BLUE PLANET SEA OF LIFE FULL
BLUE PLANET SEA OF LIFE TRIAL
BLUE PLANET SEA OF LIFE SERIES

BLUE PLANET SEA OF LIFE SERIES

And don't get me wrong, those animals are cool, but for me the real pleasure of Blue Planet and its sister series (such as the famous Planet Earth) is the chance to discover something brand new, something incredibly unique. Among the fish, it's the sharks that dominate. Whales, dolphins, and seals dominate the series, with penguins, polar bears, and sea turtles probably getting more than their share of screen time as well.

BLUE PLANET SEA OF LIFE FULL

Watching some episodes, it would be easy to get the idea that the sea is almost exclusively full of mammals. If I have one quibble with Blue Planet, it's that its focus is a little. Over the course of a year and a half, hagfish, sleeper sharks, and other scavengers reduce the behemoths to bones. The first episode, for instance, features footage of the carcass of a gray whale, having sunk to the bottom of the sea. Some of the most spectacular footage comes from the bottom of the ocean, where scientists and filmmakers use submersibles similar to those used to explore the Titanic to investigate life in one of the most inhospitable environments we could imagine. The fifty-minute episodes of the series explore a variety of marine habitats, such as coastlines, frozen seas, and the open ocean.

In reality, it is home to habitats and ecosystems as diverse from each other as are the habitats on dry land.

The ocean is often treated monolithically, as one entity of unbroken water. For example, three years were devoted to solving on of the persistent questions of marine mammal biology - where do blue whales go on migration? It seems remarkable that, for the single largest animal that has ever lived, we didn't know the answer to such a basic question before, but it just goes to show how mysterious much ocean life is. Many of the behaviors and species featured had not been filmed before, and the filmmakers crossed the boundary between documenting and discovering. Filmed over five years at approximately 200 locations (and narrated by Sir David!), Blue Planet is the most ambitious, complete overview of ocean life on earth. We’ve taken technology to places where it was probably never meant to go.In an effort to correct this, BBC Natural History Unit (the same studio that produced Life in Cold Blood) has produced one of the most spectacular documentary series every filmed - The Blue Planet: Seas of Life.

BLUE PLANET SEA OF LIFE TRIAL

That took a lot of trial and error, trying to get that right. So we had to design a whole camera system that could be deployed off the submarine and then loaded down onto the seafloor to get the shot of him. I didn’t feel like we were getting to know this guy if we weren’t really looking at the world on the level that he’s seeing it at, and looking at him at that level.

But all the cameras on the submarine are up on platforms, so everything we were shooting from the submarine was looking down at him and that’s not what I wanted to do. He’s pink and he lives right down on the seafloor, and I really wanted to get down and look him in the eyes. The other thing that we had to do: there was this really cute fish in the Deep episode, a sea toad.

That’s what I used in Chile to film the Humboldt squid, because we wanted to try to make ourselves invisible. Some of it was state-of-the-art camera sensors that could really respond to filming in extremely low light conditions.

Blue planet sea of life