Readers may recall using photoshopped images of polar bears on CGI ice floes. Here we go again.
Via the GWPF: Frozen Planet Fakery Row: Polar Bear Filmed In Zoo Using Fake Snow
Frozen Planet’s eight million devoted fans will not take kindly to being left out in the cold. It emerged yesterday a key scene from the hit BBC series showing a polar bear tending her newborn cubs was filmed in a zoo using fake snow.
Mixing real Arctic shots with zoo scenes, documentary makers fooled the audience into believing the footage was gathered by intrepid cameramen in the brutal sub-zero wilderness.
It was actually filmed from the comfort of a wildlife park enclosure using bears in a man-made wood den.
During the carefully worded Frozen Planet commentary, Sir David Attenborough’s script failed to explain how the moving scene was made.
The truth behind the trickery is only revealed in a hard-to-find video among dozens of clips on the BBC website.
Yesterday John Whittingdale, chairman of the Commons culture, media and sport committee, said it was “hugely disappointing” viewers were misled.
He said: “My view has always been that all broadcasters should not seek to give viewers a false impression and it is much better if they are entirely open.
“If this was not filmed in the wild it would have been much better to have made that clear in the commentary.
“It’s questionable how many people would visit the website and find the video clip which explained the circumstances of the filming.”
More than eight million viewers tuned into the fifth episode from the £16million seven-part series on November 23.
It began by showing genuine footage of a male polar bear scavenging for food during the harsh Arctic winter.
As howling blizzards filled the screen, Sir David explained: “He must live on his resources. This is a time to scrape by.” The camera then panned to a frozen hillside, before cutting to a close-up of a female polar bear hibernating with her newborn cubs.
Apparently referring to the same bear family, the naturalist said: “But on these side slopes beneath the snow new lives are beginning. The cubs are born blind and tiny. An early birth is easier on the mother.”
His commentary continued: “In two more months polar bear families will emerge on the snowy slopes all round the Arctic.” The camera then moves from the snowy tundra to the dark nest, watching the cubs nuzzle up to their mother, as he says: “But for now they lie protected within their icy cocoons.”
Viewers marvelled at the crew’s apparently daring exploits. One fan wrote online after the show: “The camera team would be in a whole heap of s*** if mummy had woken up.”
In reality, the den was made of plaster and wood beneath a German zoo’s polar bear enclosure. It was fitted with cameras shortly before the cubs’ birth.
read more at the Daily Mirror
You have to give it to the BBC… they are Masters at their game of deception.
When it comes to tugging the heartstrings and purse strings in the name of agw, there is no trickery too debased to resort to.
Fakery and deception are typical of that lot, but those baby bears are so cute! 🙂
http://tinyurl.com/866shd2
David Attenborough just lost all credibility with me now.
Perhaps they should also come clean on their bias on global warming.
Couldn’t they just wait for the weather service to predict another barbecue summer and use real snow? [/sarc]
And there it is. – The methodology of the Man Made Global Warming Movement in one.
Make something up, and pretend it is real, while putting the evidence that it was made up in an obscure location, just in case a CYA event occurs.
A shocking number of my friends have no problem with this at all.
I asked one of them, an Israeli friend, what he thought of the BBC’s coverage of Israel. “That’s different”, he said.
Is it?
Marlin Perkins is not amused.
From the Marlin Perkins wikipedia entry:
“Because Walt Disney had fabricated footage of a mass suicide of lemmings in its film White Wilderness,[4] then CBC journalist Bob McKeown asked Marlin Perkins if he had done the same. Perkins, then in his seventies, “firmly asked for the camera to be turned off, then punched a shocked McKeown in the face.” [5]”
Coming soon: undetectable computer simulation of people or bears. Attenborough-AI will live forever!
This whole spiel is completely in line with all their other deceptive and exaggerated claims; we really shouldn’t be surprised at all!
Do viewers really expect that all those close ups of e.g. krill and plankton are filmed in the wild and not a petri dish? How is this different? The web site said from the start where this filming took place, there was no subterfuge – it’s part of standard naturalist filming practices.
You’re really scraping the barrel now – there is no great conspiracy.
I’m disappointed! No Animatronics?
eljay says:
December 12, 2011 at 12:20 pm
What little was left of mine has gone too.
Genuinely baffled as to why people think this is a story.
It was probably too cold in the Arctic to shoot this scene in the first place. But being the BBC, the Bogus Brainwashing Comrades, it’s their duty to manipulate and deceive the public 24/7 so they ended up with this kind of BS.
How do these Polar Bears manage to survive and breed at a temperature well above freezing, without an ice flow and without seals to hunt? Yet in the Arctic a mere rise of 1 deg C per century is meant to threaten their very existence. To me they seem to have adapted rather quickly to the comfort of a zoo and without any help from Darwin.
Sad to see the old boy trying to defend this.
“DRE says:
December 12, 2011 at 12:32 pm
Marlin Perkins is not amused.”
If you think he wouldn’t be amused, think how Jim would feel. IIRC, he’s the guy who would be crawling into the den while Marlin did the commentary. “While Jim makes his way into the den, trying not to disturb the mother bear, I’ll keep you informed of his progress…”
Funniest thing though is that Attenborough and the producers are completely unapologetic. Basically their argument is
“Like Duh ! If we had put a camera into a real den the mother would have eaten the cameraman and/or her cubs.”
To have fessed up during the programme that the footage was faked would have ruined the dramatic impact ( honestly ).
Down the years the BBC Natural History Unit have had to do a lot of this sort of fakery and to their credit they actually make documentaries to explain how they did it, often as an extra add-on to the original or as a last episode of a series, a sort of “making of…” film.
This sort of thing never happened with Johnny Morris !
sarc on//Could it be that they couldn’t find any real snow up in the arctic and all the wild polar bears dead, all due to AGW? So they had to resort to ersatz shots?//sarc off
Oh noes a nature documentary staged something. What’s next, no Santa Claus???
Someone please correct me if I’m mistaken about this. My understanding is that many wildlife ‘documentaries’ filmed in the U.S. are also fake. There’s supposed to a commercial wildlife video ranch somewhere in Montana.
Wanna shoot a documentary about an elusive momma cougar raising her young? No problemo. There’s supposed to be only one suitable cougar den on the whole ranch. Just go there, set up your video gear, and wait. Momma has already become habituated to the presence of humans.
Tracking a wary female cougar in the wild is just too much work.
The polar bears were a lot better off in the 1950’s when hunters kept their numbers down. Now their numbers nearly exceed their resources. Their numbers will now be kept down by survival of the fittest and starvation.