You can’t respect it unless you understand it.”īlue Planet 2 begins in the UK at 8pm on 29 October on BBC1. We couldn’t ignore it – it just wouldn’t be a truthful portrayal of the world’s oceans.”Īttenborough said: “We would like to think the natural world is better understood and better respected as a consequence of what we do. “We are just showing it as it is and it is quite shocking at times. “We are not out there to campaign,” said Brownlow.
Blue planet the deep Patch#
In the Arctic, a walrus mother and her pup are seen struggling to find a patch of sea ice on which to rest – the north pole has lost about 40% of its ice since 1979. “We filmed a young mother pilot whale carrying her dead baby, which the scientists there believe was due to toxic shock – plastics are the route by which the contaminants get into the milk,” said Honeyborne.
Blue planet the deep series#
The new series also focuses on the damage being done to wildlife in the oceans by human activity, including plastic pollution in the sea. “When we first heard of it we just didn’t believe it – it’s fisherman’s tale that proved true,” said Honeyborne.Ī walrus mother and her calf rest on an iceberg in Svalbard in the Arctic. It is utterly surreal.”Īnother film first showed fledgling sooty tern chicks being seized in mid-air by giant trevally fish, which erupt from the waters of a remote Indian ocean atoll. In order to catch a crab, these cuttlefish send ripples of colour patterns down its body and, we can’t say for sure whether it’s hypnosis, but it certainly appears to mesmerise the crab to the degree that it momentarily stops, allowing the cuttlefish to make the kill.
Blue planet the deep skin#
“The amazing thing about cuttlefish is that they have control of their of their skin pattern.
“To get ahead in this crowded undersea city you have to come up with some ingenious ways,” he said. The cuttlefish footage was shot off Borneo, said Mark Brownlow, the series producer. On Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, a tuskfish was revealed using a specific coral nub to crack open clams, while elsewhere grouper fish were seen using a kind of sign language – the “headstand signal” – to reach across the vertebrate-invertebrate divide and encourage octopuses to help it hunt. We want to tell all aspects of the oceans and we will use all the film craft techniques to do that.” “But it’s very important we have a transparent relationship with our audience and that the small proportion of them that do want to know how these things are filmed can find out. “You can’t just break the spell,” said Honeyborne.
The source of the footage is not highlighted during the programme. The fearsome-looking fangtooth, which has the largest teeth relative to its body size for any fish, was filmed in a special chamber aboard a ship that had retrieved samples from the deep ocean. The Blue Planet team also worked with scientists to accurately recreate a rock pool and the burrow of a zebra mantis shrimp to enable closeup filming. “If you’re filming something that’s microscopic, you have to put added light on it – that’s just the the simple laws of physics.” “We make films that are totally true to nature and we’re honest and open about the techniques we use to do that,” said James Honeyborne, the executive producer of Blue Planet 2. A giant trevally patrols the shallows of a lagoon in the Indian Ocean, waiting for fledgling birds to leap at as they fly overhead.