#Bbc iguana escaping lots of snakes tv

“In one case a crew tied down a ferret to a rock to lure a hawk.” “When it goes further than editing footage to crews intervening with nature and potentially harming animals, that’s where it crosses the line,” she said. Ms Smaill added that there was, however, an ethical line that filmmakers should not cross. We can see the camera move, we can see changes of perspective,, we see close-ups turn to wide shots and vice versa.” The wide tracking shot as the iguana makes it escape as the snakes come out of the earth - I experienced it as a kind of horror film. “The clip from Earth is absolutely compelling filmmaking, it is suspenseful, its production values are impeccable and it makes no attempt to disguise the fact that it is stitched together.

“Most nature documentaries try to show the survival of the fittest in the most readily understandable form - a challenge, an annual pilgrimage, a miraculous escape. This is perhaps one of most dramatic and universal stories we have,” he said. “The nature documentary is really only ever about one thing: death and survival - the primal forces of natural life. University of Sydney film studies lecturer Dr Richard Smith backed Ms Smaill’s assessment, claiming that documentaries are “stitched together all the time”. “And it’s the mastery of the audio-visual, footage being sped up or slowed down to tell a story and make a spectacle.”

“Wildlife documentaries are highly crafted - it’s not a matter of ‘point the camera and shoot'”, she said. Ms Smaill said it was common practice for programmes such as BBC’s Planet Earth II to heavily edit footage for documentaries, especially when it comes to nature films and camera-shy reptiles.

#Bbc iguana escaping lots of snakes tv

But I suspect very few people gave a second thought to the plight of the snakes left hungry on the beach.“I think that in the age of reality TV and fake news, we’re well-versed as consumers and it’s up to the viewer to discern what’s true.” No surprise then to witness the relief felt when the little iguana slipped through the snakes’ constricting coils and escaped to safety. Throughout history we’ve presented the snake as a symbol of evil and danger. After all, we are most often afraid of the things we don’t understand and struggle to anticipate.

It is perhaps because snakes’ eating habits, appearance and movement is alien to us that we fear them. Once prey is consumed, the snake may not eat again for several weeks. As ectothermic – or cold-blooded – animals, reptiles only require around a tenth of the food intake of a similarly-sized mammal to survive. Evolution has instead led them to consume their prey whole, digesting bones and all. Unlike mammals, snakes don’t chew their food and have no appendages with which to carve up a share of their quarry with their kin. Collectively, the actions of these snakes can appear terrifying, but once a snake eats it loses its desire to hunt again. The time of year when these iguanas hatch is for these snakes the equivalent of Black Friday bargain hunting – it’s every snake for itself, because if they miss out here, they’ll go hungry. Rather than capturing a coordinated attack from snakes hunting as a pack, the clip from Planet Earth II actually shows a number of snakes acting individually, on instinct. And rather than hinder my career, my stand attracted BBC producers with better judgement, and eventually led to me presenting my own primetime BBC One wildlife series, Rhys Jones’s Wildlife Patrol.īut while it worked out well for me in the end, the same cannot be said for the racer snake, which has already been roundly and colourfully attacked. A couple of days later, though, I received another call telling me that the documentary had been poorly thought out and that a decision had been made to cancel the production. I remember thinking that that would be the last chance I’d ever have to work for the BBC, but also feeling that I’d made the right decision.