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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Wildlife Filmmaker - Everybody's faking it

Interesting, but I have issue with someone who made his career doing something and on the verge of retirement says "I have to stand up and do something about what I feel is wrong." Come on...you couldn't have a moral awakening during your career rather than at the end of it?
 
It's high time that an insider stands up and says "Wait. What we're doing is wrong and unethical." I'm 63 years old, and my career is coming to an end...
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What a total and complete douchebag!
 
Yeah, it's kind of convenient to come out now, after your retired, and stand for what's right. Putting jelly beans in dead carcases for the bears.... never imagined.
 
Truth in documentaries

Truth in documentaries

While it is true that there are some professionals in natural history television production that actually do camp out and wait all summer for the lion to come out of its den (or whatever) almost all animal footage has some contrivance about it, even if its just altering the chronology of events. Often, it takes a great deal of skill to really fake something effectively. As I recall, a British cameraman once raised some geese at home, personally so they would follow him, and then drove along in a jeep with the geese flying overhead (10 feet off the ground) shooting up at them as if they were in the sky. It was a perfect shot of geese in flight from 5 feet away.

The truth is that there is very little in documentary production that is not contrived at one level or another. All of film making requires a kind of slight of hand to convince the audience that what they are seeing is something worth caring about. The real truth is that reality is dull, even for wild animals.
 
Folks fake stuff? I'm shocked! Next thing you'll hear is that models don't actually look like that or scientists were faking global warming data. Incredulous!
 
Mark Phelan said:
Folks fake stuff? I'm shocked! Next thing you'll hear [...] scientists were faking global warming data.
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If you hear that you're most likely hearing unsubstantiated falsehoods spread by ideologues who have no basis for the accusations and are attacking respectable thoroughly investigated professionals who made no mistake but to find data that disagrees with the political ideology of those with little understanding of actual science.

Sorry to Godwin the thread but I'm not just going to ignore witch hunts regardless of their context.
 
It's easy to be an armchair politician with a high degree of self-justification. Doubly so if you are retiring and soon to go out of the picture.
This is like saying "SCREW YOU!" to everyone at the office when you just handed in your letter of resignation. Sure, it might feel good, but aren't you really just being an asshole who couldn't stand up for his point of view before you had nothing to lose? (after all, they can't really fire you twice...) :dupe:
 
Faking is not evil. What is worse is not getting the job done, and letting down your sponsors. Been shooting nature documentary for many years, and you always grab every opertunety.
 
I worked in wildlife documentaries for a number of years before jumping over to movies and commercials. We faked things all the time. Sometimes big fake outs, like filming wolves in fenced areas. Most times it was small fakes though, like having our guides find the animal in the wild for our host to "discover". There was lots and lots of small fakes like that during our filming, but we always tried to do it as "real" as conditions and situations allowed us to. Sometimes we didn't fake anything but the timeline. In TV that is almost never real.

I never felt unethical about faking anything for TV, because the shows I worked for ultimately benefited the species we were filming...except once. I remember a Peruvian Native brought us a snake we were looking for while filming deep in the jungle. This seemed like the perfect solution for us, because we were running out of time and that snake was hard to locate. It was a beautiful specimen, but when we pulled it from the bag we noticed it was injured. It had been so stressed that it gave itself a large bowel ulceration. Snakes rarely survive this type of injury and I knew it. It was terribly sad for me as I am a lover of all animals, but reptiles especially. Despite the snake's condition, we shot the scene anyway. It is the one time in my career I felt like I crossed an ethical line. One could argue that the snake was going to die regardless, but that didn't help me sleep at night. So, I guess my point is that sometimes there are unintended consequences for faking reality, and it is our responsibility as filmmakers to minimize the risk to the animals we are filming. I learned it the hard way...poor old snake :(
 
I'd love to hear what Kennan Ward has to say on this subject.
 
There have been many times when I have been somewhere on a walk in the woods and observed something, an animal, like a squirrel, that I need as a cutaway. But somehow if I have taken the Red and tripod, etc. and look for it I don't find it. You know putting out a pile of nuts works pretty well. This is a business, and sometimes we need the shot and don't need to waste time.

Crossing moral boundaries is a different issue, but using simple wisdom to get the results you need is just expeditious.
 
Get controversal feeling reading this. I very much agree on this sound part. Unfortunately, very often even in the wilderness there's a lot of man made noise: airplanes flying on the sky, distant cars or skidos, other people and so on. There's more this kind of background noise that what one probably guesses. For instance, last summer I was filming quite far from any people and suddenly realized that I hear the commentary of the football/soccer World Cup final in my earphones. The parabolic microphone picked the background noise while I tried to capture the extremely low sounds of goldeneye ducks. Later on the same evening I heard on the earphones a couple arguing on a boat couple miles away from me.

But, to argue "all" is a bold statement, although obviously, all cameras create illusions. Sometimes I shoot along some highway or birds sitting on a tree in the middle of some town. By careful framing all man made elements disappear. In edit if such a footage is put next to something shot in the real wilderness, nobody is able to recognize it. Is this cheating or not, I don't know. I would rather say, that's what cameras tend to do. They always pick only a certain fragment of reality.

I feel confident that here in Scandinavia people shoot bears, wolverines and wolves only out there in the forest and not in a zoo. For the very reason that there are only a small number of such zoos and everybody would recognize the landscape. But yes, food is taken to the animals into the forest, but still, the animals come and go freely. One is neither able to control the animals in any manner. And the people I know definitely wait days even weeks for the right moment of light to pick the image they are seeking for. Some are very tough, or should I say stubborn to pick an image of the right moment they have had in mind for a long time.

The same goes with birds. They are also often feeded, but definitely not all shots are taken this way. A great portion of wildlife documentary relies on knowledge. By experience people know where the birds and predators can be found at a certain moment of year and day and when the conditions, especially light, are the best for shooting.

I guess all people in wildlife documentaries have to make their own decisions. Personally, in my childhood I've spent weeks in the middle of nowhere in a real wilderness. With my brothers we use to hike a lot in the woods fishing and picking berries, and every now and then we wittnessed a spectacular moment when saw some birds or animals somewhere around. I know that this is what I subconciously try to capture on my Red raids. For this reason feel truly satisfied only when I'm able to shoot wild and free animals in the real wilderness, and try to do everything to get as many footages like this.

Guess it is in the genes of human beings to suspect other people for one's own faults. So whenever read stuff like this I wonder, if this is how one works, is this also the reason why one claims everybody else works in the same way. Still, I agree, there is some thruth on this, but the reality I'm aware of is not even nearly as gray as this text lets the reader to understand.

After thought: The black woodpecker in my avatar built last April a nest in an aspen only 10 meters from an unpaved road. The nearest buildings are about 150m from this location. I sat in a hide following the birds. The question is, does this background info make the footages/photos any better or worse? Does somebody definitely want to know the nest was close to a distant road, and may one say this is a wild animal?
 
I suppose if things weren't done to entice animals to work for the camera, wildlife docs would be mostly shots of walking/hiking, then a few shots of "okay" wildlife material, and then one or two "great shots" at the very end. All spread over about 20 hours of footage. Or about 4 minutes of actually interesting footage.

Let's just hope they don't unionize, eh? Organic jellybeans only, people!
 
If "reality tv" is as fake as it is, how can we expect anything other than fiction to be realistic?
 
Part of this discussion/revulsion is where is the line drawn when obtaining an image? A similar conversation is going on about the latest "Supercell" photo popping up everywhere by Sean Heavey about it being HDR versus non-HDR. Some folks are adamant that the image is real while others swear it's HDR. I can only imagine what will happen when Epic rolls around with HDRx!

But cannot the same be said about Ansel Adams? I absolutely love his images, but were they manipulated in the darkroom? Without question. Where does art stop and factual footage begin? Choosing film stock is even a choice that presents compromises. So when shooting "nature" footage, to communicate an idea or concept, what is permissible and what is not? I'm sure we can all agree on certain issues, but the gray areas are where the true discussion lies. How far can you "tweak" a model, or lion, or tigers or bears, before it becomes "fake"? Is there ANY truth in advertising?

I feel like I'm in an NPPA breakout session here.
 
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