Culture

Unnatural nature films

by YankeeJim | September 22, 2010 at 04:45 am

201 views | 3 Recommendations | 3 comments

I love nature shows. Do you remember Marty Stouffer who produced Wild America?

http://theamericanwildlifeproject.org/marty.html

Wild America was authentic as it could be. You got the idea that Marty was out there in the natural environment, waiting patiently to capture what nature would serve up.

“But Marty yearned for adventure beyond the local woodlands. Through skills honed as an outdoorsman in the Arkansas woods, he survived his solo trip to Alaska at the age of 18. An August snowstorm buried the remote Brooks Range, and shut Marty off from the outside world.

He was able to survive for weeks by killing and eating a Dall sheep ram. When the folks back home actually paid money to see the unsophisticated movie he made about his trip, the young naturalist/filmmaker was amazed... and pleased. He immediately began planning his next big adventure.”

Now, I love the shows about survival. I talk about Bear Grylls and Man vs. Wild show once and awhile because some of the things he does crack me up such as eating eyeballs whenever he can or drinking water from the bladder of a dead camel.

Today, there is a feature in the “Style” section of the Washington Post in which Chris Palmer, nature photographer reveals that nature is usually pretty boring and nothing happens.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/21/AR2010092105782.html

Here is a quote that I like from the story below.

“And if you see a bear feeding on a deer carcass in a film," Palmer writes, "it is almost certainly a tame bear searching for hidden jellybeans in the entrails of the deer's stomach."

“Wildlife filmmaker Chris Palmer shows that animals are often set up to succeed

By Daniel de Vise

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Not long after Chris Palmer broke into environmental filmmaking in the early 1980s, he brought home a newly completed film to show his wife, Gail.

She loved it -- especially the close-up of the grizzly bear splashing in a stream. She asked Palmer how the crew had captured the sound of water dripping from the bear's paws. He confessed: The sound guy had miked up a water basin and recorded splashing sounds made by his own hands.

She turned to him and said, "You're a big fake."”