Filming in Australia

Filming Life Force in Australia

By Rory McGuinness – Producer/Director/DOP Life Force: Australia

When NHNZ asked if I wanted to film a documentary on the evolution of marsupials in Australia, I didn’t hesitate. I knew it was a great opportunity to integrate my years of work filming wildlife in this country with my fascination with just how exquisitely adapted these animals are to their desert island home.

Originally conceived by the New Zealand natural history writer Alison Balance, the idea focused on 'hot-spots' of evolution around the world. These are places where we find the most vivid examples of speciation and specialization. Australia’s marsupials are extraordinary examples of just how varied and specialized animals can become in their endless adaptation to environmental change. So Australia was a natural choice as the subject of one of a series of six films featuring these 'hot-spots'

THE STAR OF THE SHOW

The most well known of our marsupials, and the star of our show, is the desert-dwelling red kangaroo. This iconic creature is the one we see frozen in flight on the tail of Qantas aircraft and it’s arguably the most identifiable symbol of Australia to many people. But the red kangaroo is so specialized and unique because it has evolved to survive in one of the most hostile environments on earth, the Australian desert. This in turn makes it one of the most difficult animals to film!

The primary challenge of the program was to paint an accurate picture of this incredibly harsh environment. At the same time we had to record an intimate portrait of the secret lives of these elusive and wary animals and explore their physiology in more depth than ever before. Additionally we needed to contextualize them within the grander story of evolution on this remote and rugged continent.

The story of the red kangaroo, and kangaroos in general, is the story of the Australian continent. I knew I needed big picture aerial photography to illustrate this. I wanted high altitude imagery that would give a sense of scale and I needed transitions in the landscape that would allude to the epic time frames over which evolution occurs. I needed imagery of all the principal locations, from the green rain forests in the north east, to the red deserts of the center, to the white sands and verdant heaths of the far southwest. This meant flying around 10,000 kilometers!

INNOVATIVE THINKING

As the producer my job was to be judicious with the budget; as the director I needed to get the best material possible and as the cameraman I had to figure out how to do both, given the technology available. Gyro stabilized cameras in helicopters were far too expensive given the emphasis in the budget on filming behavior at ground level. The answer was to use a fixed wing aircraft and fly to all the locations relevant to our story in as short a time as possible. One of the most significant developments in camera technology in recent years has been miniaturization. Nowadays we can film in full high definition with a camera the size of a match box carrying a lens as big as a thimble. After exhaustive testing, I decided to shoot the aerials with a tiny Iconix camera from the wing of a Cessna. I contacted my old friend, pilot and photographer Damon Smith, and together with Mary Clark we flew the 10,000 kilometers in two frenetic weeks.

UNPREDICTABLE WEATHER

Such a long way in so short a time meant we had no opportunity to wait for the best weather. We had to go with what we had. We were lucky to have clear skies over the rain forest, which is normally under heavy cloud, then dry weather over the mesmerizing Simpson Desert. It was only when we touched down in the evening among the dunes to camp under the stars that, to our great surprise, it started to rain!

After a wet night we flew on to that other great Australian icon, Uluru, only to find it under heavy cloud. Photographically, this is the worst situation, as there are no blue skies to bring out the legendary colors of the rock. In frustration I took the camera to film the textured stone in close up. Just as I was getting started it began to rain again. We ran from one vantage point to another to film ephemeral waterfalls cascading off the rock and it turned out we were perfectly positioned to capture this very rare event. The weather then cleared for our journey to Western Australia and on to the Great Australian Bight where mist swirled from the limestone cliffs in an ideal evocation of the antiquity of this vast continent. We landed back in Sydney exhausted, exhilarated, and acutely aware of just how unpredictable the climate here can be.

TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS

Once we had the aerials 'in the can' we needed to focus on the kangaroos. One thing that is obvious from the sky over Australia is just how big this country is and how much of it is desert. It is here that the red kangaroo has evolved. A key to its success is its extraordinarily efficient locomotion. This enables it to travel great distances in search of scarce food and water.  As a macropod it hops on two feet rather than runs on all fours. I wanted to capture this in greater detail than had ever been recorded before and I found I could do this with a new camera imaginatively named "the Phantom". This camera was able to shoot full high definition at 1000 frames per second, or slow the hopping action by 40 times for later analysis.

But the camera is state of the art technology and not exactly designed for the rugged, hot and dusty conditions of remote central Australia. Also, although the hardware, developed for military applications, is proven, the software that takes the data and converts it to high definition imagery is still fraught with gremlins.  We would drive for hours through the desert over the roughest terrain with the camera suspended from a shock cord in the back of our land cruiser hoping to film kangaroos hopping, then spend hours on the satellite phone to the US suppliers of the camera in the early hours of the morning trying to download new software and rescue our mysteriously disappearing data. Eventually we mastered the process, including the software downloads, to capture these magnificent animals in full flight in super slow motion. This provided stunning footage that beautifully illustrates just how perfectly adapted they are to this incredibly hostile environment.

Another fascinating aspect of marsupials is that many of them have a pouch. Much of the gestation of a young red kangaroo takes place in the pouch, whereas in a placental mammal such as ourselves, it takes place in the womb. It was essential that we illustrate this in the film but to photograph inside the pouch of a wild red kangaroo would be next to impossible.

In the outback, many kangaroos are killed by cars travelling too fast as the roos hop in erratic directions or become fixed on a distant horizon across a road and hop determinedly for it regardless of an oncoming vehicle. Sometimes the hapless motorists will stop and find a live baby 'joey' in the pouch of a roadkill mother. These joeys find their way to animal carers who raise them for eventual re-release into the wild. As they grow they bond with their human carers, who have hand fed them for months and often kept them safe and warm inside their clothing. A relationship of trust develops between the animal and its carer and remains intact, even after the kangaroo has grown to adulthood and had babies of its own. 

A SPECIAL MOMENT

As superintendent of Sturt National Park, Ingrid Witte, has found herself caring for many kangaroos found roadside by visitors to her park.  Through her I was able to gain access to a rescued orphan kangaroo that had grown to adulthood and had a joey of exactly the age I was looking for to tell our story. This mother kangaroo had been released by Ingrid back into the wild but remained so trusting, it allowed us to gently open her pouch. With the same tiny camera we had used to film her desert home from 10,000 feet up in the air, we were able peek inside her pouch to reveal the joey happily suckling within. This was an extraordinarily intimate moment for the whole crew and we felt very privileged to have witnessed firsthand this truly special aspect of the life of a kangaroo.

As a wildlife film maker, when I have these feelings of privileged access to the secret lives of animals, or am present during moments of a rare spectacle in nature such as the rain on Uluru, or find myself looking down in awe at an epic landscape - I know the resultant footage will have the strength to deliver the same feelings to its audience. And I know the finished program will be powerful and effective in conveying the magic and wonder of the natural world. So it was with filming Life Force in Australia.