Profile of Alastair Fothergill


I’ve always been amazed by the BBC’s nature documentaries, narrated by David Attenborough. Alastair Fothergill is the producer of the most famous series ‘The Blue Planet’ (2001) and ‘Planet Earth’ (2006). Fothergill was born in London on April 10th 1960, and studied zoology at the St. Cuthbert’s Society at the University of Durham. He joined the BBC Natural History Unit in 1983, and was appointed head of this organization in 1992. He quit this job in June 1998 to fully focus on his new project as the series producer of ‘The Blue Planet’, which aired in 2001. This show ended up being a multi-award-winning series. More recently, he completed the major series Planet Earth (2006), Frozen Planet (2011) and The Hunt (2015). In 2008, he signed with Disneynature, a newly formed film unit that produces nature documentaries. Fothergill was awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s Cherry Kearton Medal and Award in 1996 and the “Clean Energy Award” by BMW in 2008. Alistair left the BBC to start his own production company Silverback Films in 2012. Together with BBC1, Silverback Films produced ‘The Hunt’, a series that searched for a deeper understanding of the relationship between predators and their prey. Alistair has introduced some innovative techniques, such as the development of the first live broadcasting from beneath the sea.

Fothergill’s newest project is called ‘Our Planet’, and he claims that this is his most ambitious project so far. It was planned to be a partnership with the BBC, but since Fothergill wanted the WWF to be involved, he chose Netflix as the to-go-to partner. Fothergill believes that in order to create a show that can both entertain and show why climate change endangers habitats of certain species, you need big companies to invest in it. That is why, besides WWF, Google and Facebook have shown their interest in the show.  The show is coming up this year on Netflix. Some of you might have already seen the trailer popping up on your Netflix homepage. As an answer to the critique that natural history film-making make their documentaries too benign, Fothergill indicates the importance of showing people what is at stake. ‘How can you possibly care about the natural world if you’ve never seen it?’, he says.

A personal point of critique anyway: Fothergill also states that he’s not a journalist in the end. I feel that if you are a person with such skill and power to show the beauty in this world, you have to take the responsibility of trying as hard as you can to educate people and provoke real change.

I chose a fragment of ‘The Making of Planet Earth’, a show to illustrate what it takes to be a cameraman in the habitat of the most dangerous animals on the planet. The results of weeks living in brutal conditions is a fantastic shot of a mother polar bear and her two young cubs. Their efforts get rewarded, but we tend to forget what it takes to shoot images like that. The video shows how the cameramen are threatened by a grown polar bear, when he smells the food they are preparing in a small wooden hut on the North Pole. The cameramen have to scare him away in order to have a safe stay. The polar bear also starts nibbling on some of the equipment the cameramen set out outside, which makes their stay there even harder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mODlsphGbLw

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