One of the greatest habitats of North America
are the Great Plains.
Just this huge open area which once had probably
more wild animals on it than anywhere else on earth.
It was going to be a huge challenge for us to sort of
capture all the action in such a wide-open place,
but it was probably the most exciting film
that we made for the whole of the series.
The Great Plains of North America
are most famous for the bison herds.
Once -- the estimates or the numbers
that once roamed across the North American Plains,
you know, they vary from 30 million to 60.
You know, one way or the other,
extraordinary numbers of animals.
Fortunately, some herds still do remain,
and we went to the best place on the continent,
which is Wood Buffalo National Park,
to try to recapture the spirit of those bison herds.
When you start a wildlife series and you've done
the initial research, one of the first things you do
is compile a sequence list,
sequences you'd really like to see in each program
in the series as a whole, and top of our list was this
sequence -- bison being hunted by wolves.
It was an easy choice to make.
We wanted to do it.
It doesn't happen in many places, as Keith says.
There's just a few wild bits of the plain left where you can
see this action, but, of course historically,
it was once seen and found across the whole region.
Now, sadly, it's only seen in a few places
and Wood Buffalo National Park is one.
The real challenge of doing a sequence like this
is that both bison and wolves
move huge distances, so trying to capture
the action from the ground is almost impossible.
And because of that, it's rarely been done.
You can only do it with a lot of money and
we had to think quite carefully about this sequence
because of the money involved
and what it would do to the rest of our budget
if we gave this a crack.
As you can see, we did and really I would say, 90 percent
of the action takes place, in terms of filming, from the air.
Even a shot like this is actually an aerial shot,
unbelievably enough, and this is something
that wouldn't have been possible ten years ago.
We didn't have the aerial systems that would allow us
to get steady shots of animals.
If you imagine with a wide-angle lens,
you'd have to be pretty close to the animal
with the helicopter and then you'd be scaring it.
We're filming from quite a distance
with a very long stabilized lens.
It's a helicopter mount called a Cineflex and it's really
created a huge number of opportunities for us
and this is probably its greatest demonstration.
We were really able to follow the action that
took place over several kilometers, just astonishing,
but, and this is the problem, it's a very expensive system
and the first shoot that we did with these animals
really didn't work as well as we'd hoped.
We had sort of tantalizing glimpses.
We had wolves chasing bison, but just not enough to really
do justice to the scene and certainly not enough for
the scale of production that we were trying to create
and so we were a bit dejected after the first shoot.
We'd spent quite a lot of money on aerial filming and we had to
really ask ourselves some hard questions as to
whether we should invest again in this sequence.
We decided to do that, partly because we felt that
having learned so much on the first shoot, we could
really put all that experience into practice for the second.
What you're seeing now was almost all filmed
on the second shoot and the gamble paid off.
It cost us quite a lot of money, but it was worth it because
I think this is one of the most dramatic and poignant
sequences we filmed for the whole series.
It took about 160 hours of helicopter time so an awful lot.
And incredible skill, not just of the camera operator,
you imagine he's just doing this looking down a viewfinder
within a helicopter and controlling the camera
remotely, but also the pilot.
So often, some of these incredible angles that look
as though they're almost shot from the ground;
the pilot is having to get the helicopter really low.
He's also got to make sure his helicopter is not disturbing
the animals in any way, so he's got to find that optimum place
where he can hover with the helicopter
and not disturb the action,
and allow for these amazing shots.
The teamwork between the pilot and the cameraman
is utterly crucial to be able to deliver scenes like this.
It's a new form of filmmaking that we've only recently got
into, but by doing it this way, we're able to film wildlife
scenes that we could only have dreamt of just ten years ago.
Clearly what you don't want to have happen in a moment
like this, is for the pilot to say, sorry guys,
I'm out of fuel, we're going to have to leave.
(laughing)
Believe you me, it happens but fortunately on this case,
this whole hunt was one event.
But it did take several hours so we were really pushed
to the very edge of the fuel stores of the helicopter.
Absolutely.
So often in wildlife filmmaking, you spend
days, hours, or a huge amount of time, but
the key moment happens in ten or 15 minutes.
Or certainly, you know, just one good day is
enough to make a huge difference to a film,
but to get that one good day,
you have to put in months of work.
One of the great things about this sequence
is that we had all the drama of the wolf hunt,
but then the calf gets away.
We all think it's the best of both worlds.
The thing about the Great Plains as well
is their exposure.
There's this huge expansive flat land and it's completely
exposed to the cold Arctic air that can blast down
from the north, and the really hot tropical air
that can come up from the Gulf of Mexico.
It's a weather battleground and that's why
on the Great Plains, you have all the greatest
records of temperature change, extreme weather
like tornadoes and so on and so forth.
It's probably the most exposed landscape in the world.
And it was really important that we could actually show
how this place is being shaped by its geology.
Shaped by the fact that it's just this huge open corridor
and a battleground where huge weather storms
play out every year.
And actually, Huw, it was your job to go and film this stuff.
Yep, and it was a very memorable experience.
We talked about the battles between wildlife,
but high on our list was also the weather battles
that Keith just mentioned, and trying to capture the
sheer force of some of this weather was a huge challenge.
What you're seeing now are great super cells
sweeping across the Plains now.
These super cells are what form tornadoes.
You can't have a tornado without a super cell and a super cell
looks like a circular, it's like a vortex of cloud
but you can have a super cell without a tornado.
The only real way of getting these weather phenomenon
is just to follow them.
We drove thousands and thousands of kilometers with
storm chasing experts trying to capture these images.
They last a very, very short time.
It's fine if you're a stormchaser, you can
shoot through the window of your vehicle.
You can stop for ten seconds and as soon as it gets
dangerous, fly back into the vehicle and drive away.
For us to capture these images in ways in which
hadn't been done before, we didn't want shaky
wobbly footage through windscreens.
We wanted timelapses which take quite a lot of time.
If you imagine you're only filming
a few frames per second, it takes quite a long time
to get a shot and it was incredibly frustrating
to see huge opportunities of these super cells forming
and tornadoes and then having to jump back in
the car, really, before they got going,
because of the dangers to us.
You just can't allow some of these storms
to get too close to you.
Now one of the quirkiest animals on the Plains,
of course, is the prairie dog and the prairie dog once
was like the bison, an animal that sort of
stretched across these vast, vast areas,
in their millions, and they form these dog towns,
and it was kind of crucial that we actually could
explain really how these dog towns kind of function
and the challenge it is to be a small animal
living in such an exposed place.
Prairie dogs are really the meerkats of North America.
I absolutely love these little guys.
I was very fortunate enough to spend a year filming
in the Badlands in the '90s,
and we were doing a film on prairie dogs
so I got to know them very, very well
and they are just such characters.
Apart from being characters like meerkats,
they do underpin the entire ecosystem of the Plains.
Without prairie dogs, you just don't have
all the range of species that you'll see in this film.
I always felt very frustrated that ranchers and farmers
living around these areas would be so determined
in ridding their land of prairie dogs for sort of
fairly spurious reasons, as far as I am concerned.
But they would always talk about liking golden eagles
and liking hawks and so on, but you don't
get those animals without prairie dogs.
They're tough little customers.
They've withstood several decades, well, probably 100
years of persecution and they're still going strong in places
and you can see their toughness in this sequence.
You know, when faced with a rattlesnake,
they're quite happy to give it a go.
The rattlesnakes are a threat to their babies.
The rattlesnakes also use prairie dog tunnels
and burrows to hibernate in.
I mean, they wouldn't use an active one, but most
of what exists, most small animals that live on
the prairies, actually, in some ways,
use prairie dogs or prairie dog systems for survival.
And it's an extraordinary to say the prairie dog, the way it
churns up the soil across the Plains and what have you,
they are the, in a funny way, they are kind of,
they used to be the farmer of the Plains.
But also the way they create these huge networks of burrows.
The thing about the Plains is it is this completely
treeless environment and there's really
no place to hide, and across most places
in the world, there's some kind of shelter
created by usually trees where you can either
use to nest or escape or gain some kind of shade.
On the Plains, the only thing that you've got are prairie dog
burrows and the remarkable story of the burrowing owl
is that it comes all the way from Mexico.
It wants to feed on these really, really
fertile grasslands, the huge insect boom
that happens every summer,
but it's got this problem.
Most owls nest in trees and need that protection,
but the burrowing owl has come to this really strange
solution for a bird and it's to nest underground.
And one of the interesting things about these
ground-nesting burrowing owls is that
the chicks, as a sort of a defense, can make
the sound of a rattlesnake when they're disturbed.
So if anything comes down the tunnel and they don't
know what it is, they'll make the sound of a rattlesnake.
They will literally sound... and it gave me the shock
of my life once when we were filming burrowing owls
for this particular program, very, very convincing sound.
And I guess the ol' rattlesnake trick works
on even sort of badgers, which is,
quite funny, we all come from the UK where the
badger is thought of as being a nice, cuddly creature.
Well on the Plains, the American badger is anything but.
It's a pretty serious predator.
And it can outdig a backhoe so it's a real threat to
any of these ground-dwelling animals.
But we never expected this -- what you're about to see
with this mobbing behavior by the burrowing owl.
I've never seen that before.
It's quite extraordinary that this little chap, who is a tiny
little owl, goes head to head with the badger.
It's a great privilege we have as wildlife filmmakers,
we get paid to spend days, months, out in the field just
watching these animals and by spending all this time
just being out there with them, you see
these amazing events and hopefully film them.
It's an extraordinary place, the Plains, and the landscapes
that this exposure and the weather which form
are incredible, but I guess the most iconic
incredible place is the legendary Badlands.
Somebody asked me the other day, what landscape
would you recommend for people to visit,
what would be the top of your list?
For me, without a shadow of a doubt,
somewhere high on that list is this place,
the Badlands, Badlands National Park.
As I mentioned, I was very lucky to have spent a year
in this place and if you're even vaguely close to
the Badlands of South Dakota,
you should do a detour to see this
because it's totally other-worldly.
It's like a place lost in time.
Apart from these eroded sandstone hills and mountains,
you have these tablelands of prairie and you're really seeing
a little bit of the prairie as it was all those years ago.
One of the great predators of the prairie are the ferruginous
hawks, which is the animal you can see now.
We thought it would be a relatively straightforward
process finding a ferruginous hawk nest in the Plains, but no.
The year we tried, there was a really sort of, it turned out
to be a really bad season for ferruginous hawk nesting.
And Ed Charles, our assistant producer, traveled thousands
of miles looking for nests and he had a lot of expert advice
from scientists and National Park people and
he checked out probably 17, maybe 20 nests
and all but one of them had either been
abandoned or had gone unused.
And so even a sequence you think relatively
straightforward, filming a hawk in a nest,
turned out to be a major battle.
The conditions were so bad that year that the parent birds
just abandon their chicks in some cases.
So he'd find nests and think, "God, that's a great nest!
Brilliant!"
And he'd watch it for a bit and realize
that actually it wasn't viable.
The chicks were either dead in it or the eggs
had been abandoned or hadn't even been used.
So this nest you're seeing is the only nest he could find
after having driven thousands of miles
across two or three states.
You can see the challenges that the bird has to
put up with, I mean, it's nesting on these
very exposed outcrops in the full sun.
And in the summer in the Badlands, or the Plains
up in the north here, it can go way into the 40s.
Obviously the Plains have got spectacular big animals
but there's also a lot of little tiny ones and some
really, really extraordinary creatures that live
within the grass blades.
I guess the most extraordinary of all has got to be
this little fella, he's the jumping spider and
he's just a cartoon character, isn't he?
Just extraordinary faces and animal behavior,
but this little chap, he's the size of a pinhead.
He's tiny, tiny, tiny!
The technical challenge for the cameraman,
Alastair MacEwen, to film this was just huge.
Everything has to be shot with macro lenses and you have
sort of a tiny area which can be kept in focus,
and of course, jumping spiders jump.
They move incredibly fast so that combination of having such
a small depth of field and such a rapidly moving animal
is really, really tough, but I think this is a sequence
that very few people would ever see the like of before.
It's revealing, but incredibly entertaining.
Our inspiration for this sequence when we
were cutting it together was Wall-E.
These little jumping spiders reminded us of that character
from the animation film and I think we used
some of the sound effects to add character to them,
but you barely need to do that.
I mean, look at the way they sort of look and move.
Most people say that you have to be a mammal to develop
character, but I think this is an exception to the rule
for sure and it's probably their forward-facing eyes that do it.
You can look an animal in the face and look at their eyes,
it's much easier to make a connection.
And also the great drama of, you've got this courtship
dance and if the guy gets it wrong, he's dead.
The girl will kill him.
That would be quite a tough act, wouldn't it?
Going on the dance floor and knowing actually your
routine is life or death and that's how it is
for the poor little male jumping spider.
And these are the actual sound effects they make.
These were recorded by the team at the time...
quite extraordinary.
They've got these very tiny little microphones
that get right up close to the action.
And then the moment of truth.
Guess this is jumping spider paradise.
And he lived to tell the tale.
I'd like to just add that no jumping spiders were
harmed in the filming of this sequence.
A few got eaten though.
Then from, well, there's the little to the biggest,
and back to the bison herd.
The big event for the bison every year is of course
the autumn rut, late summer rut.
It's a really difficult thing to film because
these are big, dangerous animals.
You want to be mobile but you also want to be close
to the action and to get stable, stable shots.
Gavin Thurston and Adam Chapman,
who worked on this scene, they worked out
this very cunning plan of stripping off the helicopter
camera, the Cineflex, and sticking it on an ATV which
allowed them to be able to drive right into the herds.
I mean, if you're on foot and you get hit by a couple of these
guys in full fight, you're dead, but actually getting in the ATV
and being able to drive around with a stabilized camera
gave them a bit of protection, and also,
the ability to follow the action.
The thing on your side is the bull bison is so preoccupied
with what they're doing, they're not really interested in you.
The dangers come from them sort of barging into you
by mistake, but try getting close to a bull bison
outside the rut and it's potentially fatal.
So for this two week window, you can actually get close
to bison bulls and not be in any danger
as a result of being close to them.
Now this was one of the most, I think,
one of the most remarkable sequences we filmed.
Generally speaking, the cats of North America are
some of the most elusive in the world, you know,
it's funny, I spent a lot of time filming in Africa.
You can go into National Park, you drive around lions
and cheetahs and that, so on and so forth.
You can't do that in North America.
The cats are very, very elusive and this is,
obviously the cougars and what have you,
are incredibly elusive, but the bobcat
is also a very seldom seen animal
but we happened to find this location.
Actually a fantastic stills photographer tipped us off of
this place where wild bobcats had got completely used to
the presence of people and it's probably the first time
someone's been able to go out in the field and literally just
walk around with wild bobcats and follow them hunting.
It's a very, very special sequence of them trying to
catch this gopher and this is something like, again,
it's the sort of scene that before we started the series,
we would have never dreamt was going to be possible.
One of the funny things about this bobcat is that it was
living in a National Park where there were quite a few people
but it was just amazing how many people visited this place
and didn't notice the bobcat because it's still incredibly
good at remaining unseen.
So if it doesn't want to come out, if it doesn't want to be
seen by people, it has a remarkable ability to go under
the radar and our team needed to sort of get their eye in,
if you like, but once you get your eye in, this is the result.
You can spend huge amounts of time with it and actually begin
to piece together a genuine piece of behavior which I think
hitherto this, was incredibly difficult, but when we're out
filming this sequence, members of the public would
come up to the team and ask what they were doing.
When they pointed out the bobcat, it was like,
wow, I didn't even see that.
I've come here every week, every month, or every day,
I've never seen one.
To be able to get close-ups like this of a wild bobcat,
it's really very, very special.
Previously, when we filmed these animals,
they had been sort of a long, long way away
and sort of little snapshots.
Or if you do see a bobcat that close, you can be fairly
sure that it's a tame one or in a set or something.
But I can tell you that not a single shot
of a bobcat in this sequence came from
a captive animal or a trained animal.
It's all completely wild.
That's something we set out to do with this series.
We wanted it to be wild animals in wild places and I think
that gives the series a real sense of authenticity.
And then as the seasons change in the Plains,
we get to the next big part of our story
which was the coming of the fall and winter.
You get these huge migrations of cranes
coming across the Plains.
The Plains are a very important stop-off place for, especially
sandhill cranes, and we went to the best sites for filming
these huge aggregations, but then something
happened which took us all by surprise.
There was one of these snap changes in the weather
and it got very cold and we started to get a snowstorm
and started to get these cranes caught in the snow.
It's very seldom seen and it just gave another one of those
kind of magical moments that really sums up
everything about North America.
It's always the land of the unexpected.
And as soon as the weather cleared,
the cranes would move on again.
Filming the winter on the Plains was probably
one of the toughest things our cameramen had to do
because it's just so exposed.
It gets so cold in winter.
It puts all sorts of pressure on the teams, in terms of
the clothing they have the use,
keeping the camera kit going.
It was a tough one.
Yes, because as Keith says,
the biggest challenge is trying to get around.
Once you've got several feet of snow,
it's almost impossible to walk through it.
You can ski, you can snowmobile,
you can sledge, but there are some animals
you just can't keep up with using those modes of
transport and we were very keen to capture an event that's
been going on for hundreds of thousands of years.
It was only really going to be possible by using helicopters
again, and using that gyro- stabilized camera system.
The scene we're about to see is the migration of
the pronghorn, this very strange-looking antelope,
the only antelope in North America.
A very odd-looking animal and for many, many millennia,
it's been migrating with the winter and
they form these rather large herds.
And especially when they're spooked,
they can run pretty darn quickly and in this case,
they were spooked by those coyotes.
These scenes you're looking at,
that was filmed from a helicopter.
I mean, extraordinary, and again, to be able to
capture this scene, not just the behavior of
the animals and this migration, but to sort of
put it in context in this incredible open landscape.
They're amazing.
This is the fastest animal in North America.
It can clock about 40, 45 miles an hour,
and it evolved that speed to escape a cheetah
that's now long extinct on the Plains.
It's interesting that the pronghorn choose to migrate
and to escape the winter but the bison,
they have to tough it out.
Our poor teams have to tough it out with the bison
to film them doing this.
One of the things that people think when they watch
scenes like this is that the animals are getting cold.
No, it's only the camera teams that get cold.
The animals don't get cold.
They are so well adapted to these conditions
that they don't get cold.
I mean, they're not going to freeze to death.
The bison is incredibly well protected by its thick hide
and fur, but what kills animals in the winter is lack of food.
I mean, obviously if your food source is completely covered
by snow and these are grazers, the grasseaters,
the grass has stopped growing,
so they're having to survive on really meager rations
and that's what kills bison.
We did film a rather sort of poignant scene of a young
bison giving up on life, this one here.
It became, we don't know what happened exactly,
but it just became weaker and weaker.
Probably something to do with food or it's possible it had
some sort of virus or illness but it wouldn't have been cold.
It stayed alive and covered in snow for quite a while,
but eventually, it did die and the winter does kill
a lot of animals in this part of North America
and it's just that lack of food.
They've got to struggle through several months of
vile conditions before the good grazing starts again.
Now when winter really sort of sets in in North America,
there's this incredible phenomenon,
the aurora borealis.
I was lucky enough to go up to northern Canada.
We were actually filming polar bears at the time,
but I actually witnessed the aurora for myself
and it's such an extraordinary site.
You can only film it using timelapse cameras
because there's so little light coming off it.
You have to have quite long exposure.
Actually whenever you film it, it always is moving
a lot faster than it does in reality.
In reality, it's moving slowly and you can see
the three dimensional nature of it and you can see
why people used to find it so magical and mystical.
Now one of the most interesting animals
in the winter on the Plains is the red fox.
We wanted to show, obviously, that some animals can just
tough out the winter and get through it that way,
but other animals have to be smart to get through winter
and there's no little animal that's smarter than this guy.
I mean, he knows that there's little rodents sort of living
in tunnels, grazing the grass through the winter,
but somehow, he's got to actually catch one
through a couple of feet of snow, maybe more.
They've worked out this technique where they can use
their hearing to sort of radar in on that sound and then they
launch themselves in the air and try to bomb it through,
through the snow and remarkably,
they can make a living this way.
I like this shot because he almost like he turns
to the cameraman and says, be quiet!
When you see a sequence like this, it sort of belies
the difficulties and we were so close, we're seeing such
great action and we're seeing a lot of behavior.
It seems like, hey, this must have been a relatively
easy sequence to film, but it wasn't.
That's the thing about cutting out all the boring bits.
It still required many weeks.
In fact, we filmed this sequence over two different seasons
to get all the shots you see.
Sometimes the fox would just disappear for some time.
I mean, it was fairly well habituated,
that means it didn't mind humans.
We filmed it in Yellowstone, but it wasn't there for us.
It had a very big job to do, it had to find enough rodents
to survive so it would move quite some distance across
these snowy Plains and our cameramen had to follow it
when it did so and it wasn't always possible.
These sequences, these shots, were filmed over quite
a long period of time to try to piece together
this amazing behavior of the red fox.
Finally gets his mouse.
This is a scaled up red fox, the coyote, another incredibly
resourceful, adaptable animal, very, very impressive.
Now one of the things about North America
is the scale of its spectacles.
I've been very lucky to have traveled all over the world and
I've seen some great spectacles, but I want to say
about North America is that it's the number of them,
and then individually, some of the most impressive
aggregations of animals you'll ever see, and you'd
be hard pressed to find something more impressive
in terms of numbers, than this,
the aggregations of snow geese.
They are moving up and down North America twice a year
and they gather in these enormous flocks and this is
one of their staging posts in Missouri.
When they arrive, the lake in which they hoped would be clear
was frozen, and this presented a really big opportunity
for the bald eagles and they too have flown here.
Some of them, a few I think, are resident year-round,
but most of them actually come here to
make the most of this opportunity.
This shot, we had to run this shot as long as it did,
it's just phenomenal, it just keeps coming.
In fact, we probably could have run it another ten or so
seconds...just phenomenal, phenomenal numbers
of birds and just so beautiful.
Wave after wave of...
It's like a blizzard actually, isn't it?
Yeah, and the funny thing is that with the snow geese
that on the water, they can take off so quickly that
a bald eagle could never catch a snow goose, or on land.
They're only vulnerable when they're stuck on the ice.
Yeah, because bald eagles, they're an absolutely stunning
eagle, very large eagle, and you can see why they've been
chosen as the national bird of North America,
but they're actually quite a gentle eagle.
They're very nervous about going for live prey of this size
and so they want the prey to be somewhat handicapped before
they're willing to take a chance on it and even then, they seem
a little bit reluctant to sometimes move in for the kill.
So what they do here is they fly over the great flocks of snow
geese and they spook them so the geese fly up into the air
and in the confusion, birds will collide with each other
and injure themselves.
Like here, so this is a snow goose that's obviously
had some sort of collision and can't fly.
This is one who's obviously got a broken leg.
Any birds that remain on the ice and are injured, then become
targets for the bald eagles, so it's a really
interesting tactic and I don't think it's one
that many people knew about.
We sort of pieced it together over several weeks.
In fact, again, this sequence was filmed over two seasons,
but it was quite a surprise to me to know that
an animal as large and as powerful as
the bald eagle was actually quite reluctant to tackle
prey like this unless it had some sort of handicap.
You wouldn't see that with a golden eagle.
I guess, you know, the bald eagle is really a fish eagle.
It's evolved to catch fish and this is just it being
opportunistic and coming in on a windfall.
Quite extraordinary spectacle there.
The strange thing about the Plains as well is that you
always think that at springtime would be the time when
the Plains are at their wettest and moist
and so on and so forth, but actually,
they're tinder-dry and not very productive at all.
It's a time when the birds that live there, especially these
prairie chickens have to come together to mate so that
their chicks are ready, hatching, at the point
where the Plains become productive again.
Now this dance, this kind of gathering of birds,
biologists call it a lek, is one of the most
extraordinary sites on the North American continent.
To film this scene, we had to use hides.
You couldn't just sort of sit out in the open
with these chaps.
We had to get our cameramen in the hide well before it got
light and there he would sit for hour after hour, day after day,
and I think it's very easy to say week after week too,
to sort of piece this together.
The behavior happened over a relatively
short period of time, but again,
we filmed it over two seasons, but the prairie
chickens, I think it's fair to say, definitely got used to
the hide because in many cases the birds would come and
sit on top of the hide and look out for prairie chicken
females, so they used it to their advantage.
Quite frustrating when you're a cameraman sitting in a hide
and your subject is sitting above you out of sight.
I always loved this shot, that little leg coming up
over the back of the chicken.
It always struck me as being very mammalian, this shot
and they're definitely animals with character.
We refer to them as ninja chickens for obvious reasons
as you can see, well, you'll soon see from the fights.
This really tinder-dry time on the Plains,
it's the most dangerous time for Plains fires.
Obviously, it's a natural kind of cycle, but we definitely
needed to include this in the story
of the Plains and try to find new ways of being
able to sort of film the drama of these big fires
based from the ground, but also taking to the air,
and using slow motion and all sorts of different techniques
to get across the power of these great grassland fires
that happen every springtime.
You can imagine when the Plains were so much bigger
two centuries ago, these fires would have been
absolutely monstrous as they sort of swept across
thousands of miles of open grassland.
And to show the Plains regenerate again, we wanted
to sort of make it sort of a magical sequence
so we used a technique called lapsed time.
Basically what you do is you do one shot when the Plains have
just been recently burnt and then you come back and when
the grass is regenerated, you see it happening here,
and you actually film it again and then you mesh
these two shots together and you just see
the whole plain green up before your eyes.
And then this was -- so often in films, there are all these
fantastic shots that the cameramen shoot,
different animals that you didn't really have
a developed story for, but it's lovely to have
an opportunity to sometimes bring all those shots together
into a music sequence like this and just
create something that's magical...
Because that's what the Plains are...
they're just magical.