Legendary film maker Chris Palmer who has created popular films such as “Bears”, “Wolves” and “Whales” is revealing all the dirty little secrets of his industry in his new book “Shooting In The Wild”.
Nature footage is hard-earned. A crew might spend six weeks in discomfort and tedium for a few moments of dramatic cinema. Certain shots — animal births, or predators seizing prey — are difficult to capture by chance. So some filmmakers set them up. Palmer writes that Marlin Perkins, host of television’s “Wild Kingdom,” was known to bait animals into combat and to film captive beasts deposited into the wild, and that the avian stars of the 2001 film “Winged Migration” were trained to fly around cameras.
Palmer asserts that manipulation pervades his field. Game farms, he writes, have built a cottage industry around supplying nature programs with exotic animals. Much of the sound in wildlife films is manufactured in the studio. Interactions between predator and prey are routinely staged.
“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.”
Yes, Chris just admitted that filmmakers often place the dead carcasses we see animals feasting on in a location and even put jelly beans and M&M’s in the animals body so the meal will look extra scrumptious. Nothing is sacred……….
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so much for my favorite channell animal planet. lol wtf m&m’s.