Staging in Wildlife Doc

Fine by me, I don't see the animals complaining

>>2200394
Pic related is justified. Filming inside a Polar Bear den is basically impossible.

I think OP's worry is understandable if we are talking about predation sequence where sometime documentary makers somehow manage to get said footage with such perfect timing/angle.

I don't watch Planet Earth to watch some Britbong take 45 hours to find a weird shrew to record for 3 seconds before it notices and fucks off.

I watch Planet Earth to watch a weird shrew eat bugs.

Anyone notices how since that Polar Bear fiasco, BBC earth constantly mentioned which part is staged and which isn't. It's nice of them to be transparent. But i have to admit, i prefer if they explained it in the behind the scene section.

>>2200399
I remember there is that scene from NatGeo where they got a King Cobra attack and kill a rat snake just before it catch a mouse. Great footage, you can still watch it in Youtube. But i agree, it does look a bit too good to be true...

>>2200394
Some staging is kind of necessary for a good wildlife documentary.
It's like simplifying the description of an ecosystem, or using an illustrated diagram of an animal's anatomy instead of photos of an actual dissection.

Sometimes the artifical model can convey the information you want better than the real thing.

>>2200394

Real life is (relatively) boring and involves a whole lot of nothing happening before something happens that- if you have a camera handy- usually results in some shitty poor angle far off shot of a portion of the action. Every minute of decent footage required dozens of hours of no worthwhule footage or shitty footage.

Staging scenes, splicing scenes, editing, and creating a narrative helps create context.

The only thing I'd take issue with would be if they're splicing together stuff to try and imply behaviors the animals never actually display or for overly sensationalist reasons.

Really the case for all documentaries really.

I prefer Steve Irwin's style of animal documentary.
Run out to the animal, catch it, then show it to the audience and explain facts about the animal.

>>2200582
Attenborough did this too a lot of time (minus the catching). I have to admit i find him more interesting when he is explaining the subject on the field.