Planet Earth filmmakers went, literally, to the ends of the earth to capture the essence of our planet, spending 2,000 days in the field. They lived for weeks or months at a time in remote locations, both awe-inspiring and brutally difficult to reach.
Planet Earth producers Penny Allen and Jonny Keeling joined us for a live chat Monday, March 26 to share their stories from the field.
Keeling spent days on end (four weeks to be exact) in the Arctic Circle in Greenland, waiting patiently to capture a musk ox fight on camera. When it happened, the light was perfect and it took just 30 seconds of footage. Allen went through a week of industrial-rope climbing instruction to prepare for the climb of her life: ascending Earendil, California's tallest redwood at 330 feet.
Read the transcript from their live chat below.
Penny Allen: We're both very happy to be here. We're very happy and excited to meet some of the viewers.
Jocelyn: How close did you get up to the animals? I heard you would film from at least a mile away. Did you ever encounter any of the wild?
Jonny Keeling: Yes, the distance is very great, depending on what we were filming. The closest we got was animals actually coming up and smelling the camera, and the farthest away was probably a mile; that was the absolute maximum.
AleMegXan: Last night's programs were simply amazing!! Was everything I saw completely real? Or was any of it computer generated?
Penny Allen: There was no computer generation at all. Everything was real, other than real satellite images; we pasted some of them together and animated them.
