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Planet Earth

Hanging from an emergent tree in Sabah, Borneo

Huw Cordey, Farleigh Old Boy and a producer of BBC wildlife programmes, such as Planet Earth and Life of Mammals, had the children and staff enthralled when he came to talk to them at the end of term about his fascinating work and experiences. 

Huw explained that Planet Earth remains the most ambitious and expensive natural history series ever made. It was filmed in 204 locations in 62 countries and took nearly five years to make, involving a large team of production co-ordinators (the unsung heroes) and 60 cameramen together with hundreds of local field assistants. The aim of the series was to show the planet as it had never been seen before, portraying the splendour and grandeur of the earth whilst putting the animals in perspective.

With film clips and photographs, Huw explained how one cameraman spent over 600 hours sitting in a hide one metre by one metre, filming in Papua New Guinea, where there are over 42 different species of the bird of paradise. Over two months of filming resulted in 20 minutes of footage used in the series. From Angel Falls in Venezuela and desert wildlife in Namibia to snow covered sand dunes in Niger and crystal filled caves in New Mexico, Huw's adventures gripped his audience.

On the edge of the Cave of Swallows in Mexico, the biggest cave shaft in the world

His exciting experiences included meeting a 23 foot long anaconda in the rainforest and an unfortunate encounter with an enormous freshwater fish, which weighed 80 kilos and broke one of the cameras when it leapt out of the water as Huw and his film crew were travelling by boat up river in the rainforest of Guyana. He explained some of the technical challenges, such as how to bring the scale of caves in Borneo to life, the problems of travelling with so much equipment and the dangers of travelling on local transport.

The crystal cave, Lechuguilla, in New Mexico, USA

With such a ground breaking series there were enormous risks, such as abseiling 1400 feet down a single rope into the Cave of Swallows in Mexico, which alone took half an hour; filming in the totally uninhabited Gobi Desert (the size of Holland) and camping there in temperatures down to -25 degrees centigrade. Cameramen have experienced the investigation by a polar bear of their tiny shelter in the North Pole and a whole

The team meet locals in the highlands of New Guinea

year in temperatures of -70 degrees for the filming of the Emperor penguin.

The inspirational talk ended with Huw answering questions: the hardest thing to film was desert camels which could run for 70 miles in the opposite direction; his favourite animals of all those filmed were birds of paradise for Planet Earth, and prairie dogs, which he spent a year filming in South Dakota.

Finally, Archie Cripwell was the lucky winner of a complete boxed set of Planet Earth DVDs for listening attentively and correctly knowing that the animal Huw had set out to film in Guyana was a jaguar.