How 'Seven Worlds, One Planet' Filmed Its Most Stunning Animals

So much of what we see on nature shows, from Planet Earth to Shark Week, comes down to simply being in the exact right place at the exact right time. Wildlife cinematographer Bertie Gregory, whose work on the BBC's gorgeous globetrotting nature program Seven Worlds, One Planet landed him a BAFTA award, was merely a trainee when, thanks to being available on just the right day with the right equipment skills, he managed to get the kind of footage other wildlife filmmakers merely dream of.

Gregory had landed a camera bursary position on Seven Worlds, which aired on BBC in the UK in 2019 and on BBC America earlier this year (here's the trailer), showcases each continent's wildlife, some of which has never been filmed before. A last-minute tip led pointed him to a group of rarely seen spectacled bears (the type of bear that children's book character Paddington is based on) who were hard at work devouring mini avocados in the South American cloud forest. Gregory was able to use a drone to film them climbing trees and gorging on fruit.

"The research team on the project had just struck gold, because an animal that you usually see a few times a year, I was seeing every day," said Gregory during a recent interview. We also talked about filming nature with new technology, his favorite animals on the series, and the craziest thing he had to do to get the shot.

Thrillist: I have to tell you, one of the screenshots that I took of the series while I was watching it was of that one little shot of the spectacled bear sleeping on the branch of the tree with his legs hanging straight down.
Bertie Gregory: Yeah, that bear had had a long day. A lot of climbing trees.

What drew you to wildlife photography and filming in the first place?
Gregory: When I was really young, really small, all my brothers and my mum and dad were obsessed with water sports. So, from a really early age, I was encouraged or forced into the sea, and spent a lot of my childhood bobbing up and down on a surfboard, getting facefuls of cold ocean waves. And I think when you spend that amount of time outside, you gain an appreciation for being outside and for wildlife. I realized if I took pictures of what I saw, that was a really good way of channeling my obsession, but also it was a really good way of explaining to other people who thought I was weird, what I was doing and what I was seeing. I found that that was a good way of convincing them that I wasn't completely weird. Not sure how successful I was at that. But also I got a real buzz about getting other people excited about something I was excited about.

I wish that I'd had photography skills when I was little, like when I was picking up bugs all over the place and showing them to people.
Gregory: Just to clarify, I had zero photography skills at that point. It was a lot of a lot of trial and error.

I actually did want to ask about the drones, because I don't know anything about drones, but I know they can be pretty loud. How do you work with that when you're filming animals that you don't want to disturb otherwise?
Gregory: Obviously, the wildlife always comes first -- one, because it's really important, you know, morally. We're supposed to be championing these animals, it wouldn't be right to be disturbing them. But also we want to film natural behavior. So, if the animal's running away or staring at the camera, that's, from a cinematography perspective as well, that's pointless. So yeah, you're right. Drones have the potential to be disturbing because they can be pretty loud. And also, they're very fast. So, you could, if you wanted to, chase animals. A lot of the time the drone is faster than the animal so they can't even get away. So that's something that we take really, really seriously. And we work with experts and basically do our homework to figure out, okay, is this an animal that we can effectively film with a drone without disturbing it? We work with scientists to figure out what are the kinds of predators that these animals have? If they have an aerial predator, they're probably more likely to be afraid of the drone. Are they used to being around man-made noises? If they are, then they're probably more likely to be accepting of the drone. And then also, the first key mistake that's often made is, if I'm trying to film an animal on foot, I'm gonna approach really slowly, over days or hours or even weeks, slowly moving closer and closer. And that's because you're trying to get the animal used to you. I'll burn through a bunch of batteries, just hovering the drone a hundred meters away from the animal just so it can get used to that noise. And that's really what was the key to the mountain lion, the puma sequence in the South America episode. We spent a lot of time just hovering that drone a long, long way away from that female just so she could get used to that noise. And by the end of the six weeks with her, I could be pretty much straight over her head, and she would continue to hunt. Now, if I'd started straight away trying to film straight over her head, she wouldn't have been happy about that.

Yeah, I remember there was this viral video that went around, I think last year, of a bear mother with cubs and it was taken from a drone.
Gregory: Was that the one on the really steep snowy cliff? 

Yeah, and one of them fell down.
Gregory: Yeah, the grizzly bear. I mean, when I saw that video for the first time, the first thing I thought was, Whoa, that drone's really close! And that female is definitely reacting to the drone. Yeah, I remember all the headlines were like Amazing Video Shows Determination of Little Cub, and it's like, no! The whole reason the situation has been created is because someone's being an idiot with the drone. And then everyone sort of caught on, you know, people that aren't used to seeing how animals react to objects and things. And yeah, it was kind of corrected.

Yeah, there was definitely a shift of perspective pretty quickly.
Gregory: I mean, I guess the thing I should say is, I would definitely not encourage people to fly drones around animals. We're lucky enough to have the time and work with the best scientists in the world to figure out how to do this without disturbing them. Because some animals will not visually show you that they are disturbed. You know, their behavioral cues are more subtle, and it really takes an expert to interpret that they're not happy, or that they are happy.

It's really good to hear about the care that you guys take in filming this and in making sure that you're doing everything right. The puma sequence, where the female puma hunts a herd of guanaco to feed her cubs, was absolutely amazing. That was like watching a movie.
Gregory: It's a dangerous animal for her to hunt. Pretty nuts how, like, if you and I want to eat we go to the supermarket. This puma literally has to risk her life, day after day, to get one single meal. And as soon as she's done that, she then has to start all over again. I think the most special thing about that sequence was that we really got to know an individual animal. Often, that's not how it works. We get to know many different individuals of the same species, so you get a connection to the species but not to the individual. Whereas with that mountain lion, that female was called Sarmiento. We were looking for her every day and we found her most days, just to get to know her and learn her territory. By the end it was like, Ah, well, we've seen her in this spot before, and usually she uses that little gully as cover to get around the back of that prey. Getting in her head was really special.

Something I appreciated was that you have segments after each episode where you explain how certain sequences from the episode came together, which I love because I think about that the whole time I'm watching it. And in the one with the belugas and the polar bear --
Gregory: You mean that idiot who was singing to them?

Was that you?
Gregory: It was. [Laughs]

What a dream, though, to sing to a beluga whale. That's amazing.
Gregory: What's crazy is that that actually works. When I was told about that when we got there by our boat captain, he was like, "Yeah, if you sing to them they'll come over." I was like, yeah, you just want to make me look stupid. And he was totally right. Some songs work really well, and some don't. It must be to do with what frequencies they're capable of making. I remember Jurassic Park and Adele worked really well. Star Wars didn't work at all. The national anthem didn't work.

They're so personable on camera. They really look good.
Gregory: What's cool about them is they're one of the few cetaceans -- so, whale or dolphin -- not all of their vertebrae are fused. Most cetaceans, their vertebrae are all fused, but beluga aren't, and that means they're capable of turning their head so they can look over their shoulder. It looks really human. Dolphins normally have to turn their whole body to like see behind them, whereas these beluga can turn their head. So they'd swim past you and then like, give you a little look over their shoulder like, "Whassup?" And then they keep swimming.

I think something that another cinematographer said during the behind-the-scenes segment was that it was difficult for you guys to watch the polar bear hunting the beluga and then eventually getting one. How hard is it, generally, to not want to do something when you're in that situation?
Gregory: I think that's a common question of wildlife filmmakers. Don't you want to get involved? Don't you want to stop it? I mean, in this particular case, if you wanted to stop a polar bear jumping on a beluga whale, you can't. So let's just clear that one up. Even if you wanted to, you can't, it's a polar bear. And the other thing I should say, which is more important, is nature is in a very fine balance, and dying and surviving is on such a fine balance. These polar bears have got to survive too. Often people ask that question when it's a really cute prey animal. And my argument against that is, if you want to base this solely on cuteness, generally predator babies are really cute. If you stop that predator hunting the cute prey, the even cuter predator babies are going to starve and potentially die. Our job is as journalists, we are observers. That said, if an animal is in distress because of humans, we would intervene or find a way of intervening. For example, if we came across an animal stuck in a fishing net or something, we'd intervene. But when it is natural wild behavior, especially with a predator-prey situation, our job is to record what happens, it's not to get involved. That doesn't mean to say that it's not difficult to watch. I mean, in the case of the beluga, they're a big charismatic animal that we got to know and they're really friendly in the water. So then to see one die is obviously really sad. But, at the same time, it is incredibly spectacular to watch. The foresight and planning and intelligence that that polar bear needed and displayed to get even a chance at hunting a whale was really remarkable. And so, sure, it's difficult to watch, but incredible to watch as well.

What was the craziest thing or just like the longest wait you had to endure in order to get an animal on film?
Gregory: In that first episode that you mentioned, which is about Antarctica, right at the end of that episode, there's a big whale gathering with about 150 fin whales, the second largest animal on the planet. Myself and director Abby Lees spent two months on a German research icebreaker called the Polarstern with, like, thirty German scientists. It was an absolute hoot, they were all crazy. We were basically opportunistically filming whales. Getting a whale gathering in Antarctica has been a holy grail for wildlife filmmaking for years, they tried to film it for the original Frozen Planet, but failed. And some new research emerged during the making of Seven Worlds that gave some clues as to where these gatherings might be happening. Abby and I spent two months on this ship and we were filming with a helicopter, trying to find these whale gatherings, and we were sort of teased, we had a few glimpses of mini gatherings. And then right towards the end of the two months on the boat, we had this one afternoon where it just kicked off and went crazy. And, of course, the helicopter had an oil leak that day, so it was grounded. So I ended up having to film it with a drone flying off of the ship. And yeah, literally, two months of waiting boiled down to just a couple of drone batteries. Just a couple of flights. Just to see something that, you know, I'd heard so much about, so many rumors about, but to actually see it in person, 150 just massive whales. They're nearly 90 feet long. And there's thousands of penguins and albatross and seals all in this big feeding party. It's one thing to see it and then go, oh, how do I do justice to this with my hands on these controls? Let's not mess this up. So fortunately, it turned out okay.

Towards the end of that episode, David Attenborough has that narration about how decimated they were by whaling and how they're only just now sort of coming back, but it's still nowhere near the numbers that they used to be. I really appreciated how this show, like most of the new nature programming that the BBC does, is very definitive about how we humans have done a lot of damage. And it's really our job now to either do something about it or not.
Gregory: Yeah, the traditional approach was, yeah, to pretend that we live in this Garden of Eden, where we would bring onto the screens these untouched, pristine places, but the reality is, very few if any of those actually exist anymore. And I guess it's easy to always go down the doom and gloom route, but in the case of these whales, it's actually one of the few conservation success stories that we have. Yes, we hunted them very close to extinction in many species' case. But, since protecting them, they have come back. And I think that's a really exciting concept, that if we all work together and protect these things and care enough, wildlife has an amazing ability to bounce back. Whales are a great example of this. Why can't we apply that to more places and species around the world?

To your point about how there are no longer very many pockets of wilderness left, I remember, in the Europe episode, to get footage of the wolves hunting the deer, the filmmakers thought that they were going to be out in the woods, but they're actually quite close to the village.
Gregory: Yeah, I was on that shoot, actually, for the Europe episode. I remember in the lead-up to the shoot, we had this one particular location that we were going to stake out, which was this mountain side that was really wild and isolated in this national park. And, yeah, it turned out that was not the best place to film them. They were still hunting wild prey, they were hunting the red deer, but around this little village. And, in actual fact, the wolves were doing an amazing job of staying out the way of people. I think in the four weeks, five weeks I was there, I think I saw a wolf once in the day. The rest of the time it was pitch dark and without military technology, the thermal cameras we were using, we wouldn't have seen them. They do a great job at living alongside us and out of our hair. I think we can learn a lot from them for sure.

I've never seen night vision footage like that before. And the camera is giant.
Gregory: Yeah, it looks like something out of an Austin Powers movie, the [imitates Dr. Evil] laser tractor beam. It's mad. The coolest thing was actually -- so, the wolves show up black-hot with the white cold ground. There was one time when a wolf came really, really close, actually snuck up behind us. We heard it, I spun the camera around, got a big close-up shot of his face, which is used in the sequence. But then, as it turned and walked away from me, I just wanted to get some shots of its feet walking, and I noticed that when its paw was down on the ground and it lifted up, for a few seconds there was a black hot spot where its paw was, so its footprints were heated for a few seconds after the animal walked off.

Do you have a favorite sequence or a favorite animal that you got to put into this show?
Gregory: The mountain lion one was pretty special. I really like animals that people underestimate. And I think in the case of the South America episode, we often think of fish as not being very bright or not having much personality. I was filming the fish, the piraputanga in the jungle rivers of Brazil. They're capable of spotting fruit above the surface of the water, calculating where that fruit is, and then, taking into account refraction, jumping up out the water, picking the fruit off the tree and then landing back in the river. They're really, really clever little fish.

So unexpected too! I had no idea what was gonna happen at all. 
Gregory: Usually they're following the monkeys around. Anytime that something hits the surface of the water, they'll go over and check it out. So, in the case of the really messily eating monkeys, they'll be spilling loads of food. But, no, that's not all. That's not their only trick. They've got a secret weapon for when the monkeys aren't around.

Is there an animal that you haven't gotten to film yet, that's sort of like your -- I guess this is a bad phrase to use at this point, but -- white whale?
Gregory: Yeah, it'd be funny if I chose beluga for that wouldn't it? [Laughs] I mean, there's lots. There are lots of animals that I've been lucky enough to have filmed and it's actually those animals that I'd like to go back and film before filming others. Usually, by the end of the shoot, you figured out how to film an animal and then it's time to go home, which is inconvenient. I'd really like to revisit some of the animals I've gotten to know, particularly the individuals. Sarmiento, that female mountain lion that had three cubs, she's now rumored to have a new set of cubs, and one of her cubs has also got its own cubs now. That'd be pretty cool to revisit the family tree of an animal I've met before.

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