![]() ![]() Over the course of a year, the team worked up and planned seven specific episodes: a big opening film, One Ocean, to introduce the audience to the central premise of the series, which is, according to Brownlow, that “you’re going to see things you’ve never seen before.” This includes footage of animal behaviour that has never been filmed, such as a fish that leaps out of the water to snatch birds on the wing through to a tuskfish that uses a tool to open clams. “For something that ends up as entertainment telly, it does have an absolute scientific core to it.” “The basis of all these big, new stories are the relationships we have with our scientists,” stresses Honeyborne. This was done by plugging into a network of contacts among marine scientists for information about the latest discoveries about the oceans. Initially, Honeyborne worked with series producer Mark Brownlow and a small team of researchers and producers to find the stories and to script Blue Planet II. Blue Planet II has been four years in production and involved 125 expeditions to 39 countries. He won’t reveal the budget for the seven part series, but some of the stats about the making of the show hint at its size. “A generation on from the Blue Planet stories, it is an opportunity to tell a bunch of new stories,” says executive producer James Honeyborne. The NHU argues that there have been so many scientific discoveries in the oceans since then, as well as huge advances in camera and diving technology, that a sequel is justified. It also sold to 240 territories around the world. The original David Attenborough-narrated series about the world’s oceans aired back in 2001, winning two BAFTAs, two Emmys and nearly 10m viewers in the UK. If any show can comfortably be predicted to become a blockbuster factual hit in the UK and around the world, it is Blue Planet II, made by BBC Studios’ Natural History Unit. Scientists have named this strange place the Lost City, and many believe that it was at a place just like this that life on earth first began, four billion years ago.The producers of Blue Planet II tell Tim Dams how tech advances and military planning helped them capture the secrets of the deep At a hydrothermal vent system in the middle of the Atlantic, seawater and rock react under extreme pressures and temperatures to produce complex hydrocarbons - the building blocks of life itself. One of these geysers might even hold the secret to all life on earth. We discover new species every time we visit these strange new worlds. Shrimps hover on the fringes of billowing clouds of volcanic chemicals, so hot they could melt lead. Hair-covered crabs feed on gushing plumes of otherwise toxic hydrogen sulphide. And at these volcanic hotspots, extraordinary micro-worlds blossom into life, completely divorced from the energy of the sun. Tectonic plates rip apart or collide in mighty clashes. Only three human beings have ever reached here, and yet there is still life to be found in these deep sea trenches. From here we journey on down to the deepest place on earth - the Mariana Trench - almost 11 kilometres from the surface, a vast chasm that ruptures the deep sea floor. Yet even eight kilometres down, where the basic chemistry of life was once thought impossible, we find strange species swimming through the darkness. The sheer weight of water above creates almost unendurable pressures. The deeper you go, the more extreme conditions become. There are fish that walk instead of swim, worms that feed exclusively on bones and shrimps that spend almost their entire lives imprisoned with their mate in a cage of crystal sponge. Food is hard to come by and finding a mate is even harder, but life adapts in ingenious ways. On the desert wastes of the abyss, a whale carcass generates a frenzy as slow-moving sharks as big as great whites fight for what may be their first meal in a year. We encounter savage hordes of Humboldt squid hunting lanternfish in the depths and coral gardens flourishing in absolute darkness, with more species of coral to be found in the deep than on shallow tropical reefs. We discover alien worlds, bizarre creatures and extraordinary new behaviours never seen before. This episode takes us on an epic journey into the unknown, a realm that feels almost like science fiction. Scientists already think that there is more life in the deep than anywhere else on Earth. We have barely begun to explore it, and yet it is the largest living space on the planet. The deep is perhaps the most hostile environment on Earth, at least to us - a world of crushing pressure, brutal cold and utter darkness. ![]()
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