BBC_Wild Cameramen at Work_4of4_Sea
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00:00Scotland, a paradise for wildlife and a cameraman's dream.
00:14This country, with its rugged mountains and endless coastline,
00:18has produced a generation of the best wildlife cameramen in the world.
00:23For decades, five filmmakers, all rooted in Scotland, have travelled the globe
00:31to bring home incredible images, shaping our understanding of the natural world.
00:39How did these men learn the incredible skills needed for catching the natural world in action?
00:47What is it that prepared them for travelling the globe and enduring the toughest of environments?
00:53In this series, these five cameramen will share their extraordinary stories and the secrets of
01:01their trade. Secrets often learned from filming wildlife in the wildest parts of Scotland.
01:11But this time, the camera is on them.
01:23The seas and oceans cover almost three quarters of the earth's surface.
01:43But until recently, the underwater world was a mysterious place,
01:48little understood and only rarely visited.
01:52Two remarkable Scots have helped change our understanding of the deep.
01:58Doug Anderson.
02:03And Doug Allen.
02:09Between them, they've captured some of the most awe-inspiring images of ocean life
02:14to have ever appeared on television.
02:18So,
02:31filming wildlife underwater is a highly specialised job.
02:36Whether the subject is a tiny fish or a baby sperm whale,
02:39it's a very different experience from filming animals on the surface.
02:43Underwater wildlife is all about getting close to your subject.
02:47You have to be able to follow them, you have to be able to work close to them.
02:50So that needs a whole different set of almost body language field skills around your animal
02:56than you do topside, where you can stand away, where you can hide,
03:01and where you often use a long lens to, you know, to get big close-ups of your animals.
03:05So, underwater wildlife is very different from topside wildlife.
03:10Filming underwater means that the cameraman is completely exposed to danger.
03:15And filming certain species, like oceanic white-tipped sharks,
03:19can therefore be a hazardous business.
03:25When Doug Anderson set out to film these three-metre-long predators for planet Earth,
03:29he had never been in the water with them before.
03:33But he had a great deal of experience with them.
03:35When he set out to film these three-metre-long predators for planet Earth,
03:39he had never been in the water with them before.
03:42But he had an idea what they might be like.
03:44I roughly think of them like little dogs, you know.
03:48And some little dogs are nice little dogs and some little dogs are nasty little dogs.
03:53Doug and the crew faced a real challenge
03:55in trying to locate these open-water wanderers in the vast expanse of the ocean.
04:01Time to throw the little dogs a bone.
04:03Which is basically a case of hanging like an onion bag
04:07full of the most disgusting offal that you can think of.
04:10Stuff that they couldn't even face putting into turkey twizzlers.
04:14And waiting for some sharks to turn up.
04:19It took us a long time to find those guys.
04:21And when we found them,
04:24there was a part of me that wished it would stop quite quickly, you know.
04:30White-tips are known man-eaters.
04:33You!
04:34Notorious for attacking torpedoed sailors in the Second World War.
04:43In the water they are flighty and unpredictable.
04:48They can switch from being quite chilled out to really hot and aggressive and bumpy.
04:54They like to give you a nudge and then give you another nudge
04:57and give you another nudge and they're sort of pushing you.
04:59Each nudge just takes you to the next level of awareness.
05:05A part of the trick with filming a shot like that in the open ocean
05:09is keeping yourself down so you can get the photography right.
05:22They're much easier to film when there's just one or two of them
05:25because you can kind of keep an eye on them.
05:27Whereas with three, you're constantly counting.
05:29It's like having three kids in the supermarket.
05:31You know, you're like one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two.
05:35You know, you turn around and nine times out of ten,
05:38the third one is just right on your shoulder blades.
05:42When things do change, when you get that shift in behaviour,
05:46then you need to be out of there and the filming needs to stop.
05:50And that's the balance.
05:58Amazing.
06:00Totally amazing.
06:16In his career as an underwater wildlifes cameraman,
06:19Doug Anderson has travelled the world,
06:22from the blue waters of the tropics to the ice floes of Africa.
06:27He's been to the islands of the Poles.
06:29But there's one place that means more to him and his family than any other.
06:35The Isle of Arran on the west coast of Scotland.
06:39Arran's where I came as a child.
06:41It's where I had my first experiences with the ocean.
06:43My dad made me a wetsuit when I was about eight years old.
06:47It was ill-fitting and cold, but I got it on in a couple of sessions.
06:51You know, sort of, I was away.
06:53It's what I did when I came here.
06:55Those first moments, I think, that people have with the ocean,
06:57wherever it is, are formative and it's immediate.
07:05For me, it was putting on a half-mask and putting my head underwater.
07:09It was a really important moment for me, you know,
07:11and it's something that I've carried on into the rest of my life.
07:18For Doug, snorkelling was just the first step
07:21towards exploring the underwater world.
07:25He was soon learning how to dive.
07:28Today, he's back in Arran,
07:30visiting the man who took him on his first diving trips,
07:33his uncle, Don McNeish.
07:37Taking anybody for their first dive is like a rite of passage, basically.
07:43And I turned to you and said,
07:45well, what did you think of that dive?
07:48Yeah, it was all right.
07:51But then, just a little smile at the side of his face appeared,
07:56and I thought, yeah, he's hooked.
07:58Yeah, that was...
08:01It was an amazing experience.
08:03That's it.
08:04Because I remember that first dive so clearly,
08:06being about 40 feet, you know, looking up at the surface,
08:09reasonably clear water, and just that...
08:12Just watching waves and just thinking,
08:14that's what it looks like, you know.
08:17It's just an extraordinary change.
08:20You know, it's really a kind of polar change
08:22in the way that you understand the ocean,
08:25and it happens all at once.
08:28I've been diving for a long time now.
08:31But I'm an image maker, really.
08:34My work is making pictures.
08:36And really, the first part of that job
08:38is about trying to unpick the behaviour,
08:40about getting to know the location and the animal and the subject
08:43and the way it behaves, and getting into the water every day
08:46and getting to know it a little bit at a time.
08:49That's wonderful.
08:55For the Life programmes,
08:57Doug made a series of dives over several evenings
09:00to unravel the mating behaviour of Australian cuttlefish,
09:04a highly intelligent species
09:06whose love lives are full of elaborate deception.
09:10It's the culture, the patterns, the intrigue.
09:13I mean, it's Shakespearean.
09:17There are big males, big butch males,
09:20that kind of muscle around and grab females.
09:25And there's these other tiny little males
09:27that are specialists in pretending to be female.
09:32These cross-dressing males hold their tentacles up
09:35in the typically dainty female posture.
09:38They even change their colour to mimic the females.
09:42It's all so that they can creep in
09:44and secretly seduce the butch male's partner.
09:48But for the little sneaks, the stakes couldn't be higher.
09:53If the big male knew they were there,
09:55they would kill them and eat them.
09:57But once they get in, they drop their guard
10:00and they're mating with the females,
10:02literally right underneath these big protective males.
10:06It's like my bath, you know,
10:08and it's all happening right in front of you
10:10and covering it is just a dream.
10:12Everywhere you look, something interesting and wonderful
10:15and beautiful is happening.
10:30The seas and oceans are full of natural wonders.
10:34But perhaps the most awe-inspiring is this.
10:40The blue whale.
10:44Up to 170 tonnes in weight,
10:46they're the biggest animals to have ever lived on our planet,
10:50dwarfing even the dinosaurs.
10:53But despite their immense size, they're fast swimming,
10:57and because of centuries of hunting, they're now very rare.
11:03In all his four decades of experience as a wildlife cameraman,
11:07Doug Allen had never managed to film a blue underwater.
11:11But on a trip to Sri Lanka for Ocean Giants,
11:15he hoped to finally get a shot of this elusive titan.
11:20Blue whales have to be on everybody's dream list.
11:22They are the biggest animals in the world.
11:24But they're not easy.
11:26They always just seem to be interested in one thing,
11:29and that's usually travelling.
11:33Doug's first attempt to get up close to a blue
11:36only underlined the extent of the challenge.
11:40This is going to be difficult.
11:42You know, those whales were...
11:44They didn't stop, they just kept going.
11:48Our only chance to get what we could of blue whales
11:51was to get in front of them when they were at the surface
11:54and then hopefully get them as they swam past.
11:58It took a long time to get in the right position.
12:02Eventually we got a shot where this enormous blue
12:05sort of appeared underneath us.
12:07And this blue whale was probably about 80 feet long,
12:10so much bigger than any other animal I had been in the water with.
12:16You know, it's like a train.
12:18It's like a train with lots of carriages on it going past.
12:21You can't actually see the whole animal in one go,
12:25and it just has these mighty powerful sweeps and then bumf,
12:28and it's away and into the blue.
12:33It was certainly the biggest whale that I've ever seen.
12:36It just looked enormous underneath me.
12:39I've waited a long time to see a blue underwater,
12:42and that was just magic.
12:49Doug Allen's career-long quest to film a blue whale
12:53highlights one of the most important and least glamorous qualities
12:57that a wildlife cameraman needs.
13:00Sheer, dogged persistence.
13:04It's not just about the days where it all works.
13:07In fact, it's really about all the other days,
13:10you know, where you wake up and you put in the hours
13:13and you've got barely enough time back in your bunk
13:16to warm up properly before the next day happens, you know,
13:19and get up the next day and you do it again.
13:22And it's just like clam diving.
13:25Clam diving was Doug's first professional job underwater.
13:29He was only in his early 20s
13:31when he started out in this notoriously tough industry.
13:35Working off the west coast of Scotland,
13:37he had to put up with gruelling conditions,
13:40but he also made lasting friendships.
13:45Doug, good to see you.
13:48Today, Doug is meeting up with one of his oldest friends
13:51from the clam boats, Martin Gorrivan.
13:55The first time you go clam diving in the west coast of Scotland,
13:58it really is an experience, you know, it's 100 feet of water,
14:01it's dark and deep and dangerous and you're by yourself.
14:05You do three dives a day,
14:07and each dive would be half an hour to an hour.
14:09If the weather was good, you kept going until you couldn't do it any longer.
14:13So I'm going to go in.
14:15Once you get good at it, you start feeling increasingly safe,
14:18but learning it is hard.
14:20If you spend a bit of time there, you just sort of think,
14:22I've done some hard hours up here,
14:24and whatever it is I do now, it's liable to be easier.
14:27There's experience as well,
14:29the range of experiences you would have had diving.
14:32I use it, I mean, I use that every day at work.
14:34You know, the skill sets that I learned there,
14:36it's what made me a diver, basically.
14:38It's that experience.
14:40It's a lot of fun.
14:42It's what made me a diver, basically.
14:44It's that time, those hours.
14:48After four years of this demanding work,
14:50Doug knew he had to get out.
14:53He still loved diving and he had a passion for photography.
14:57But what to do next?
15:01Inspiration came from a fellow Scot, Doug Allen,
15:04who at the time was filming for Life In The Freezer.
15:08I remember seeing Doug Allen's name coming up in the credits.
15:11I was just like, well, he knows a lot more about cameras than me,
15:14and he's also got the field craft,
15:16and I was like, right, how can I fix that?
15:18So I found out from someone with a naturalised genome,
15:21it was Bristol, you know, and I was like,
15:23right, well, I'd better move to Bristol,
15:25and so that's literally what I did.
15:28Doug Anderson's big break came on a shoot for the Blue Planet series.
15:33He was part of a camera team
15:35filming one of the ocean's fastest creatures,
15:39feeding on a show of sardines.
15:41The surprise arrival of a 20-ton seawhale on the scene
15:45gave him the chance to get some unexpected footage.
15:50I was just running a little bit of film
15:52and all I could see was the head of the seawhale
15:54just crashing through the brain.
15:56It was one of the most wonderful wildlife experiences of my life,
15:59but at the time it was also one of the most stressful
16:02because I thought I'd run out of film.
16:05So just about now,
16:07I'm hearing the film coming off the core in my camera
16:10and just wondering how much of that shot I got.
16:16After the shoot, Doug had to wait a nail-biting month
16:19before the film was developed
16:21to find out if he had got the key close-up.
16:25It turned out that his luck was in, but only just.
16:29The last shot came up and then the whale came up
16:32and then engulfed the shoal and then kind of fell away from me.
16:36And then the tail left frame and the whole thing went black.
16:40And there was six frames, which is about that much,
16:44between the tail leaving frame of the seawhale
16:47and the end of the row.
16:49And I was just... I just could not believe it.
16:52I was 29 years old and this is like...
16:54For a wildlife cameraman, for a young wildlife cameraman,
16:57it's like scoring a goal in the FA Cup.
17:03For wildlife cameramen, the shot is everything.
17:07They'll put up with all kinds of hardships and hazards
17:10to bring home the best footage.
17:13But this focus on the job can involve some tricky dilemmas
17:18and occasionally some less-than-gallant behaviour.
17:23I was diving with Sue, Sue was my reefer team,
17:26and we were filming humpback whales in Tonga.
17:33And purely by accident, this whale came in contact with Sue.
17:39And I think the whale had forgotten about Sue being there
17:43and really got a big surprise at contacting something in the water
17:47and it flicked its tail really hard.
17:49And this whacked Sue in the leg.
17:51And she dropped the camera.
17:54I could see Sue at the surface.
17:56I could obviously see the camera,
17:58which I knew there was a lot of good stuff on,
18:00heading for the depth.
18:02So I had to make a call, rescue Sue or get the camera up.
18:06So I made the only call a cameraman could.
18:11I got the camera up.
18:15Given the remarkable footage of humpbacks that ended up in planet Earth,
18:19perhaps Sue might forgive Doug's sense of priorities.
18:25The shoot certainly demonstrated the difficulty
18:28of filming these lively heavyweights at close quarters.
18:35But even filming small animals brings its challenges,
18:38as Doug Anderson discovered on location off Tobago for the Life series.
18:45His mission was to try to capture super-slow-motion images
18:49of flying fish skimming over the waves.
18:52The action is impressive this morning.
18:55Unpredictable, but impressive, but it's distant.
18:58It's not happening next to the boat today.
19:00Look, look, look!
19:03The only thing for it was to get out amongst the flying fish
19:07in a small inflatable.
19:09All right, let's go!
19:11This time, Doug and the team met with more success.
19:15We put this, like, £100,000 camera in a bin bag.
19:21I guess that's what...
19:23Oh, I just had the most amazing afternoon.
19:25Tons of flying fish, and I hadn't got a clue what I was doing.
19:28The whole thing happens faster than you can think,
19:31so I was just literally kind of pointing at a patch of ocean
19:34and then just whip-panning and just pre-setting the focus
19:37and hoping these fish would fly somewhere near focus,
19:40and of course they did.
19:43He had managed to capture images never before seen,
19:47flying fish taking to the air.
19:52That was amazing.
19:54We spent a long time in that wee boat today.
19:56Thanks.
19:58The last two hours were just off the scale.
20:01We were just getting shot after shot.
20:04Having succeeded in filming flying fish on the surface,
20:08it was now time to go underwater.
20:11Here, Doug could film the fish
20:13swarming around a floating palm frond to spawn.
20:23Doug was able to film the fish
20:25swarming around a floating palm frond to spawn.
20:34They're just fish everywhere.
20:36The females are spawning these sticky mast eggs.
20:39The males are coming in and clouding them with sperm,
20:41and this thing just gets thicker and thicker and thicker,
20:44and all the females want to get inside it,
20:46you know, because that's the best place to put your eggs.
20:51This female's dying in there,
20:53and the whole thing's getting heavier and heavier the whole time,
20:56so they know they've got to spawn on it before it sinks,
20:59because once it sinks, it's gone.
21:04At moments like that, we did a joke where everything was right.
21:09The light was right, blue water,
21:12the four tonnes of flying fish all going mental.
21:19Doug was naturally feeling very satisfied with his day's work.
21:23But the skipper, Barry, seemed to have something else on his mind.
21:28Barry is this unbelievably relaxed guy,
21:31but I could see him getting a tiny bit agitated, you know,
21:34and I was just like, oh, what's going on?
21:36And he was like, man, I've got to check the rudder, you know.
21:39I was like, really? OK, go ahead.
21:41I didn't really know what he was talking about.
21:43Ross sat on the back deck and he came up, he kind of cut off
21:46what was actually part of this spawning mast.
21:50The fish had started spawning on the rudder of the boat.
21:54I cleaned this off like five minutes ago, right?
21:58Right now the problem is there are too many flying fish around us.
22:03If we go through the night with the lights on and stuff,
22:06more and more and more will keep coming,
22:08and what they're doing here is they're actually laying on the boat now,
22:11so the boat has become their object, and that is not good.
22:14So basically you're worried that if we just stay on this drift,
22:17we're going to sink the boat?
22:19Five hours from now, that will be 3,000 pounds.
22:22Yeah. Yeah. In the back here.
22:24It will sink the boat.
22:26OK, so we've got to leave it in time.
22:28Yeah, we can't stay here.
22:30Not in your wildest dreams do you expect to be on a bulletin to Vago
22:34that was at risk of sinking through the spawning of flying fish.
22:38You know, but those are the good times, definitely.
22:43Some were a little bit worried about the future.
22:48Some wildlife shoots, though, are not so happy.
22:54For the Blue Planet series,
22:56Doug Allen spent six gruelling hours on the plunging deck of a boat
23:00following a pod of killer whales hunting down a grey whale and her calf.
23:07Years on, the images haven't lost any of their power to shock.
23:12We were all absolutely knackered,
23:14not just from holding the camera steady and holding it on your shoulder all that time,
23:19but just the emotional content was pretty harrowing.
23:25What the orcas were doing was trying to separate the female from her calf.
23:30It was just mayhem, really.
23:32The calf was struggling to take a breath, the female too,
23:36and yet these big killer whales there, you see, bang,
23:39right on top of the calf and just drive it down deep under the water.
23:46Look, it's actually riding on the back of the calf
23:49and it follows it around and follows it around.
23:52It was inevitable from about two hours in
23:55that these killer whales were not going to stop.
23:59They had one thing on their mind and that was to get the calf and to eat it.
24:05And it was just absolutely nature, red tooth and claw.
24:18Eventually we knew the calf was dead because all the killer whale activity stopped
24:23and they were simply diving up and down in the same place.
24:29And the female, well, there was nothing for the female to do
24:32except to carry on to the north and I suppose eventually finish her migration.
24:40When we discovered the calf the following day,
24:43I dived with it and I could see that the only thing that had been eaten
24:47was the lower jaw and the tongue.
24:51It was tough watching it, but this is what happens in nature.
24:56We just happened to be there while this rare event was happening in front of us.
25:07The world's oceans are the scene of titanic life-or-death struggles.
25:13But hidden beneath the waves are stories that are the very essence of life.
25:20And the opposite of brutal.
25:25In the shallow seas of Australia,
25:27Doug Anderson filmed the wonderfully graceful and tender courtship
25:32of the tiny, weedy sea dragon.
25:35I loved filming the sea dragons.
25:38It's genuinely one of the most beautiful, intimate moments I've had in wildlife.
25:45They're a cryptic species and I think that's what's so special about this sequence.
25:49They spend most of their life trying to look like a piece of weed and not get eaten.
25:54And just for these tiny moments of their life history,
25:58hours in their year, they get together and dance.
26:02And being there for that is just amazing.
26:05I just can't describe it.
26:13It's just around dusk, so you've just got this tiny window of light
26:17before things just get too dark.
26:19They've perhaps been checking each other out all day
26:22and the males and females come together and they start doing this mirror dance.
26:32It's really special. I remember filming this.
26:35The males just come underneath and they do this kind of rhythmic head-butting.
26:39The females sort of go on their sides and rock slightly.
26:42And then they go back to mirror and then they'll do another pirouette, another dance.
26:46And it just keeps on going.
26:54Very often it's the small stuff that I just...
26:57I just get so much enjoyment out of.
27:00So I left there very satisfied with this one.
27:04On the Isle of Arran,
27:06Doug has returned to the spot where his love of the ocean was first born.
27:12He's taken his daughter, Holly, and is teaching her how to snorkel.
27:19Giving her a taste of the same breathtaking world
27:22that inspired her father's career.
27:26It's a bit of a challenge.
27:28Giving her a taste of the same breathtaking world
27:31that inspired her father's career.
27:37I spent my whole life on the ocean, really. My whole adult life.
27:40And it's always a good place to go for solace or relaxation or invigoration.
27:45It's a place of opportunity.
27:50I really hope I can give my children enough good experiences with the ocean
27:55to give them a respect for it and everything that's in it.
28:04Sharing their experiences of the world's environments
28:07and encouraging our respect for the creatures that live in them
28:11has been the job of a group of gifted wildlife cameramen.
28:15They've faced great hardships
28:17to bring the wonders of the natural world to our screens.
28:20But in all this, one thing has remained unchanged.
28:24Their own sense of awe at the richness and fragility of the planet we all share.