The series I’ve spent much of the last two years working on, Seven Worlds, One Planet, is now being broadcast on BBC1 – the website, with clips, behind the scenes stories and schedules is here

I was lucky enough to film sequences across the whole series including Weddell Seals in Antarctica, Humbolt Penguins in Chile, Thorny Devil lizards in Australia, Snub Nosed monkeys in China, Sumatran Rhinos and some rather wonderful hamsters in the Europe episode.

As always the teams involved with putting these programmes together have been amazing, from the production co-ordinators who manage to get us safely to, and from, some tricky locations to the researchers, producers, camera teams and editors who make the stories work on the screen. We invariably teamed up with brilliant people the field too – biologists, conservationists and support staff who are often the unsung hero’s and heroin’s of projects like this.

The grave conservation issues that are facing our planet are woven through each film and, judging by the first episode, Antarctica, the producers and directors have given a genuine emotional soul to landmark natural history television; a really impressive achievement.

BBC1’s Dynasties ‘Chimpanzee’ has been nominated for editing and cinematography from over 1,000 international entries at the Jackson Hole Wildlife film festival, we’ve also been nominated for ‘Best Natural History Documentary’ at the prestigious Grierson Awards.

Testament to a great team, and a very special chimpanzee.

I’ve recently started filming for two major landmark series being produced by the BBC Natural History Unit.

Frozen Planet II continues the pattern of revisiting and updating historical BBC landmark series. It’s 10 years since the original Frozen Planet – this new series explores the earth’s cold regions using the best of contemporary film-making techniques.

Green Planet picks up where the incredible Private Life of Plants left off. The Private life of Plants is my favourite BBC NHU series and looks as extraordinary today as it did nearly two decades ago – Green Planet will use cutting edge camera technology to reveal the extraordinary world of plant behaviour.

The final film of BBC1’s Dynasties series, Tiger, will be broadcast at 8pm on Sunday 9th December.

This is the second Dynasties film that I worked on, and I spent two and a half years on my life alternating between filming in India for Tiger and Senegal for Chimpanzee. The two films were very different beasts, literally and metaphorically.

With Chimpanzee we covered the story of the complex social world that chimps inhabit, and we ended up with a Shakespearean drama involving strong characters who revealed themselves to us as we filmed. We had the benefit of being immersed in the chimp world on every one of our 200+ filming days, and would often spend many hours within a few metres of our key characters. Chimps are very similar to us as humans, we can read and understand their behaviour like no other species.

Filming for Tiger was very different.

Tigers are solitary carnivores, they don’t live in complex societies, we can’t relate to them in the same way we can to an ape, and their lifestyle as predators means that they spend a huge amount of their time doing absolutely nothing.

With the chimps we were on foot, and could move with them wherever they chose to go, with the tigers we worked largely from vehicles restricted to the road network in the park. It was never easy filming the chimps, but at least you could usually see them, with the tigers, even with our brilliant team of guides, drivers and mehouts (elephant handlers), we could go for days without even a sighting of one, let alone a meaningful filming opportunity.

So we were faced with trying to piece together the story of the life of one tigress, named Raj Bhera, from fragmented glimpses; rather like trying to plot the course of evolution from the fossil record. As time passed we learned more about her as an individual, we could start to make good guesses about what she was up to; where she had been, with whom she’d interacted or if she’d hunted that night.

Most days would require some sort of camera surgery

Every now and again key moments in her life would play out in front of camera, but those moments were often fleeting, unpredictable and extremely challenging to film, with no opportunity to fine-tune camera angles or the direction of the light. The challenge with chimps was to tease out which story, of the myriad of options, would prove to be the strongest – a case of what we’d end up leaving out in the edit. With tigers it was totally different; we could deduce how the story of our tigress’s life was developing but we really had our work cut out for us to film enough strong images to allow us to tell that story accurately and authentically.

We never gave up though, we never really got enough sleep, and some weeks we felt like we were making no progress at all, but we all fell for Raj Bhera. The sense that we were gaining an incredibly privileged insight into her life – and that we would be able to show this to people with the film – kept us all going.

I’ve never filmed an animal that energises its environment quite like a tiger – there is an electricity in the air when a tiger is near which is hard to describe. Considering how few tigers there are now left in the wild I was very aware that every moment I spent filming one was special.

Breakfast in the field

… and elephant breakfast

Raj Bhera’s pug marks

It’s been a long time coming, but Dynasties, the series that I’ve spent most of the last three years working on, is starting on Sunday 11th November at 8.30 on BBC1.

There are five films and I filmed the first; Chimpanzee, and the last; Tiger.

Our aim was to follow an individual animal for two years, documenting their lives in as much detail as possible to produce unique portraits of individuals from these five iconic species. It was always going to be a high-risk strategy as we had no idea at the outset what would happen to our characters – they could die or disappear or their lives could be largely uneventful for the filming period. In the end the various teams have produced five remarkable and very different films, each one a unique and authentic insight into the specific challenges of survival of their featured species.

I shared the filming on Chimps with my great friend Mark MacEwen, and I think we both found it one of the hardest and most rewarding projects we’ve ever worked on.

The chimp group we filmed lives in Senegal, West Africa, and was a group I’d filmed several years earlier for another BBC’s Life Story. They live in a savanna habitat, a mixture of grasslands and forest, and are right at the limit of chimpanzee distribution – really at the edge of the chimp universe. It’s incredibly hot, average temperatures would be in the high 30’s, the hottest day I remember was 42C in the shade. At certain times of the year you would be forcing your way through 8ft tall grass, unable to see more than a few inches in front of you, at others you would be trudging across a scorched moonscape where the rocks are too hot to touch.

Our daily routine was what made it tough, we’d need to be with the chimps when they woke up in the morning otherwise we would risk loosing them, possibly for several days, that could mean setting the alarm for as early as 3.30am. We’d then need to stay with the group all day until they made their nests and went to bed, on some evenings this might not be until after 8pm. You could easily walk 10 miles in a day and not get to bed before 11pm. We needed to carry all our camera kit, water (about 5 litres for a day) and food, my pack would weigh over 30Kg in the morning, so it became an exercise in endurance as much as film-making.

The other big challenge was trying to cover the story – we had no idea what would happen during the two years so we had to make sure we had sufficient coverage of all the events and characters as the months went past to allow us to allow us to tell the strongest story once we had finished filming. We never knew if a seemingly insignificant glance or quarrel would have huge consequences in a few days time, so we had to constantly think on our feet and discuss events with each other to make sure we were making smart choices. It was like filming a Shakespearean tragedy without really knowing who were going to be your main characters, who were simply supporting cast, or what was going to happen.

We had such a fantastic team for this project and I think that’s what kept us all going – without Jill Pruetz (who has been studying this group of chimps for nearly 20 years), Michel and Jonny (Jill’s field incredible field assistant and project manager respectively) none of this would have been possible. They taught us about the chimps, kept us out of trouble and were wonderful companions on long tough days. I also got to work with some of my favourite people – DoP Mark MacEwen, AC Matt Drake and Director Rosie Thomas. There is something very special about working hard with your friends to make a film, and I hope we’ve done this wonderful group of chimps justice.

Information about the series is on the BBC website here

It’s been a long time in the making, but the series I spent much of the last three years working on is ready to be broadcast. I filmed all of the tiger film, half of the chimp film and completely fell for both of our key characters. To have had the opportunity to spend so much time in the field with these fantastic creatures was a real privilege.

More information about broadcast dates to come!