Making a movie, even something as simple as adocumentaryon salamanders, is more than just setting up a tripod and waiting for something interesting to occur. Reaching the most secluded backwoods of the tropics, Saharan Desert, or Siberia is a lengthy, back-breaking journey in itself. Once in the right place, there is no guarantee of spotting anything worth paying admission. This process is not unusual. Especially dedicated and masochistic nature photographers take weeks, months, and, yes, even years toset up a single shot.
Unfortunately, TV doesn’t work on that schedule. That’s when nature documentary crews cut corners. Simply put, the vast majority of the documentaries you watch are not real. Sure, the footage might be authentic, however, there are more factors in making a “non-fiction” film than getting it all in focus. The seamless way the crews cover their tracks, spicing up dull footage, is an art form.
From the earliest time of TV, nature shows have been aimed at kids.Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdomran for a quarter of a century, racking up four Emmys for its educational value. Yet, not even that show was free from scandal, accused oforchestrating their most dramatic scenes. In light of the problem, the Audubon organization issued a public warning against the mass proliferation of staged nature photographs and produced a “Guide to Ethical Bird Photography and Videography.” Fake videos and photos is big business.
Corrupting the Youth
Should the idea of documentary film-making seem too cut and dry, the genre’s history is full of some ridiculous twists and turns. When the nature movieThe Vanishing Prairiedebuted, city slickers decided that one particular scene illustrating the miracle of birth was in bad taste. This one image of an afterbirth-covered buffalo calf — a scene that literally every farm kid witnessed at some point in their childhood — was evidently too disgusting or disturbing for sophisticated New Yorkers to witness in 1954. The state of New York initially barred the Disney doc from theaters.
There was way more to this story than it appears. Even in 1954, critics and film historians openly acknowledged documentaries were faking footage. In the same article, aNew York Timesfilm critic defendedThe Vanishing Prairiewhile pointing out that it is merely “a handsome and entertaining look-see at various enactments of nature’s characters.” The important word in that sentence being “enactment.” The nature shows you watch on the BBC, the Animal Planet, or PBS are about as “real” as the photos Instagram celebrities upload.
Related:The 10 Most Uplifting Documentaries of All Time
Four years later, Disney would make the infamousWhite Wildernessdocumentary, now renown for its staged mass lemming suicide, though fewer people seemed to be aware just how fraudulent that film was. Faking scenes was A-okay, but uncensored scenes of birth was repulsive. It was the beginning of a bizarre double standard. A good example why puritanical responses to journalism never end well, and also why not to take documentaries or docudramas all that seriously.
Even Attenborough Needs a Foley Artist
Don’t believe what you watch in a documentary, and while on that subject, don’t take the sounds as gospel either. When it was revealed in 2016 thatPlanet Earth IIhad faked sounds, itcaused a minor scandal.
The wondrous cacophony of Mother Nature is sometimes impossible for a cameraman to capture in the field. Borrowing the idea from fictional films,nature documentaries have long employedthe use of Foley artists to add in racket to render the raw footage more intimate and immersive. Foley artists, for those unaware, are the guys slapping coconuts together to recreate the sound of horses' hooves on cobblestone. Any audio recorded from afar, usually by drone, is instantly ruined by the roar of rotors or ambient sounds drowning out what the lens is zoomed into. Drones, incidentally, are banned from most state and national parks in the United States for being annoyingly loud, a nuisance to birds and other critters.
Related:Man Vs. Wild: Was the Show Fake?
Sitting in front of a TV with beautiful 4K images of closeups of spiders with murky or faint audio is about as entertaining as watching CCTV cameras. The use of secondary, filler audio is usually excused as filling in the blanks. Sound expert Richard Hinton explained it as creative license to occupy or disguise “a hole in the story.” What a Foley artist can’t accomplish, an audio technician does on a mixing board, adding that cool underwater sound effect we all know and love in post-production. It’s artful, but not honest in a strict sense of the word.
Crossing the Line?
Ultimately the biggest no-no in journalism is altering the facts. Should you think that this brings immense disgrace to the entire genre of documentary film-making, you should probably be aware that every single photographer or filmmaker who has ever lived has rigged the shots, tweaking something before or after the photo is taken, barking orders at his subjects to move or smile or take their hat off, outright faking shots, and occasionally even moving corpses on a battlefield to enhance the drama. They won’t teach that in photography courses. Consider it the worst secret in the profession.
In nature documentaries, composite shots of various different animals are often pieced together to tell a story or create some semblance of what an animal’s daily life would be like. You might remember a certain scene fromFrozenPlanetexploring the birth of a polar bear cub. That wasfilmed in a zoo, not the Arctic Circle. “If you had tried to put a camera in the wild in a polar bear den,” naturalist David Attenborough explained in an interview with British broadcaster ITV1, “she would either have killed the cub or she would have killed the cameraman, one or the other.” That’s not a small footnote in a sea of documentaries produced by the king of documentaries. The BBC has a storied history of re-purposing or outright lying about footage, either maliciously or by accident.
Should we care if what we are watching is technically true or not? Probably not. The daily struggles of one fruit bat can’t be that different from another identical fruit bat, and these documentaries do offer a curated, glossy glimpse into a world we would otherwise never understand. A better choice might be to find an investigative documentary that isn’t dependent upon sending a crew to stalk a bonobo family for eight months, forcing them to look over their shoulder at the dude shoving a boom mic at them.
If youreally want nature, raw and unedited by human hands, just go outside.
