Alastair Fothergill

Alastair Fothergill was educated at the universities of St Andrews and Durham, joining the BBC Natural History Unit in 1983. He has worked on a wide range of the department's programmes, including the award-winning The Really Wild Show, Wildlife On One and the innovative Reefwatch. He worked with Sir David Attenborough on The Trials Of Life and again, in 1993, when he produced Life In The Freezer. In 1992 he was appointed Head of the BBC Natural History Unit. In June 1998 he stood down as head of the unit in order to concentrate on his role as series producer of The Blue Planet.

Alastair Fothergill is the series producer of The Blue Planet, Planet Earth and the director of Earth, the associated feature film.  Alastair describes how Hollywood-style technology and aerial filming were specially adapted for the Planet Earth series, allowing audiences access to amazing landscapes and animal behaviour which has never before been filmed. Planet Earth was seen first on the BBC in 2006 and is a celebration of the earth as never seen before.  Four years in the making and filmed entirely in high definition the series provides unique views of awe-inspiring landscapes from across the globe and incredible footage of rarely spotted creatures that live in these environments.

Alastair Fothergill was educated at the universities of St Andrews and Durham, joining the BBC Natural History Unit in 1983. He has worked on a wide range of the department's programmes, including the award-winning The Really Wild Show, Wildlife On One and the innovative Reefwatch. He worked with Sir David Attenborough on The Trials Of Life and again, in 1993, when he produced Life In The Freezer. In 1992 he was appointed Head of the BBC Natural History Unit. In June 1998 he stood down as head of the unit in order to concentrate on his role as series producer of The Blue Planet.

Planet Earth's series offered numerous firsts including:

• A complete hunt by wolves filmed from the air.
• Grizzly bears in the Rockies tending newborn cubs and feeding on moths.
• Displaying birds of paradise captured with a low light camera, including the blue bird of paradise which has never been filmed in the wild before.
• Footage of a new species of blind cave fish in Thailand.
• Pink river dolphins presenting stones as gifts during courtship - the only known use of tools by wild dolphins.

The series begins with From Pole to Pole, which considers the planet as a whole and shows how the Sun dominates the lives of all animals and plants.   The BBC commented Planet Earth is its most ambitious documentary project to date, costing up to $2 million per episode, and Mr. Fothergill didn’t waste a cent.

According to a March 18, 2007 NY Times article… “Until we started Planet Earth the only aerials you could film in nature documentaries were wide angles because if you flew close enough to get a tighter shot you’d frighten the animals,” Mr. Fothergill said. Among the various photography systems employed by his vagabonding camera crew — 70 men and women who traveled to more than 200 locations on five continents — during their five years traveling the globe, the Cineflex heligimble was by far the most revolutionary. The gyroscopic stabilizing mechanism, once reserved for Hollywood studios, can support a lens four times more powerful than any previously used in nature photography.

“As far as animals on the ground are concerned” the helicopter “is just a distant buzz, an annoying mosquito in the sky,” he said. The technology allowed his team to film, without interruption, wild dogs hunting gazelle in Africa and wolves chasing caribou in northern Canada. “If you go up to the high arctic tundra and just sit there, you might be unbelievably lucky if a wolf would run past you. It would be gone in a matter of seconds. We were able to film a complete