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
If so many people can infer that because thoe clip about polar bears was not filmed in the Arctic, it follows that global warming is a hoax, then they must have no ammunition of substance. It shows how lacking in real arguments these people are.
But they had to fake it – snow is now a thing of the past
WHY WINTER NO LONGER EXISTS
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/34252/Why-winter-no-longer-exists
Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html
Louise says:
December 12, 2011 at 12:37 pm
The program is where it should have been explained, not buried away on a website. The general viewer does not go running off to the BBC site! Imagine! You will be saying Black and Harrabin have posted the honest truth about the goings on in Durban next, rather than the bent, biased stuff they produce every day!
Those on here defending the BBC may like to check
http://www.newssniffer.co.uk/articles/467718/diff/0/1
This is the BBC at work every day.
When you present documentary as drama, which wildlife programs often do, this is fine.
When you present documentary as news or current affairs or, as Attenborough does in Frozen Planet, as propaganda to support an environmental/political point of view, it is questionable.
‘Truth’ is subjective.
For the record.
I learned last night thru the dutch television news that the shots were made in Ouwehands Dierenpark in Rhenen the Netherlands.
Much as I deplore David Attenborough’s global warming propaganda, this is a non-story. It is not deception to show a genuine polar bear birth in a zoo and splice it into footage in the wild.
As for the global warming nonsense, Attenborough reminds me of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who in his dotage became convinced that faked photos of fairies at the bottom of the garden were authentic. In both cases it’s a good illustration of why we shouldn’t accept uncritically the opinions of authority figures, however eminent.
These shots aim to make polar bears into cuddly creatures and get us all to go ‘Aah!’. Well it failed on me.
It’s not like there’s been this long-going argument about the best settings for a Carter carburetor, and this clip is our proof that the BBC lies and so they obviously lied when they agreed with you about the settings.
This has been a world-wide, economy-busting public debate in which the proponents of a scientific theory have a long and consistent history of fudging the science whenever the science can be fudged, who have taken shortcuts that obviate their essays, who have used their positions to bully any talk not conforming to their own, and who confirmed all of this themselves, when (oops) a bunch of their e-mailed plans to do these things got “released” somehow.
In other words, stop pretending as if this wasn’t the exact perfect use of this film for the purpose it was intended. I mean, my god, even after all of the hits they’ve self-inflicted and deserved, they still can’t make an honest presentation of . . . anything? They’re still faking polar beat shots?
boudumoon@hotmail.com says:
December 13, 2011 at 12:06 am
“When you present documentary as drama, which wildlife programs often do, this is fine.
When you present documentary as news or current affairs or, as Attenborough does in Frozen Planet, as propaganda to support an environmental/political point of view, it is questionable.
‘Truth’ is subjective.”
For adherents of the Frankfurt School and of Ravetz’ Post Normal Science, definitely so. You forgot to add “The ends justify the means”.
“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.”
Naive moron. The BBC is not legally required to tell the truth. If I recall, there was a law suit bought against them by the creator of a documentary: this was the outcome.
To still reflect this kind of mindless ‘hey man, the world is, like, full of cool and honest dudes; let’s all get along and trust each other to speak the truth’, is patiently, and indefensibly, stupid.
Grow up, you little child.
In the print version of the UK Daily Telegraph David Attenborough is quoted as saying they were ‘making movies’, which perfectly explain the choice of images used in the final episode to illustrate climate change.
“It was not a German Zoo, it was a zoo in Rhenen, The Netherlands.”
Oh, hell. So these bears can’t even speak the right language! These people are beyond belief!
“Like Duh ! If we had put a camera into a real den the mother would have eaten the cameraman and/or her cubs.”
…This is wrong. Years ago the BBC made a series called “The Kingdom of the Ice Bear” in which the mother was filmed in her den without that consequence.
The BBC has a long history of lying about “global warming”. Last week, for instance, they had a background picture to one of their reports about Durban in which a cluster of chimneys belching snowy white steam had a filthy black plume of smoke “Photshopped” onto it. After all, it’s hard to manufacture public anxiety from showing the production of the same stuff that makes up those nice fluffy white clouds.
Clearly there is nothing and no-one from the AGW cult that you won’t bend over for. We have a word for that, but I’ll only think it and not type it here in Anthony’s house. I wouldn’t use the term ‘scraping the barrel‘, because it is more like a ‘target rich environment‘. The bumbling fools that populate the AGW Church of Climatology are nothing if not verbose in demonstrating their immorality, dishonesty, and lack of integrity whether it is their pseudo-science or media productions for little children.
Why don’t you entertain the troops here with your opinion of the 10:10 No Pressure campaign.
You’re rationalizing. There is no excuse in this day and age of drop-in effects and fonts (not to mention production diaries and every other high-tech advancement) for producers to be lazy. This practice is to documentary film-making as AGW Climatology is to hard Science. At best it is amateurish, but far more likely it is Goebbels-esque propaganda. This happens all the time these days, in all fields. The print media and online media is awash in haphazard presentations where one cannot tell who said what quote, references and attributions are missing. It is sloppy to say the least.
We see it with Washington Compost and NY Slimes reporters, who usually get fired with Pulitzers revoked. We even see it all the time on the Discovery and History Channels where dramatizations are interspersed with historical footage. I mean all the time, for example a cut from newsreel footage of Hitler to re-enacted bunker footage complete with grayscale and aged film effects. It wouldn’t kill them to put Dramatization in text on those frames. And it will continue unabated until everyone steps up, and stops rationalizing and justifying bad behavior. If you were the professor and your student submitted this as a project I would hope you would take him to the woodshed.
Perhaps the ‘oh so what?‘ chorus of enablers should remember that given the opportunity against you, the green eco-nazis would ram it down your throat without blinking an eye, regardless of how insignificant the error. Knives and gunfights.
Bingo! Nail.Meet.Head.
Here’s a quote from today’s printed Daily Telegraph:
“Yesterday Sir David Attenborough insisted he had done nothing wrong on Frozen Planet, because the producers were “making movies” and telling the truth would “ruin the atmosphere”
.
I love that bit about “telling the truth”. Sadly, when it comes to climate change and the BBC, telling the truth seems to be a low priority. Remember the senior NASA climate scientist earlier this year who told an outragious and demonstrable lie in front of the BBC cameras?
Of course, this matter of the polar bear cubs is a relatively small thing and certainly does not disprove climate change. But if you are routinely economical with the truth, even in small matters, then you are – shall we say – on a very slippery slope.
Chris
Martin Hanson says:
December 12, 2011 at 10:40 pm
If so many people can infer that because thoe clip about polar bears was not filmed in the Arctic, it follows that global warming is a hoax, then they must have no ammunition of substance. It shows how lacking in real arguments these people are.
Well, “global warming” is in fact a pseudo-scientific hoax as judged solely on the basis of its own lack of scientific merit. So what do you infer from that about the continuing propaganda in support of “global warming” and its now having involved even your own strange reverie above?
The original Ursus bogus made it to the textbook, by the way. Audesirk et al., Biology, 9th ed. p. xvi.
So what are you lot saying? That polar bears don’t give birth in holes in the snow?
The filming of the young cubs might not have been filmed underground, in the depths of an Arctic winter: but wasn’t it a truthful representation of what actually happens in the wild?
At the end of each of these programmes 10 minutes was spent on showing how some of the film sequences were obtained
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00zj39j/Frozen_Planet_On_Thin_Ice/
Perhaps if this contraversial piece had been shown and justified the beeb wouldn’t be under attack again. A similar thing happened in 1997.
A bit of this programme that I did not like :- “Frozen Planet” showed pictures taken from the production teams helicopter of a herd of Bison being hunted by Wolves in the North Of Canada.
The commentary from the beloved David, ran some thing like ” something panicked/spooked the Herd” and we were shown the Wolves gaining a fortunate kill in the ensuing panic.
In my opinion it appears obvious the Bison herd was panicked by the camera team in their helicopter, either accidently or deliberately, either way it was a kill effected by the Frozen Planet cameras.
I was fortunate enough to watch the first six episodes in full HD glory on my big LCD TV, and did indeed enjoy it. Don’t let the faff about two little bears in a Dutch zoo spoil the show for you. To anybody that can count, it was obvious that a different group of bears emerged from the snow, for three little cubs followed their mummy down the slope, and sad to say, next day there were only two little cubs trailing behind their mummy. Was it another male polar bear, were it wolves, we don’t know?
What I learned from the programme. One third of the planet is covered in snow. Hence the name Frozen Planet. The green lungs of the planet are not in the Amazons, but are actually in the vast forests of Canada and Russia. (bits of Scandinavia as well.) Places that are cold and covered with snow is not nice places to live in. If anything, the series shows the benefits of a warmer climate.
There are some spectacular shots of wildlife, and the high-speed photography is used to full effect. Wolves, killer whales, etc. kill. And some penguins are pebble thieves!
UK John;
Regardless of who spooked who, predation keeps grazers from devastating their own environment. They’ll eat themselves out of house and home and cause all manner of collateral damage and death to other species unless kept a) moving, b) skittishe, and c) culled.
Hooray for wolves!
Bah. typo: “skittish”, not “skittishe”.
It looks like George Monbiot has got his claws out, Anthony.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/14/frozen-planet-polar-bear-bbc