How BBC’s ‘Life’ Came Alive

As the executive producer on the BBC nature series Life, Michael Gunton was in charge of coming up with the vision of the production and making sure the sequences and approach stayed true to that vision. As Gunton puts it, “It’s a little like being the editor of a newspaper.”

Gunton is no stranger to wildlife filmmaking, having produced series on the Galápagos Islands, invertebrates, and Yellowstone National Park, to name just a few of his subjects. He is also the creative director of the BBC’s Natural History Unit, considered to be the largest production company of wildlife films in the world. With Life he and his team set out to illustrate animals doing extraordinary things in order to overcome the challenges they face.

“Every single one of the stories we went for was a specific strategy those animals have,” he says. “We would come up with a story we wanted to film and then [decide] if it was the predator’s story or the prey’s story, and then try to shoot it from that perspective.”

That sounds fine in theory but in the natural world the behaviour of the weather and animals can change and they would often catch even more exciting things. One of those moments occurred during an expedition to Antarctica where the crew attempted to record seal-hunting killer whales during a hunt. Previous BBC productions Planet Earth and Blue Planet had both tried to capture this, with no luck. And while Life didn’t quite get what they wanted they were able to gather enough information to assist an upcoming series — Frozen Planet — in securing the desired footage.

“No one really knows what these seal-hunting [killer whales] really do. It appears that they hunt as a pack and single out a particular seal. One of the ways the seals try to escape is they leap onto the ice. What the whales can do is collaborate together and knock the seal off the ice and therefore get to eat him. They either try to rock the iceberg or they swim together and send a tidal wave to wash the seal off,” he explains. “We tried to get that but that iceberg the seal ran towards was too small so what actually happened, which was amazing also, was they basically ended up playing hide-and-seek and these killer whales kept on trying to grab this seal and he kept on swimming in tighter and tigher circles around this iceberg. And because of the way the iceberg is shaped the killer whales couldn’t get close enough to grab him. In the end the killer whales swam away.”

For those looking to get into the world of filming nature documentaries, Gunton’s advice is go out and shoot something of your own.

“I have someone working for me now who did a little film about pigeons in the street. It wasn’t very good but I made some comments and she went back, re-shot it and it was ten times better so I hired her. And that’s what I did — I made my own films, made my mistakes when nobody was watching and so when I finally went to see somebody I had something half decent to show them,” he says.

If you think it’s all been done before Gunton says whenever he starts to believe that, nature surprises him.

Life is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. For more information visit the official BBC site for the series.

brian.mckechnie@citynews.rogers.com

Top image: A scene from Life. Courtesy BBC One.