close the deal.</p>
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<p>The end result is <a href="http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/africa"><em>Africa</em></a>—a seven-part BBC/Discovery digital co-production assembled from more than 100 TB of footage, tapping into 42 different file formats from more than 500 HD cameras (eight of which were lost in the wilderness forever). The documentary series is currently airing in primetime on the Discovery Channel in the United States through Feb. 19. Africa will be released in the U.S. on Blu-ray and DVD on Feb. 26, exactly a week after it finishes airing on Discovery.<br />
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Amid the beauty and harshness of the Kalahari, the savannah and the Congo, the Sahara and the Cape of Africa, the series boasts its own list of impressive firsts, including an alarming clash among rival male giraffes that gives dire new meaning to the term “necking,” a nighttime gathering of black rhinos captured with a camera system developed by the BBC that is so sensitive that it can shoot with moonlight and starlight as its only illumination, and a close-up look at the remote nesting grounds of the massive, rarely seen shoebill, hidden deep within a Zambian swamp.<br />
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“People are always making films in Africa but are never making films about Africa,” says Mike Gunton, executive producer of the series and senior executive at the BBC Natural History Unit. “The inspiration for me was, Could it be possible to tell the story of this great continent and all the individual places that make Africa such an extraordinary place? And so that was our goal: showing the different elements of this great wilderness and how these many wondrous locales in Africa relate to each other.”<br />
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Gunton says the series strives to show viewers things that humans have rarely—if ever—seen in the wild. “You can only do that with a lot of cameras and a lot of work over a very long period of time. In some instances only a camera can show us what the human eye cannot capture in real time, such as that giraffe fight in the first episode. The fight itself, where they use their huge necks [as weapons], only lasted maybe a minute, but showing it in slow motion using a<a href="http://www.visionresearch.com/Products/High-Speed-Cameras/Phantom-HDGOLD/"> [Vision Research] Phantom Gold</a> camera makes it come across almost like a boxing match or a ballet. We slowed down the action about 40 times thanks to the Phantom.”<br />
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The brief encounter demonstrates the notion that even in the wild, patience can be a virtue. The elder giraffe, patiently awaiting what appeared to be a final (albeit non-fatal) blow from the younger male, ducks his long neck at the last second and spins around to smash the less experienced opponent in the solar plexus with the top of his head, thereby knocking the younger giraffe to the ground temporarily and ending the courtship stand-off.<br />
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<p>For one episode, the crew deployed remote cameras to film inside Zambia’s Bangweulu Swamp to catch the nesting of shoebill birds, Gunton explains. “These birds are enormous creatures, four or five feet high. They look like dinosaurs! We used these little remote cameras set on gyroscopically stabilized camballs, and whenever the parents were away, we’d edge the camballs closer to the nests. We had to run a full kilometer of cable from the camballs out to the edge of the swamp where we were recording,” he notes.<br />
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Assistant director Felicity Egerton says that although the production occasionally used specialty cameras over the course of the four-year shoot, such as the Phantom Gold for slow motion sequences, the HD cameras of choice for most filming were various models of the <a href="http://www.panasonic.com/business/provideo/P2HD-VariCam-cinematography-camcorder.asp">Panasonic P2 VariCam</a> series. In addition to her directorial duties, Egerton shot most of the behind-the-scenes footage of the series for a bonus episode (“Africa—The Making of…”) that will air at the end of the U.S. run on Discovery Channel.<br />
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Egerton’s most memorable location work came during a difficult shoot at the Dragon’s Breath Cave in Namibia—site of the largest underground lake in the world, which was not discovered until 1986. “It was rather extraordinary and, for me, one of the real filming highlights of the expedition,” she says. “We had big problems with condensation in the cameras, and sometimes we simply left them in the cave overnight to [acclimate] for the next day. Even the heat from our bodies made the cameras fog up if we stood too close to them, so we had to sometimes keep our distance.”<br />
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While much of the cave segment was shot on VariCam for the series, Egerton chose the <a href="http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/consumer/products/camcorders/professional_camcorders/xf305">Canon XF305</a> camcorder for most of her behind-the-scenes work. “It rather came in handy when we were climbing up and down ropes,” Egerton says.</p>
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Shedding some light on the Dark Continent of Africa has been the singular goal of a small army of digital cinematographers, producers and other crew members who collectively spent nearly 1,600 days on location, consumed 6,526 malaria pills and carried 50 tons of camera gear over 27 countries to close the deal.
To capture the extraordinary footage found in the new tv documentary, Penguins: Spy in the Huddle, the BBC sent out cameras disguised as everything from snow to rocks to other penguins to capture insider footage from within the birds' colonies. Explains CNET, "All these robot spy cameras helped the documentary crew get right into the midst of the penguin colonies without disturbing them or altering their normal behavior. The team was able to capture stunning footage, including that of an Emperor penguin laying an egg, a moment they say was filmed for the very first time."
