need help in finding out more about wildlife documentaries
 

hy, I an a 22 years old student in journalism, from Romania, and I am making my diploma paper on Wildlife Documentaries. Since I have never filmed anything in my life and I could not find any book on this subject in Timisoara I could use all the hepl I can get. So I would wery much appreciate it if someone could tell me more about Wildlife Documentaries, about the basic rules of their production, filming, problems that may appear, cutting and post production or any other information that you think that may be helpfull. Thank you in advance for your help, laura

If it's a start you're looking for have a read of Jacques Mesereau's thread on An Osprey Homecoming, below, check out the trailer, buy the video and look at Steve Siegel's website and his host website at IBC. Meryem Ersoz gives lots of practical advice on this Forum as do several others ..


http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=67658

But get any camcorder and get out there, anywhere, quite near, observe, do a bit of shooting, dash to a viewing system and note what happened when you did what? and then go out observe and try again and again ... any literary source on its own (and this forum is one of the best) is going to tell you as much as a book on how to ride a bike without a bike ...

... then tell us what happened and we will hopefully have ideas to offer

Hi Laura,

There are a few books around that might help you out but not many specific to wildlife documentary.

Derek Bouse 'Wildlife Films' (get this from Amazon)- good for history and ethics

Piers Warren has a couple of books that are now available as an ebook- Wildlife Filmmaking www.wildeye.co.uk- basic 'who does what' stuff

Basically a wildlife film production runs the same as any many other film productions so any book on documentary production could help you.

"Documentaries, the basic rules of their production, filming, problems that may appear, cutting and post production"- all have similar problems whether you are shooting animals or people... animals are slightly less predictable.

There is masses of stuff online about film production which will help you.

First rule of film production is do your research first.


Hope this helps

J

if production values are what you're interested in, i would read this thread:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=60427


then i would watch some of the docs named in the thread and, most importantly, watch the "making of" featurettes, where the filmmakers themselves discuss production, etc. that will give you an idea of current issues in making wildlife documentaries.

add:

an osprey homecoming
the wild parrots of telegraph hill
march of the penguins

also, if you can obtain a copy, frederick wiseman's "zoo" is quite interesting. and since he is *the* genre-re-defining documentary guy (at least in terms of Western documentary values), always worth a look.

without knowing what approach you plan to take with this project, it is hard to offer anything other than general advice.