Planet Carnivore

Planet Carnivore

I spent almost two months in Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania shooting one of National Geographics flagship productions for 2007 recently. Varicams with 500mm lenses and remote controlled camera units were employed to aquire a different flavour of natural history program.

Sitting waiting for lions to do something is like watching paint dry and we watched and filmed the hyena clans out-competing the lions in the day to day scramble for food.

Challenges in the crater are numerous, tourists are like the plague, roads are terrible and hence dust is thick, coating everything within seconds. The rewards for all the waiting are also numerous... Morning light and scenes on the crater floor at dawn and dusk are like something out of "Lord of the Rings". NGT timelapse specialist ABC4 fuelled his obsession and pulled out some classic intervalometer work.

The gear we had worked like clockwork, Varicams produce incredible images, high speed, rich color and no hiccups. The only thing that let us down was the HVX200, what a nightmare. Don't go there.

I was DP on this one, a great opportunity from producer James Byrne, I'm just hoping I made the best of it.