The Americas' Filming Firsts: How Cameras Caught Rare Animal Behaviors Never Recorded Before
The Americas filmmakers and scientists used cutting edge technology and research to film never-before-seen animal behaviors.
Over the course of 10 episodes, The Americas took viewers on an expansive adventure from the southernmost tip of South America to the northern Edge of North America, and all points between. It was a project 5 years in the making, requiring 180 expeditions to some of the most remote locations on Earth.
Even narrating the footage in the studio, series narrator Tom Hanks got an education himself and often left wondering just how filmmakers pulled off these incredible shots of the natural world.
“I find the tales behind the camera equally astonishing,” Hanks said. “The extraordinary lengths they go to, to get these images, in some of the most extreme places on the planet.”
Now, you can see just how researchers, scientists, and photographers captured these uniquely wild moments and even some behaviors never before seen in film, in The Making of The Americas.
Nesting with harpy eagles in the rainforest treetops
The crew behind The Americas set out for the Amazon rainforest of Venezuela in search of a giant harpy eagle. They were hoping to find a mother raising a newborn chick and capture it on film for the very first time. But filmmaking in the rainforest is almost as challenging as living in the rainforest. Capturing the birth and early life of a harpy eagle chick meant spending a month in the rainforest, watching and waiting.
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The team needed to get cameras in the correct position and keep them there without disturbing the eagles. They set up shop high in the treetops, where the harpy eagles nest, nestled in small, temporary platforms in the canopy. Their workspaces were little more than a few planks of wood, some netting, and some fabric roofing, all perched more than 100 feet above the forest floor.
Filmmakers spent 12 hours a day on those platforms for 3 weeks with food and water delivered from the ground by rope and bucket. Finally, an eagle chick poked its head out of the nest, crying to be fed. The mother eagle stays in the nest to protect the chick while they both wait for dad to return with food. In the meantime, a massive thunderstorm is on the horizon. High winds, heavy rain, and lightning make staying in the canopy a dangerous endeavor for eagles and people alike.
When the weather cleared and filmmakers climbed back onto their treetop platforms, they were delighted to find that the chick had survived the storm. Even better, dad finally returned with food and the team captured a mother harpy eagle feeding their chick, cutting the meat into tiny pieces and placing them tenderly in the chick’s mouth, for the very first time.
How filmmakers went hunting with sperm whales at the bottom of the ocean
Perhaps the most ambitious of The Americas’ segments involves following a sperm whale on a deep sea hunt, something scientists have speculated about but no one had ever seen. “The Americas crews worked closely with the world’s leading scientists and photographers to reveal cutting edge discoveries,” Hanks said.
Human filmmakers could never hope to move quickly enough or swim deeply enough to follow a sperm whale on a hunt. Instead, the crew enlisted the help of the sperm whales themselves, courtesy of a specially designed camera tag system.
Four suction cups arranged in a square attach the camera harmlessly to the whale’s body. The camera system was designed to shoot automatically and release from the whale after 5 hours. Back at the surface, it sends out a signal which researchers use to find the camera tag and retrieve the footage.
Making it work took a combination of timing and luck. A boat captain carried the crew and the camera system out to sea and to within touching distance of a pod of sperm whales. Then, using a long pole, researchers attached the camera to the whale’s body. It all had to be done in just a few minutes, before the whales dove again and rose an hour later who knows where. Once the camera system was attached, the rest was up to the whale.
Once the camera detached, researchers needed to find it, and fast. They spent the next day carrying an antenna and combing the beach, hoping to find the camera before its battery ran out and the signal went dead. Finally, they found the camera buried in the algae along the coast.
Back at the base, researchers finally got to see the footage they had all been waiting for and it was about as good as they could have hoped. The whale dives to a depth of 2,500 feet, clicking loudly along the way. Suddenly, the clicks get faster as she finds something in the dark depths, then a burst of ink and a brush against the seafloor. They were watching the first footage of a sperm whale hunting squid at the ocean floor. And now we get to see it too, on The Americas.
