A friend of mine (thanks, Jess!) posted a link to this video last week, and it’s just too cool not to share. It’s a short excerpt from the BBC series Life, written and narrated by the great David Attenborough. The series is produced by the same folks who created the amazing Planet Earth series in 2006, and it shows – the cinematography is stunning!
In this clip, time-lapse photography is used to show the profusion of animals living on the seafloor in Antarctica’s McMurdo Sound. Here, 10-foot nemertean worms, multi-colored sea stars, urchins, and other invertebrates teem in slow motion. Time-lapse photography allows the filmmakers to portray these creatures’ lives at a less alien pace, revealing their remarkable natural history in a way that the human visual system simply can’t appreciate in real time. Time-lapse certainly isn’t a new technique, but most time-lapse sequences I’ve seen are quite static, whereas these sequences use slow pans and zooms that make the shots much more dynamic. My favorite sequence begins about 30 seconds into the clip, where the camera is shooting down onto the seafloor. I can only imagine the difficulty of orchestrating some of these shots!
Life makes its US debut on March 21 on the Discovery Channel. Oprah Winfrey will be narrating the US release of this series. I’m a bit disappointed by this – I’m sure Oprah will do a good job with it, but there is only one Sir David!