You may not know that because the life of plants is mysterious and low-key, they are actually as aggressive, competitive and dramatic as animals - they will fight for food and sunlight, they will participate in fierce turf battles, desperately breed offspring, scatter seeds... They can also be called "drama spirits".
Following the launch of the powerful natural masterpiece "Plant Private Life" 26 years ago, the BBC has spent 4 years and traveled to 27 countries and regions around the world to launch a series of documentaries focusing on the plant world, "Green Planet".
Green Planet poster
The most worth mentioning is that the film uses innovative shooting technology to capture the microscopic world that cannot be observed by the human eye, deeply examines the intricate intricacies of microscopic ecology with a magnificent lens language, and combines the latest discoveries of plant science to present the audience with the hidden but wonderful plant world on the earth, once again subverting human understanding of life.
In the eyes of the producer, its good looks can be called the plant version of "Earth Pulse"!
"Green Planet" consists of five episodes, or narrated by Sir David Attenborough, telling the story of plants in different living environments: from the United States to Costa Rica, from Croatia to Northern Europe; from deserts to rivers and lakes, from tropical rainforests to the frozen north, this time David discovered a new story and a new understanding of the way plants live. Not only did he encounter the largest creature ever, the trees that cared for each other, but he also encountered the plant kingdom's predators and the world's most vicious defensive plants.
For the first time, the team captured the picture of "bats and flowers clinging to each other". The bats photographed by the camera crew fed on nectar, and for most of the year, the hanging bat flowers were the only source of nectar. Similarly, bats are the main pollinators of hanging bat flowers. Each hanging bat flower provides only a little nectar, forcing bats to fly around all corners of the forest, visiting many of the flowers and pollinating them.
This episode gives us a very intuitive understanding of the key to the ecological rules of the rainforest; after the forest area is drastically reduced, the number of hanging bats is difficult to meet the requirements of bats, and the number of bats will drop sharply; the hanging bat flowers will disappear without bats to help pollinate. These close ecological relationships make the rainforest colorful.
It was an extraordinary shot for the team, who also experienced a lot of dangers and setbacks.
While filming the phenomenon of the large-year-old fruiting of the two genera of the genus in the Dannong Valley of Kalimantan Island, the film crew accidentally disturbed the hive of the Golden Ring Wasp, and the swarm attacked the film crew. This isn't the first time the film crew has been attacked, with a researcher being stung three times in Costa Rica. You also have to admire the persistence and endurance of the team, the Rainforest World team spent three weeks in the same location, in order to guard the camera to take thousands of photos of leaf-cutting ants.
Mike Gunton, chief producer of "Green Planet", said in an interview with reporters: "Humans know very little about plants, in fact, plants are strikingly similar to animals, they are as aggressive, competitive and dramatic as animals, they will fight for 'food' and sunlight, and will also participate in fierce turf competition, desperately breeding offspring and scattering seeds." They calculate, hunt, deceive, and communicate; they protect their relatives; and they manipulate animals for their ends. When plants and animals interact, contrary to what we see, it is usually plants, not animals, that play a dominant role."
Vines that compete for light
Green Planet will show viewers how plants lure animals to their service, protect themselves from being eaten, and reveal the largest organism ever created, the plant world's prey master, and the world's most vicious defensive plant.
Because plants and humans live on different time scales, the film crew pioneered the robotic motion control system, using groundbreaking real-time and time-lapse photography techniques that allow viewers to observe plants' lives from their time scales and perspectives.
Speaking of innovation, Sir David Attenborough lamented, "In Plant Private Life, we were always limited to extremely heavy, primitive shooting equipment, but now we can take the equipment with us to go wherever we want. We can enter the real forest and see the plant grow, fight, migrate, and even die with its neighbors. In my opinion, it is these scenes that make them really come alive and make the audience can't help but sigh: Oh my God, these extraordinary creatures are exactly the same as humans. In a sense, they also have to live and die, to fight, to learn to reproduce, and so on, but they do it very slowly, so we have never seen it before. In my opinion, there is a hypnotic attraction to this. ”
Friends who like to watch documentaries will find that documentary photographers seem to be inventors. There is a penguin spy in the front, a shell camera, and a baby bear antenna in the back. This time, the team naturally developed a new product.
During this shooting, the production team, together with engineers, optical experts and computer experts, jointly developed a photographic robot called "Three-legged Tree", which captures images from 7,000 different locations, and "Three-legged Tree" can move on human time scales, but all the movements presented in the lens are delayed. It was this innovative technology that helped the film crew successfully capture the entire process of leaf-cutting ants carrying leaves from trees to the ground, and this shot is the pinnacle of this technology, and no other team has been able to complete a similar work. In addition, the use of thermal imaging cameras, magnification frame overlays, ultra-high-speed cameras and high-end microscopy technology allows viewers to immerse themselves in the delicate and exquisite dynamic beauty of plants, viewing perspectives and experiences comparable to "Earth Pulse".
"Three-legged tree" photographic robot
Asked what is the biggest difficulty in photographing plants? The main creative team said that the first thing is that the team size is much larger than initially expected.
The team includes a time-lapse shooting specialist, a videographer operating a SD camera, a drone operator, an expert who can operate a crane, and an expert who can lay cables and tracks in the forest. Due to the variety of different environments involved, teams often need to be equipped with several different cameras and a full set of lenses. The photographer uses a wide-angle lens to photograph the fluff on the surface of the leaves, which allows the audience to see the whole picture of the leaves, providing a detailed and open perspective for the audience.
In some shoots, teams need to carry more than 50 boxes of equipment, while shooting animals only require 15-20 boxes of equipment.
Tropical forests are richer in plant variety than anywhere else on earth, and fierce competition is constantly on the battlefield.
In the first episode of Rainforest, Sir David Attenborough will reveal plants' greatest ally and most formidable enemy: fungi. Fungi break down dead plants, releasing nutrients needed for living plants to grow, but some fungi can also attack and kill plants.
Another highlight of this episode is The Big Flower of Kai's - "Carrion Flower". It is a parasitic plant with no leaves or even stems. The plant parasitizes in vines and takes everything it needs from them until it eventually produces huge flower buds, which after opening, the world's largest flower appears, with petals up to a meter wide, but the flowering period lasts only a few days. Its texture, color, including smell, resembling an animal carcass, attracts scavenger flies, which lay eggs in carrion.
Carrion flowers
In the episode Desert World, the crew traveled to the Taklamakan Desert to photograph spectacular poplar forests. The Taklamakan Desert is one of the driest deserts in the world, and the dunes are constantly deformed and unusually tall, even engulfing the Eiffel Tower, but even these dunes are still growing strong poplars, some of which are more than a thousand years old. The roots of poplar can extend extra long and sprout seedlings from the roots, and the root systems of all poplars are connected to each other to form a huge net. As long as one poplar can find water, other poplars can share it and survive tenaciously in this desert.
In addition, "Green Planet" also focuses on the companionship between plants and humans. Sir David Attenborough said: "Plants are the most important allies of mankind, and we rely on plants for every breath, but plants are only static bystanders for humans, no reaction to what humans do, no resentment, only silent death, and this is because we do not pay enough attention to and understand plants."
Produced by the Natural History Department of BBC Studios for the BBC and PBS, green planet is co-produced by the Open University of The United Kingdom, Bilibili, ZDF German Television, China Central Radio and Television Drama Documentary Center and French Television, and will be launched simultaneously on the CCTV Documentary Channel and Bilibili of China Central Radio and Television at 21:00 on January 10.
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