Planet Earth

[jzq]

My sister-in-law recently let me borrow the BBC series "Planet Earth," and I just HAD to post about it here. It

contains some of the most unbelievable, gob-smackingly beautiful, amazing photography I've ever seen. If you

haven't seen it, you should definitely check it out. -- Particularly if you're into nature photography.

[martijn_houtman]

I've viewed most of them, and I was absolutely stunned! It contains some of the world's most beautiful places,

extraordinary creatures, brilliant filming and editing, and all that combined with one of the best voice-overs ever. One of the

things I was amazed by was the scene with the mountain goat, where you see a mountain goat walking along its natural

habitat and then the camera starts zooming out and zooming out, until you see basically the whole landscape ... it really

felt like endless zooming!

[sionnac]

I agree - amazing cinematography. Recommend it! The snow leopard episode (I think it was in "Mountains") was

brilliant.

[borek_lupomesky]

And you haven't (I guess) seen its full high defintion glory. Planet Earth is currently the pinnacle of natural documentary filmmaking. There are number of shots that constitute a "first" of its kind - first snow leopard in wild footage, first underwater time-lapse, first super steady telephoto shots from aircraft and so on... I hope you have seen all 11 parts.

[bernie moore]

There was one scene where the cinematographer sat in a blind 5 or so days 12 hours a day to get the first shot of some goofy tropical bird doing his mating dance. This gave me one of the parameters of what a 'professional" is.

[michaeljlawson]

It is definitely the most beautiful cinematography I have ever seen. I have watched the DVDs several times (Gift from my wife), and still watch it when it comes on TV. I always thought it would be amazing to do what they do. After seeing some of the behind the scenes stuff, I realize it's even more amazing than I ever thought, but also no where near the paradise I wanted to believe they worked in. They make unbelievable sacrifices for those shots.

[andy_briggs1]

I used to work for the BBC in Television Centre, London (although I had absolutely nothing to do with any programme making and certainly nothing to do with Planet Earth). My job was to build the facilities to allow the BBC to transmit High Definition. Half way through the project we noticed a buzz about the place. BBC Bristol (the department that creates all of the BBC's natural history programmes) had created a new series to showcase HD. We were, at the time, crying out for demo material to show off to the rest of the BBC what HD was all about and Bristol had a reputation for creating stunning photography through the immensley popular 'Life' series voiced by Sir David Attenborough.

 

Needless to say, when we first saw what they had created we were completely in awe. I admit, even as a hairy ar$ed engineer, at the first time that I saw it some of the scenes were so stunning that I had tears in my eyes. The previous Natural History programmes, whilst visually stunning in themselves, were all about education. Here someone had thrown the rule book out of the window and gone for broke to show stunning images like no other had before. Quite simply, I don't think there is a duff shot / bad montage sequence anywhere in the eleven hours of programming.

 

I raved about it, I told everyone I knew about it, and sure enough it was a massive hit in Britain and throughout the world. The BBC takes a lot of criticism these days but it stands preeminent amongst broadcasters as the best maker of wildlife documentaries bar none.

 

Every two or three years the BBC seems to raise the benchmark of wildlife documentaries. Planet Earth was released in 2006 - how good can we expect the next series to be?