Chris Packham's guide to making wildlife films

Here's some tips to wildlife filmmaking from Chris Packham. I've posted a few quotes below that stick out to me but for the full article visit the Warehouse Express website. Chris goes into more detail about scripting, shot sizes and story. I'd also recommend reading 'Go Wild with your camcorder' by Piers Warren of WildEye, it's a bit dated but still full of useful advice, tips and tricks.

"Do it yourself. D.I.Y. carpentry, plumbing, gardening, schooling, aircraft building and archaeology. We can and do them ourselves. It’s an industry, a phenomenon, a state of mind and an attitude which encourages us to take things quite literally into our own hands. But if we can be empowered to it least attempt stonemasonry, bagpipe playing and space rocket design why don’t we get to grips with do it yourself wildlife film-making?"

Preparation

"If you want to save a lot of time, a tremendous amount of effort and frustration then think very hard about realistic ideas before you even pick up the camera and start to shoot any sequences."

"When it comes to preparing a project as ambitious as a wildlife film, research and not expertise is the key element to success."   

Know your subject

"My advice would be to choose a subject which is eminently accessible to you. Of course ‘The Wild Dogs of the Kruger Park’ are very sexy indeed but not generally as available to us all as the ‘The Wild Voles of Marshy Vale‘... Pick a topic where you can miss things or make mistakes and immediately return to put them right, where your part-time hours mean you can chip away at that project until it comes together, a topic which you can financially afford to complete one day."

"... because of the big budget series on the BBC, Discovery and National Geographic, and those on Channel 4 and five for which programmes are made over years, all over the world by large teams of people, it is often presumed that the far more accessible wildlife in your garden, park or county could never compete - that its just not interesting or exotic enough. What rubbish! The absolute essential to good television is viewer involvement, usually through a mix of entertainment and education, and at its absolute core is a good story. We like stories , pure and simple , and there are stories unfolding beneath logs under my shed that are better than some of those I have seen screened from the Serengeti!"

Equipment

"As long as you have kit which is in anyway respectable you can get the results. If your films are good then no-one will be nit-picking over the pixels. A genius could make Gone With The Wind on a mobile phone so there is no reason why you can’t make 101 Badgers, Apocalypse Newt or One Flew over the Dunnocks Nest on a handy cam."