Veteran BBC cameraman, Doug Allen confirmed in a recent convocation speech at a UK university that scenes in BBC wildlife documentaries are regularly filmed in artificial sets to guarantee the quality of the shots.
Allen indicated that species “smaller than a baby rabbit” are put in custom-built sets and filmed under controlled conditions, rather than in the wild.
You can’t make a film about mice just by going out into a meadow and looking at mice. You need to introduce them to a safely built set in which they will be happy. There’s a lot of skill in doing that.
The BBC faced a lot of heat for failing to explicitly explain that a polar bear birth scene was not filmed in the Arctic, but in a set constructed in a Dutch zoo.
At the time, David Attenborough defended the scene, quipping “Come on, we were making movies.”
Allen had the following view of the polar bear scene:
Be proud of it, and then I think people would have felt less deceived. I don’t have a problem with that sort of thing – I did it myself years earlier – but the public, some of the public, chose to think that was fakery.
You can watch that, here.
[Source : Daily Mail]
