Once the footage had been captured, they needed a world-class editor to wade through it all. With Cordey tied up in editing the rest of that episode, Williams would be the man at the coalface, charged with tackling the everyday hurdles in East Africa - a job that required a huge amount of perseverance and ingenuity. One was assistant producer Darren Williams. Two crucial members of the team remained. “Without Huw's bravery there, we wouldn't have got this particular one off the ground.” “No matter how good your team is, you have to have a producer who's willing to take risks,” says Aeberhard. Cordey speaks highly of him (Aeberhard, not the turkey), and the admiration is reciprocal. Aeberhard, who lives in Vermont and owns a turkey that appears onscreen during our Zoom call, has filmed Lake Natron before. Silverback FilmsĬordey was at the same company as Aeberhard in the 1990s and knew that he would be a major asset. Trusting each other was crucial to the process. The footage they got was even more dramatic than they had imagined. They wanted to film the flamingo chicks being born but, crucially, they also wanted to capture the three-mile journey the young birds take as they travel on foot in a huge crèche towards springs on the lake's edge. “Everything is working against you,” says camera operator Matt Aeberhard.īut the footage the team wanted to capture would mean traveling to the lake and getting to grips with it in all its gruesome glory. In 2007, a helicopter crashed into the lake.
Its water is so still that pilots lose their reference to the ground. On the mounds, above the danger of the water level, sit their eggs. Before making their journey, they wait for conditions to be perfect: The lake needs to be drying out but still contain enough water that it leaves a substrate of soda and salt, out of which the flamingos can build individual mounds. In order to breed, the birds fly thousands of miles to the middle of the 1,040km² lake, which is fed by underground springs from Ol Doinyo Lengai. Every few years it is paid a visit by as many as a million visitors of one particular kind: flamingos. Lake Natron sits on the northern flank of the volcano Ol Doinyo Lengai. “You have to have a producer who's willing to take risks.” In another, river otters hunt for fish in water kept warm by boiling-hot underground magma.īut it was Lake Natron that would provide the episode's most spectacular footage. One of the sequences sees a female iguana using the warm ash in a volcanic crater as the perfect incubator for her eggs. He was also the producer-director of its first episode, “Volcano.” Attenborough explains in his introduction that without the powerful underground forces volcanoes trigger, there would be no breathable atmosphere on our planet.Ĭordey was looking for sequences that would demonstrate both the hostility of volcanoes and the animals who use them to their advantage.
LAKE NATRON DANGEROUS SERIES
“They have provided the air we breathe and the land we sit on.”Ĭordey is the series producer of A Perfect Planet, which aired on BBC One in January 2021. “You and I wouldn't even be having this conversation were it not for volcanoes,” Huw Cordey tells Inverse. “ have provided the air we breathe and the land we sit on.” Silverback Films It ended up being even more frightening than they had anticipated. When they decided to tackle northern Tanzania’s Lake Natron in 2019, they knew it would be a challenge. They work on each series for years, researching, planning, and liaising with scientists in order to film in some of the most inhospitable places on the planet. The company, which wildlife filmmakers Alastair Fothergill and Keith Scholey founded in 2012, comprises a rag-tag team of photographers, producers, and editors who come together like Avengers when they are commissioned for a project.
Working extensively on Sir David Attenborough-narrated projects for Netflix and the BBC - Our Planet, A Perfect Planet, things that tend to have “planet” in the title - Silverback specializes in scouring the globe to find glimpses of nature that few people, if any, have ever seen. When the water dries, razor-sharp plates of soda are uncovered, making it impossible for most animals - let alone humans - to cross.īut, just over two years ago, a handful of filmmakers decided they needed to go there.īehind most of the wildlife documentaries that have made your jaw drop and eyes pop in recent years is a team in Bristol, England, called Silverback Films. The wind barely ruffles the lake’s salt-saturated water, making it act as a mirage that can deceive migrant birds, thousands of which lie mummified on the shores. The alkalinity in the water is not far off from household bleach. They say Lake Natron is the most toxic lake on Earth.