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
Canadas’ GURU of AGW crowd,David Suzuki, recently had a short AD on Canadian TV scaring kiddies, that Santas’ home, the North Pole was melting. He encouraged them to make donations to the David Suzuki Foundation, to save Santa. If I see him,I’ll kick his a$$ around the block for scaring grandkids. These people are REAL CREEPS! Suzuki,by the way called people Maggots, feeding off the planet. HE and the AGW crowd are the REAL maggots
From the Mirrror article:-
“Last night the BBC insisted: “The commentary accompanying the sequence is carefully worded so it doesn’t mislead the audience.” ”
I suggest the commentary accompanying the sequence was carefully worded so it did mislead the audience.
Imagine if one of the zoo penguins had crossed in front of the camera and got filmed together with Ursus Maritimus. I was going to add bogus to maritimus, but the polar bear is not bogus at all. It’s the sub-species of homo-sapiens filming the bears that are bogus.
What I find amusing is that Mythbusters given the same situation would probably do exactly the same thing, throw in a quick set of shots of the den being built and the photographer’s setup, Voiceover — “Filming a polar bear birth in the Arctic presents problems and risks to both the cameramen and the bears that are frightening. Besides which the insurance company said ‘Absolutely NOT’. So here’s what we did. The bears are real. The ‘snow’ isn’t” And everyone would be fine with it.
No surprise that my students believe this garbage. Sigh.
[Using multiple screen names violate site Policy. ~dbs, mod.]
I’m crushed. Please don’t tell me that the Country Bear Jamboree is part of the cause too!!
BBC’s excuse budget cuts?
It costs a lot of $$$ dosh to film and go to the Arctic. Why not bring the Arctic nearer to you with fake snow and a few zoo polar bears It’s also easier to fake Arctic ice melting aswell. 🙂
For those of you baffled as to why this is a story. This kind of stuff is fine for entertainment. But this kind of stuff is not fine within the context of a concerted global effort to hoodwink millions of people, especially children, into thinking and believing that there is any truth to the eco-terrorrism being promulgated as either “fact” or “science” by the IPCC, the WWF, Greenpeace or any other political and agenda driven groups. Brainwashing the susceptible masses with blatant falsehoods is not “ok”.
I can’t get too excited about this one. This type of thing has been commonplace in nature films for years. If you go to the archives, review an assortment of nature documentaries from the last 20yrs. select a hundred examples of similar sequences i. e. births in sequestered environs, and investigate how those sequences came to be, I’d suspect you would find that a majority of them, possibly a large majority, would have been artificially created, at least to some extent and often entirely. Sometimes this is commented on in the narration, but not that often.
We live in the age of CGI. The old idea of I saw it with my own eyes no longer applies. At present it is entirely possible to create images of things that never existed or no longer exist which would require the skills of a well trained graphic technician to prove they aren’t real. Anyone who is viewing film or video created in the last decade and assuming that what they’re seeing is a depiction of an actual reality is living in a world of delusion. Unfortunately that group probably includes a vast majority of the world’s population
Well, at least we know WUWT is written in space – we can tell that from the header picture which shows the view from the window of the room Anthony writes it in.
What’s that you say? It isn’t written in space it’s just a picture? You mean WUWT doesn’t come from the ISS? What a deception! Why didn’t Anthony tell us that! Surely not because it should be obvious?
Not surprised. I haven’t paid any attention to Attenborough since 1993 when all those dinosaurs down in Isla Nublar turned out to be CG.
I don’t see why anyone should be surprised. Did anyone actually believe that the cameraman dug into a den containing a 1500 lb wild female Polar Bear and her young? And got away alive afterwards?
By the way Attenborough is apparently utterly ignorant of Polar Bear biology:
“He must live on his resources. This is a time to scrape by.”
It is actually the other way around. Other bears hibernate in winter, Polar Bears don’t because winter is the good time for them, when seal-hunting is good and they can feed,enough to be able to scrape by during the lean summer season, As a matter of fact they go into a semi-torpid state described as “walking hibernation” during the summer to save energy.
Larry Fields says:
“many wildlife ‘documentaries’ filmed in the U.S. are also fake”
Filming an animal in the wild that is not afraid of humans is hardly faking. Most (not all) animals are fairly unafraid of humans in places where they have not been hunted for a long time. This does not mean that they are tame as quite a few tourists in african national parks have found out with fatal results.
Oh come on folks, it wasn’t supposed to be real, it was just an “illustration”.
OHMIGOSH! I think I just channeled Al Gore!
ThePowerofX says:
December 12, 2011 at 1:14 pm
Further evidence Global Warming is false.
=============================================
Thanks for the laugh – very droll.
I’m afraid I’m in the “so what?” camp. As far as I can tell, this isn’t news, it’s standard practice to do this kind of thing. Attenborough’s many and varied nature programs do this kind of thing all the time, and often show how it’s done either in a short segment at the end of the programme, or occasionally in a separate programme, “the making of”.
Disclaimer: I didn’t see the episode. If the sequence was accompanied by a voiceover something like “The cubs do their best to stay as far apart as possible in the den because human CO2 emissions has made the den unbearably hot,” then there’s a problem. But otherwise it’s a non-issue, IMHO.
Larry Fields says:
December 12, 2011 at 1:01 pm
“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.”
Right you are Larry. If you look carefully you will discover how many photos of ‘wild’ cougars have the same background. Or wolverines or any truly wary species. Another tipoff is overweight animals. This ranch is very popular and profitable. And the tame bears and now wolves in Yellowstone aren’t much different. Just a larger zoo that charges less to get in.
Back on this topic, it is a wonder that the BBC didn’t just use some activists in polar bear suits for this.
DN:
You are probably confusing David Attenborough (the naturalist and documentary maker) with his brother Richard (the actor who plays the naturalist in Jurassic Park).
Or maybe you’re just making a joke which I have just ruined. Sorry either way, can’t help being a pedant…
It’s TV, it’s a show, it’s theater, and if anybody believes what they see so much the worse for them.
No such thing as 1500 pound female polar bears.
To be precise : the bears were not filmed at a zoo in Germany, but in the Netherlands.
This sort of thing has been a pet peeve of mine for decades. I damn near went ballistic upon watching a few parts of “Blue Planet”.
Anyone remember the cave lizard fish (homaloptera sp.), the one they were calling a cave angle fish ( a fake name the made up for the show name). The film crew had to be molesting the poor thing to get it to swim the way it was because, normally these guys stay against a surface. They hate to swim.
“I KNOW its true, I just can’t prove it, so it is not really lying if I fake it.” … yay righ.
Nature documentaries do this kind of thing all the time especially for close-up shots. This kind of deception is not new.
Going by the howls about global warming the BBC should have used fake, tropical warm water with palm trees and crocodiles. ;O)
Derek Sorensen;
I’m afraid I’m in the “so what?” camp. As far as I can tell, this isn’t news, it’s standard practice to do this kind of thing. >>>
You mean like “so what if Al Gore faked his on air experiment?”
So what, like that?
The moment we say “so what” to documentaries that are not explicit in terms of how they illustrate their subject matter, we’re expose ourselves to deception. I grew up firmly believing that lemmings migrate en masse to the edge of a cliff every year, and commit suicide by throwing themselves into the sea. It had to be real, because I saw it on Walt Disney. Turned out it was a massive fake with lemmings being pushed from behind over a cliff in Calgary and falling into the Bow River, where many of them drowned. The type of lemming in the film doesn’t even migrate at all!
If the documentary is to be accepted as legit, it should have made the method with which they were able to film the bears clear in the documentary itself. In retrospect, it should seem obvious that a film crew didn’t find a way to tunnel into a polar bear den without disturbing the bears. But in retrospect, when I watch the Disney lemming film, it is obvious to me that the lemmings are being pushed from behind and are doing everything they can to NOT fall over the cliff.
When a documentary fails to disclose how they did something, the first question the pops into my mind is…what are they hiding? fine print in the credits, an obscure link on a web site, or a companion “how it was made” piece just don’t cut it.
Perhaps the whole of Frozen Planet was faked. How do we know? Perhaps there is actually no Sir David Attenborough. How do we know? How can we trust anybody again?