Filming Fast Hummingbirds: On Location | Hostile Planet

Filming a show like "Hostile Planet" comes with a lot of unique challenges. Check out this from "Behind the Scenes." OK, ready? One of the aims of "Hostile Planet" was to try and immerse the viewer in the world of the animals. You want to film something people haven't seen before or film it in a new surprising way, which is going to be difficult. [chirping]

We went to the heart of Ecuadorian Andes to film hummingbirds. That's nice. We spent four weeks out there, filming 12 hours a day, every day, just to capture this hummingbird sequence. That's the one. I think it looks great. But it's really challenging to capture how a hummingbird moves because you can barely see it.

So this is a Phantom high-speed camera. It's one of the cameras that can record almost as fast as the hummingbirds can fly. And what we've done is we've suspended this rather expensive camera from a rope. And we've created a little hummingbird paradise here. And the idea is that we can just move the camera. And so we get that feeling of flying with the hummingbirds. That's very nice. It's super sharp.

That may sound easy. The shot's over in half a second. This camera allows us to take that half a second and stretch out into 30. [motor buzzing] We also wanted to give the perspective of what it's like to be a hummingbird flying through the forest. So we got this racing drone pilot to go out with us and fly his really fast and agile drone dodging between the trees.

He came for five days. And for the first two days, it rained solidly. And you were just thinking, how can we get the sequence? But we got inventive. You'll see the very expert taping around the whole drone just to keep the water out, because it just keeps on pouring. And then we had to build a little roof for it. Isn't she a beauty?

Water dripping everywhere, so you think you got the most perfect shot, and there's this splash of water on your lens. And it's like, ugh! After a while, we actually realized that that looked really good. It made you feel immersed in this environment in a way the clean image wouldn't. [chittering]

We entered the project with the idea that we were going to try and push things as much as possible. [wings beating] I know what we're trying to do. And I'm seeing the raw footage. And I'm going, that's incredible. That's when you know it's going to work. I hope you'll be blown away, because I know I was. [music playing]