Hacker News Reader

I would say yes, most likely an artificial ant farm. I learned recently from a documentary director friend of mine that this is done very often. For instance, since a human should really not get too close to a wild cheetah, they would use domestic ones for close up shots, even though the documentary is meant to be in the jungle. Most audiences would not spot the trick, and it would help filmmakers tell their story more fluently. But it of course blurs the line between fiction and documentary.

They can be very fake: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09....

I've wondered that too. One of my favorite I assume was plotted by the film maker, though I've done no research on it, as an insane amount of well-timed events happened. If you're remotely interested in things like this, you owe it to yourself to check out The Besieged Fortress: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV4AaV0AGOA