If you’ve ever spent time watching lions – which are quite capable of sleeping for 22 hours in a single day – you might find it hard to believe that predators are the hardest working animals on the planet. Nevertheless, this statement is true. The statistics bear it out – when it comes to hunting, predators fail most of the time. From an evolutionary perspective they would have to. If they didn’t the prey would all be eaten and the predators would starve. Sounds obvious but you would be excused for not being aware of this fact as natural history films typically show predators at their best, with sequences invariably ending in the ‘money shot’ – or the moment when the predator catches its prey.
The hardest working animals on the planet! Leopards need to get a lot of rest – only 1 in 7 hunts are successful.
In the real world, survival is a daily battle for predators and it’s this struggle that we wanted to show in The Hunt. Rather than portraying them as ‘red in tooth and claw’, the main aim of this series was to get the audience to feel sympathy for our star predators. It was a tall order given our natural affinity for the underdog but ‘failure’ was our trump card. The predator may appear to hold all the cards but in any contest between hunter and hunted both are running for their lives and the outcome is never certain.
On the hunt – a pack of wild dogs looking for wildebeest
Predators face numerous challenges. They must overcome not just their prey’s significant defences, but also the challenges of their environment. How, for instance, do you get close to your prey on an open plain, where there’s nowhere to hide? How do you even find your prey when you live in thick forest? To understand these challenges it was important to get right alongside our predators as they hunted. To do that we used the very latest gyro-stabilized camera systems (or Cineflex) , which Jamie McPherson, our cameraman, found a way to mount on a range of vehicles and boats – even on an elephant.
The cineflex – gyro stabilized camera system used for filming hunts on the move.
For the wild dog sequence we hung the Cineflex off a scaffolding frame attached to the bonnet of our vehicle. This allowed us to travel with the pack as they hunted wildebeest at 40mph, without missing a moment of the drama. (Fortunately, the location had no aardvarks, and few porcupines, which meant we didn’t have to worry about suddenly dropping, at speed, into a three foot hole and crippling ourselves and a £500K camera!). We skirted over the final kill, which would have done little to create sympathy for the dogs, but following all the toing and froing of the chase it’s hard not to be impressed by the huge effort the pack made to get a meal.
Tracking wild dogs at 40mph
At the other end of the spectrum we used the Cineflex to film the slow motion stalk of a leopard. With the camera hanging off a jib arm we were able to get the camera at leopard head height to, once again, feel right in with the action. During the course of the filming we also used this system to film many other kinds of hunts, including orcas hunting whale calves, tigers stalking chital, polar bears sneaking up on seals and flying fish being pursued by dorado and frigate birds.
So, did we change people’s perception of predators? Well, if the reactions of the Googglebox contributors are anything to go by, yes. They celebrated the efforts of the wild dogs and even cheered on the skinny polar bear as it tried to stalk a seal.
And after 25 years making wildlife films it was nice to go on shoots where getting the ‘money shot’ wasn’t the benchmark of success.
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The Hunt is nominated for Best Natural History Documentary at The Grierson Awards 2016.
Alistair Fothergill, Huw Cordey for Silverback Films, BBC, BBC Worldwide, BBC America, The Open University, CCTV9, NDR Naturfilm; first shown BBC One
