How does a film like “Exploring the High Frontier” go from an idea in a producer’s head to a Special on network television?  What exactly is involved and how long does it take?  Tim Scoones (producer / director of this show) explains how we get from script to screen:
 

Did you know that a film like “Exploring the High Frontier” (or “Heroes of the High Frontier” as it will be called on video) takes nearly three years to make?!  Did you know that it takes hundreds of people, thousands of air miles and hundreds of thousands of dollars to put such a show together?  It may sound like a big operation, but every detail of every part of the production is scrutinised to reach the highest quality show and the best value for money - right down to the last hour of the production and the last twenty dollars spent.  Thanks to NBC and the National Geographic Society my budget was big …… but you should have seen some of the bills I received!  We spent tens of thousands of dollars on airline excess baggage alone!

So how does a show like this start out?  It starts with an outrageous idea which surfaces from the depths of a producer’s imagination and then won’t leave them alone.  This is how I came to produce television’s first ever major documentary on the rainforest canopy - it was an idea that was waiting to be realised, people said it was impossible, and we were foolish or brave enough to take it on.  But take it on we did, and three years later we have about fifty minutes of television and a web site to show for it!

Many people think that producers go out and make a show and then sell it to broadcasters afterwards.  This is rarely the case, especially for a big show like this.  As an independent producer working for Oxford Scientific Films in the UK, my first job was to work up a film script that was enough to tempt a broadcaster to buy the idea and fund the film “up front”.  My plan was to sell the idea to National Geographic Specials - a very small but high quality market which reaches a huge worldwide audience - the perfect place for the idea.  I teamed up with Cathy McConnell, an old friend and highly experienced producer/writer in the field, well known to National Geographic.

My first task was to contact canopy research scientists around the world (made easier by the “International Canopy Network” of such scientists on the Internet).  I then had to choose the scientists who would work best on screen - not only because of their research area and climbing techniques, but for their appeal to a mass television audience worldwide.  It was at this point that I got to know Nalini Nadkarni, Meg Lowman, Jay Malcolm and the balloon crew of “Operation Canopy”.

Some quick research (funded by Oxford Scientific Films) produced the bare bones of the story, which Cathy McConnell and I presented to National Geographic Television at a “pitch” meeting.  This is a terrifying affair where you have about half an hour to sell your idea to the top executives of the National Geographic Society - a sort of “sudden death” situation, where one either wins famously and proceeds towards a commission, or fails totally and loses the money so far invested in development.

Fortunately we had pre-empted this process by putting together an incredible team of producers, writer, camerapeople, sound recordist and editor, all with an award-winning track record in films about rainforests, including sequences involving tree-climbing.  This team, combined with an exciting story of an undiscovered world up in the trees and the passion and resilience of the daredevil scientists who are working to unlock the secrets of this high frontier, won us the commission.  The vital Step One was complete - now we just had to make the film!

Next came what I call either the “The Reality Phase” or “The Night Of The Long Knives”, depending on how optimistic I’m feeling.  This is when the research effort is stepped up and our dream ideas are looked into in the finest detail to make sure we can deliver the images for the sequence - on time, on budget, and without endangering anyone.  As a parallel process, these research proposals were carefully budgeted, right down to the last lens or tank of fuel.  After much to-ing ad fro-ing, a final budget was agreed with National Geographic Television.  This meant, as is always the case, that some sequences had to be reduced and others had to be dropped altogether.  In our case we had to drop the idea of filming in Africa, filming a man in a microlight aircraft in Peru, and a filming high tree research couple in Borneo.  The shooting script was agreed, and a final budget and “treatment” were written and contracted.

By now we had been working on the film for about a year, and not a frame of film had been shot!  The next phase was fieldwork and shooting.  Shoots all around the world were planned and full international field teams were assembled.  [For more detail on the locations we shot in and the often bizarre camera techniques we used, see the other parts of the “Making Of The Film” section of this web site].

This field phase (which often feels like waging a small war) lasted about a year.  This is fast in natural history television terms - the field phase can sometimes last two years or more!  Many people are not aware of one of the most nerve-wracking aspects of our work.  We shoot on 16mm film (the camera equipment is tough and reliable and the final result looks much better than current video formats).  But the down side of shooting on film is that you cannot see what you have shot (and whether it worked) until the film has been developed in a laboratory back in the USA!  This is usually after we have all returned from the shoot, and it is too late to re-shoot!  After every shoot there is an agonising period when the crew wait to see the results of so much effort.  Was there a tiny hair in the film gate?  Was there a piece of grit in a film magazine which scratched the negative?  Was the light meter working correctly?  Were the lenses behaving correctly?  Did the cameraperson catch that blink-of-an-eye action?  Was the film damaged by damp or fungus or airport x-rays?  The wait can be excruciating …….

Fortunately for us, with a few minor exceptions, the images came through fine - about forty hours of footage from which we needed to craft a story of just under one hour.  But for a film of such magnitude and reach, we were keen to add yet more material to the images we had shot especially for the project.  Our next task was to trawl the film libraries of the world’s best natural history production houses to find extra shots and sequences which we could add to our images to tell a broader and fuller story.  This involved producers and researchers looking through endless tapes of other people’s out-takes - looking for golden moments - veritable needles in a haystack …..

Once all the images were collected and logged we were able to start editing.  Mark Fletcher (the editor) and I moved out to Los Angeles from the UK for about 4 months so we could cut the film at the National Geographic Specials offices in North Hollywood.  Copies of all the images were loaded into a powerful computer and the shots were selected using an editing software system called Avid.  At this point the story of the film enters a new phase.  As producer and director of the field phase, I had to detach myself from the “history” I had with the footage and concentrate on which image best told the story, and which footage to leave out, no matter how much blood, sweat and tears went into filming it in the field.  I was helped in this by the fact that new faces appeared on the team at this stage - an editor and various National Geographic Television executives.  Cathy McConnell, who had not been in the field and therefore had a more objective view of the footage, also became closely involved in the story-telling once again.  Just like in the filming phase, the editing was a big team effort, pushing the story forward as it evolved.

It is incredible how a story can change during an edit.  The whole of the Neil Rettig story was added during the edit - originally we were just going to do a piece on the Harpy Eagle, but the people element of the film was by then so strong it seemed vital to tell Neil’s story in conjunction with the Harpy Eagle’s.  Fortunately, Neil had a wonderful library of archive footage that we could tap into.  An original assembly of all the elements usually produces a film about two hours long.  From there, material is added and taken out and shuffled around, through “rough cut” (the story structure is in place, but the film is still about ten minutes over length) and “fine cut” (a near-finished presentation to senior executives where only minor changes are required to get the film to length).  Finally the pictures are “locked” (no more picture changes from then on - not even one frame) and the film is at the correct length - in our case just over fifty minutes long.  This process of taking forty hours of field footage and huge amounts of library material and boiling it down to about fifty minutes takes about two months.  Once the pictures were finalised, we went back to the high quality masters of the images and used the “Edit Decision List” produced by the Avid editing computer to re-create the film in high quality form, mastered onto super high quality Digital Betacam broadcast-standard video tape - the format from which the broadcaster (NBC for example) beams the show to viewers like you.

The next phase of the production creates the soundtrack of the film.  [For more on this, see the “Filming Techniques” part of the “Making Of The Film” section of this web site].  “Atmosphere” or background sounds, specific calls and key movement sounds are layered up by a specialist team of sound editors in Burbank, Los Angeles who worked to a frame-accurate copy of the edited film.  Meanwhile, Writer and Co-producer Cathy McConnell was busy in New York writing the narration script - each word carefully chosen and timed to the picture.  Every fact in the narration was then checked by National Geographic Television’s research department to make sure that everything the film portrays was scientifically accurate (a double-check on the rigorous research process that precedes any filming).  Once checked, the script was sent to our narrator, F. Murray Abraham, who watched the film carefully and rehearsed the script so he could deliver just the right emotion and emphasis to each part of the film.

At the same time our Los Angeles based composer, James Wesley Stemple, was writing the unique music score to the film, again working to the same frame-accurate pictures.  I have to say that working with the composer is always my favourite part of making a natural history film, even though this only takes about a month of the whole three year process.  For me, this is when the idea I originally had all those months ago really comes alive - when it develops its soul, if you like.  Music hooks straight into the emotions of the audience, so this is my best opportunity to get closest to how they are feeling as they watch the show.  It’s a very exciting process, with lots of ideas being tried out, and lots of late nights driven by the desire to get the feeling of the film - its energy - just right.

The two month sound phase culminates in the second biggest day of the production (only topped by Transmission Day) - the Final Mix.  This is when all the sound elements - natural sound, effects, music and narration - are brought together, and their relative levels adjusted to give the right balance of sounds.  Only then does one see and hear what the film is really going to be like - on the last day when one has creative control of the film!  It’s a very exciting moment.  The film is complete.

The film may be complete, but the process is not over.  Things can often continue to happen for months after the Final Mix before the show is transmitted.  Various versions are made of the film - some long, some short - depending on where and how the film is to be shown.  The film’s narration is translated into many different languages (sometimes as many as thirty languages, from Swedish to Swahili), and the English narration part of the soundtrack is replaced with the appropriate language voice.  Space is created for commercial breaks, and this often means sequences have to be lost to make room.  For example, to create the version for NBC to broadcast as the Network Premiere in the USA, we had to cut out eight minutes from the master version to make way for five commercial breaks!  To see the film in its full-length, commercial-free form (the “Director’s Cut”, you could say …..), please buy or rent the film on National Geographic video - otherwise you don’t know what you’ve missed!

That’s usually the end of the three year story that started with an outrageous idea which surfaced from the depths of a producer’s imagination and then wouldn’t leave him alone - another documentary broadcast to tens of millions of people throughout the world;  another video on the shelf.  But this film has a virtual epilogue - this web site, designed to take a television audience further on their discovery of the rainforest canopy.

Largely thanks to the enthusiasm and efforts of Nalini Nadkarni and her colleagues at Evergreen State College in Washington State, USA (and a dream Nalini and I had at the outset of this project, all those years ago .....), I am very proud to see this site going on-line.  It is entirely the work of the team who made the film - an un-commercial, non-profit venture made with no budget and created through voluntary contributions (and the support of Evergreen State College, who believe in its merit).  What we are trying to do here is to stretch the current use of television into the future, where television specials like this will merely be "billboards" to attract the attention of the public and engage their interest, whereupon they then proceed onto the World Wide Web to learn more, ask questions, have those questions answered, get connected and actually do something about important issues - all things that television is actually pretty hopeless at doing, the nature of the medium being what it is.  Nalini and I are both committed conservationists and eternal optimists, and we thought the only way of moving television into this more worthy, useful and powerful position was to just go ahead and DO IT.  Our only regrets are that this does not happen for every documentary made and that this site is only in English - I would love to see the Swahili version!

And that’s where you come in, dear reader.  By arriving here on the World Wide Web, you have now become part of the process, from script to screen.  My invitation to you now is to take this process further by taking action yourself - learn more about rainforest canopies through the text and web links on this site, and maybe click on one of those links in the “Conservation” section and get involved in the future of this “high frontier” - a place which for years has captured my imagination, and which gave me an idea which wouldn’t leave me alone.

I quote from the final lines of the narration:

“[Canopy scientists] … have blazed a trail into the last biological frontier - opening this ‘Eighth Continent’ to exploration.  Upon their shoulders, the next generation can scale new heights ….. We are part of this beautiful world floating above our own - for good, or ill.  The same pioneering spirit that brought us up into the canopy has given us the power to destroy it ….. Canopy explorers have given us a unique opportunity to save this amazing world.  We have a choice - it’s up to us which path we take……”

So go ahead - surprise yourself - get out there and do something that makes a difference.  Take this process to the best stage of its evolution - help create a secure future for the rainforests which I hope you love and respect just a little more having seen the film and visited us here at www.evergreen.edu/ican
 

Tim Scoones, January 1999
 
 

Find out about all the exciting places Tim and the crew visited during the filming for the show in the "Locations" section of the “Making Of The Film” section of this web site.

Find out more about the huge range of skills, gadgets and gizmos the camera crew used to bring you those extraordinary shots in the “Filming Techniques” section of the “Making Of The Film” section of this web site.

Find out more about the core crew of the film in the “Crew” section of the “Making Of The Film” section of this web site.