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Everyone has wanted to fly at some point in their life. Unfortunately for most of us, watching this unbelievable trailer about Discovery’s Winged Planet is the closest we’ll ever come to actually flying. That’s okay thought because the footage is unbelievable—cameras were mounted onto birds to see life from their point of view.
Though we’ve seen helmet cam footage from a bird’s perspective before, it was never like this. Winged Planet is not some one-off experiment, this video shows what it’s like to be embedded with a flock of birds. You can see different environments, flying formations, life, death, hunting and so much more. It’s a bird’s life like we’ve never seen it before. Here’s how they pulled it off:
What we had to do was strip down the highest-quality, but smallest HD camera available. We had to engineer it so it was basically a circuit board, a chip, a lens, and batteries. We had to make sure it was as light as possible, but we also needed it to record slow-motion. We wanted to film 50 fps rather than 25 which is normal [The standard in the US is 30 or 60 fps]. So, we had to make the cameras and the mounts so the bird could fly naturally and feel comfortable.
It also needed an extremely wide lens. You don’t to see just the bird’s perspective, you want to see the bird in the frame as well.
It’s so unbelievably real it almost looks CGI. Watch the trailer of Winged Planet below and be sure to check out Pop Photo’s interview with Winged Planet’s Director John Downer here. [Discovery via Pop Photo]
My cat will lose her shit when she sees this.
Even if it is just the Earthflight footage rebranded.
Be even better if it was narrated by David Attenborough
David Tennent did a decent job when it was shown as Earthflight, but yeah, of course.
Does anyone know what happens to birds that have been imprinted after filming stops? Do they just follow land-rovers and hot air balloons for the rest of their puffs?
Imagine turning up at someone’s house with a flock of in tow; “Yuh, that’s just some geese that had me imprinted as a matriarch for this BBC thing we did five years ago. They’ll die soon, don’t make a big deal about it.”
Or give em to the royals for xmas
It’s all gone a bit Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Hmmm, yeah. I think I could handle having geese following me, but an albatross would eat your chips.
On a vaguely related note, round my way back in the day (1915), the fashion for the time was to train gulls to poo on the periscopes of submarines, such was the devastation being caused by u-boats. A guy called Mr Carnegie was one of a few men in the Anti-Submarine Division working on the problem and he built a periscope/gull feeding platform to carry out sea trials where I live. Naturally, I wasn’t around at the time, but had I been, I would’ve suggested they use chips. The gulls round here are all about the chips….
So, the plan was to get the seagulls to associate periscopes with a fish supper?
The question remains though – sauce or vinegar?
That was the plan. It was abandoned….
Brown sauce and vinegar, of course.
Reminds me a bit of the WWII bat bomb programme, where the incendiary-equipped bats went home and roosted in the air force base they were being deployed from.
That was abandoned too.