Wild Colombia with Nigel Marven

Chlidonias

Chlidonias

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this four-part series was just on NZ tv over the last few weeks, so I thought I'd start a thread if anyone wants to discuss.

The programme itself was pretty good with a lot of rarely-featured wildlife (e.g. lots of small birds, crab-eating foxes, things like that) but I really don't like Nigel Marven. He's one of those "attack the animals" presenters -- you can't be expected to look at an animal just being an animal, you have to look at it being man-handled. The worst bits are when the camera-man is filming a lizard or some-such on a tree, perfectly good close-up footage, and then Nigel says "I really have to show you this lizard" and goes and grabs the poor thing so he can shove its face into the camera lens.

I call him the Forrest Gump of wildlife documentaries. I think it's mainly his accent but he always sounds slightly simple and he just seems to blurt out whatever is in his head. Favourite line was when he was out at night spot-lighting and suddenly said "I'm going to sleep now...."

Snakes really hate this guy! Almost every snake he catches acts really hostile! I sort of get the impression they rile them up beforehand to make the segment more exciting. I wasn't a big fan of Steve Irwin but at least he knew how to handle snakes calmly.

Anyway, here are a few clips I found on youtube. One is him being Nigel, one is him attacking an anaconda, and one is him getting what he deserves from an angry boa :)

 
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Absolutely agree about Nigel Marvin......

His style is so annoying, I can't bear to watch him.......and he did that unforgivable 'walking with dinosaurs'-esque series where he was actually in the sequences. Shame he didn't try and pick one of them up!
 
It's just about tolerable with the sound off and play guess the animal if you don't know it.
I think it's aimed at the modern generation of what I knew as Animal magic, with out the magic of Johnny Morris. that is under tens as a rule on children's TV
I must add I couldn't watch Steve Irwin either, too much over the top enthusiasm for me.
dean
 
Yeah I saw this series a couple months ago, and his China series a few months before. He is an interesting character to say the least.
 
nanoboy said:
Yeah I saw this series a couple months ago, and his China series a few months before. He is an interesting character to say the least.
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I didn't know about the China series, I would have liked to have seen that. I found a couple of clips on youtube, including the following one of him with (as per usual) a really angry snake in a very faked capture scene.
 
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nanoboy said:
How can you tell it is a fake capture scene?
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did you watch it?

Nigel walking with guides...comical double-take to the left of screen...."snake - hold my binoculars!"...runs off-screen....cameraman positioned on other side (foreground) of snake while Nigel slithers dramatically in from the back over the ground to grab it.

Also notice the way in some shots the snake is quite calm, but in close-ups it is hissing angrily for the action quota presumably after being deliberately riled (as per my comment in the first post of this thread).
 
Chlidonias said:
did you watch it?

Nigel walking with guides...comical double-take to the left of screen...."snake - hold my binoculars!"...runs off-screen....cameraman positioned on other side (foreground) of snake while Nigel slithers dramatically in from the back over the ground to grab it.

Also notice the way in some shots the snake is quite calm, but in close-ups it is hissing angrily for the action quota presumably after being deliberately riled (as per my comment in the first post of this thread).
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I did watch it. I just assumed that a big snake like that would be sluggish if it was relatively cold, and consequently they would have more than enough time to plan the scene and get in position. Why would Eden or BBC or whoever allow faked scenes then?
 
I guess most of the scenes in this kind of films -éncounters between man and animal - are fakes ! Mr. Irwin on his bike in Madagascar and oh.. suddenly a ´rare´ animal dicides to show himself to Steve which ofcourse jump up it and `WOW, unbelieveble, amazing, great and so on´. Other - normal - nature-loving people can walk ( or riding bike ) for days in a surtain areas without seeing a single animal, but Steve, Nigel and so on do find all the rareties within a day !
I know a friend of a friend and a real expert on snakes, who spend 3 weeks in the jungle of Papua New Guinea searching for Green Tree Pythons and didn't found a single one. Steve sets his first footsteps on New Guinea and guess.... a complete nest of Tree Pythons in all known colors !!
No these documantairs are not my kind of thing. I more like the films of Jaques Cousteau and Hugo van Lawick, they did REALY a good job.
 
By the way, talking about Colombian wildlife, is there mentioned something about the Colombian subspecies of the Lowland Tapir ( Tapirus terrestris columbianus ) in the movie ?
I didn't see it yet ( I did see his movies about penguins and his China-journey ) and saw a note on this extremely endangered subspecies, that a second population was - as recently as February 2013 - rediscovered in Central Colombia. So far it was thought that only a few animals had survaived in North Colombia.
 
vogelcommando said:
By the way, talking about Colombian wildlife, is there mentioned something about the Colombian subspecies of the Lowland Tapir ( Tapirus terrestris columbianus ) in the movie ?
I didn't see it yet ( I did see his movies about penguins and his China-journey ) and saw a note on this extremely endangered subspecies, that a second population was - as recently as February 2013 - rediscovered in Central Colombia. So far it was thought that only a few animals had survaived in North Colombia.
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I don't recall any mention of tapirs
 
nanoboy said:
I did watch it. I just assumed that a big snake like that would be sluggish if it was relatively cold, and consequently they would have more than enough time to plan the scene and get in position. Why would Eden or BBC or whoever allow faked scenes then?
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it was made by Eden TV, and it is how a lot of the modern wildlife "documentaries" are made now. The scenes are of course all filmed out of sequence and edited together. (As a mild example, see the earlier Colombian clip I posted where Nigel gets bitten by the boa. In some early close-up shots on the clip you can see blood on his finger and shirt, because they are shots from after he was bitten).

The camera crew don't just walk along filming everything the team does because otherwise it would all look like Cloverfield. So they find a snake, then wrangle the snake so they can obtain a number of shots of the presenter "finding it" and catching it, and then use the best one for the finished programme. For the Yunnan one it is likely there was a person just to the right of shot who released the snake so that Nigel could come flying in from the back on cue to "capture" it. Then do another take, and another, until it looks good and Nigel gets his lines right. Then they can film the earlier shots of him "spotting" the snake and dashing off to catch it.
 
For the Yunnan one it is likely there was a person just to the right of shot who released the snake so that Nigel could come flying in from the back on cue to "capture" it. Then do another take, and another, until it looks good and Nigel gets his lines right. Then they can film the earlier shots of him "spotting" the snake and dashing off to catch it.[/QUOTE]

Such cynicism from one so young it gladdens the heart :D
 
I feel sorry for the anaconda being yanked around like that. It's so wrong in so many ways. I'm sure nobody would like it if someone sneak attacked you and wrestled you to the ground.
 
Chlidonias said:
it was made by Eden TV, and it is how a lot of the modern wildlife "documentaries" are made now. The scenes are of course all filmed out of sequence and edited together. (As a mild example, see the earlier Colombian clip I posted where Nigel gets bitten by the boa. In some early close-up shots on the clip you can see blood on his finger and shirt, because they are shots from after he was bitten).

The camera crew don't just walk along filming everything the team does because otherwise it would all look like Cloverfield. So they find a snake, then wrangle the snake so they can obtain a number of shots of the presenter "finding it" and catching it, and then use the best one for the finished programme. For the Yunnan one it is likely there was a person just to the right of shot who released the snake so that Nigel could come flying in from the back on cue to "capture" it. Then do another take, and another, until it looks good and Nigel gets his lines right. Then they can film the earlier shots of him "spotting" the snake and dashing off to catch it.
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That's really really sad. David Attenborough docos don't appear to be faked, and I am watching one right now from Eden TV called 'Nature's Curiosities'. I like his style of observing from afar. Faked scenes are lame.
 
While Attenboroughs docos aren't faked in the sense discussed above, over the years a lot of scenes - particularly closeups and underwater shots - have been filmed in studios. In his autobiography "Life on Air" he describes how one of the cameramen working on "The Private Life of Plants" set up a large tank in his barn and transformed it into a replica of the Amazon so he could film the growth and flowering of the giant Amazon Water-lily. He insulated the entire barn with polythene to maintain humidity and temperature, had lights erected on timers, pumps to keep the water level correct and all sorts of other problems to overcome (like large smelly bubbles breaking the surface and ruining the shot).

Some shots can only be filmed in a studio (like a naked molerat running through its tunnels) and there was a big brouhaha last year about The Frozen Planet using footage of a polar bear cub filmed in a zoo, but the large animals and the location shots are all done on site.

:p

Hix
 
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nanoboy said:
That's really really sad. David Attenborough docos don't appear to be faked, and I am watching one right now from Eden TV called 'Nature's Curiosities'. I like his style of observing from afar. Faked scenes are lame.
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if you want laughably bad fake "documentary" scenes you should watch some programmes by snake-catcher Austin Stevens. Check out the one I've linked below and see if you can keep count of the number of different camera-angles lol. Worst is the mid-part where the dude sits there narrating and pretends the whole thing was real!!

 
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Hehe. Yeah to be fair, the story he was narrating was real, but the snake scenes were a re-enactment.

Hix, yeah I hear you. I remember the polar bear fiasco, but they do show a lot of 'behind the scenes' segments these days like how they filmed a lot of the plant scenes in a studio. If I can't trust David, then we have lost all hope.
 
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