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Comment by mcpackieh | Hacker News Reader

It remains common practice for nature "documentaries" to create fake narratives in editing. Pay attention to cuts, camera angles and changes in background scenery and you'll notice quite a lot of it. If they're showing two animals in some sort of confrontation but only ever show one of the animals at a time, you can be sure it's fake. If they're showing something that has several camera angles it's probably fake, particularly if some of the camera angles are very close or in a position that should make the cameraman visible in the other angles.

That popular video of a lizard running through a gauntlet of snakes is very fake. They probably spliced together many days of footage using captured lizards and snakes.

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The audio in nature documentaries is all fake too, right? I don’t know that I’ve ever heard this from a reliable source, but at some point years ago I got the idea in my head and now every time I’m watching on I’m convinced the vast majority of the sound effects are fake.

I work in film. I’d have to assume so, since the cameras are often very far using long telephoto lenses.

Your definition of “fake” can be a lot of things as the team will record as much audio as they can of of the actual animal (I assume). But the final audio track is a bit like VFX in the visual side - you combine elements from all sources, your recordings, historical recordings, foley audio. Whatever it takes to get the desired effect in the audience.

I wonder. I tend to think so. But then I also think of things like the parabolic sideline microphones at football games and wonder how well they'd work with an amplifier.

Yep! There was an episode of 99 Percent Invisible focusing on the sound design fakery in nature documentaries: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/sounds-natural/

Coincidentally, it also features the very lemming story that brought us here.

I remember taking to a film maker at Yellowstone. He told me that you have a fixed amount of time and budget to get footage. If you don’t get everything you need, you fill with some other footage. That footage may be from previous projects or bought from somebody else.

If they want to stay in business, they have to deliver a product.

Also keep in mind many documentaries film in what are essentially zoos (large animal sanctuaries). Sometimes this is revealed in the show, but other times you have no idea. They get shots out in the serangheti but then cut back to a close-up of a cheetah inside a sanctuary.

Obviously not every behaviour can be captured in one take exactly in the way that will make an interesting film documentary. This is not some revelation.

As long as the edited footage represents something that could plausibly (though maybe rarely) happen I see no issue.

Personally I am happy to sit through a "drier" documentary if it is well made. But Planet Earth and the like are greatest hits type documentaries, designed to show the exceptional events and behaviours.

I mean in an interview they’re claiming it’s real https://www.fastcompany.com/3068093/heres-the-story-behind-t...

It looks very convincing to me if it is a fake.

It's not fake as in CG or puppet snakes or a set or they dropped a bucket of snakes on an unsuspecting lizard, but video from different times spliced together to present a narrative that isn't what happened. Fake temporally at least. The producer has acknowledged this:

"Unfortunately lizards, snakes and iguanas aren’t good at 'takes'." She continued: "For continuity, it was better to crop the scenes together based off of the two cameras we had at the time to create the best possible scene."

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/pla...

Sergei Eisenstein’s montage theory should be basic teaching at school.

I hold out hope that Marty Stouffer’s Wild America didn’t make liberal use of those shenanigans in his original series.

Nor Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.

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