Eighteen days without a single usable shot
The herd moved at night for almost three weeks. What that does to a crew, a budget, and a schedule — and why we did not…
Four Wildernesses One Season
Four Wildernesses One Season
Patagonia
Four Wildernesses One Season
Borneo
Four Wildernesses One Season
Arctic
About the series
Four crews. Thirty-one months in the field. And one question we could not stop asking — how does anything still make a living out here?
Every animal in this series is solving a problem. A drying pan. A shorter winter. A forest cut into islands. We built the season around those problems rather than around scenery, and stayed long enough to watch them get solved — or not.
Nothing here is staged, baited, or re-cut from library footage. Where we could not film a behaviour honestly, we left it out and said so in the episode notes.
Episode guide
The four films, in the order we shot them
Each episode follows one wilderness through a single turning point in its year — the week the water arrives, or leaves.
EP 01
The Long Dry
Southern Africa · 58 min
Elephant matriarchs hold sixty years of route memory. We followed one herd for eleven weeks and filmed the moment the youngest calf learned the road.
EP 02
Wind Country
Patagonia · 58 min
A puma raising four cubs in open steppe cannot hide a kill. A winter spent watching her trade concealment for speed, and what that costs by season's end.
EP 03
Islands in the Green
Borneo · 58 min
Canopy rigs at 48 metres, left running nine months. They recorded a forest that now works as fragments, and hornbills learning to cross open ground.
EP 04
Late Ice
High Arctic · 58 min
The freeze now arrives three weeks later than when our field guide was born. The animals waiting on it, told from a camp that had to be moved twice.
The field record
What it took to get four hours of film
Every figure below is taken from the production log, not from the press pack.
0
Days on location
Across nine field trips, the longest running 71 consecutive days without resupply.
0
Hours of rushes
Roughly 297 hours of footage shot for every hour that made the final cut.
0
Countries and territories
Every permit secured through resident partners, with local crew on each shoot day.
0
Behaviours filmed first
Nine sequences reviewed by external biologists and confirmed as first-of-kind footage.
Ep 01 · Frame 0412
Spotlight
The matriarch who remembers the road
She is fifty-eight years old and the only reason her family is still alive. When the seasonal pans failed in the third year of drought, she walked her herd 210 kilometres to a spring she last drank from as a calf — a route none of the younger cows had ever travelled.
Our tracking team followed at 400 metres for eleven weeks. She never once stopped to search. She simply walked, and everyone behind her learned the way.
- Estimated age
- 58 years
- Herd size
- 19, including four calves under three
- Distance walked on camera
- 210 km in 34 days
- Filming distance held
- Minimum 400 m at all times
Official trailer
Two minutes, not one frame of it staged
Cut entirely from finished sequences. Nothing in it was filmed for promotion, and nothing appears in a different form in the episodes.
Contact sheet
Rushes, straight off the cards
Sheet 07
Reel A-014
8 frames
F-0114
00:41:22
F-0231
06:12:04
F-0388
11:55:47
F-0402
18:03:19
F-0455
21:40:08
F-0511
26:17:53
F-0603
33:29:11
F-0740
44:08:36
Frame numbers and timecodes are as logged on location. Nothing on this sheet has been colour graded — these are straight card pulls.
Conservation
Filming rules we do not break
Written before the first shoot and audited after each one. Any crew member can stop a shot under them, and three shots were stopped.
Distance before footage
Minimum approach distances are set by the resident biologist, not the director. If an animal changes what it is doing because of us, the camera stops and we withdraw.
No bait, no call playback
We do not feed, lure, or draw animals with recorded calls. Every behaviour in the series happened whether or not a camera was present.
Local crew on every shoot
Twenty-two of our thirty-one field roles were filled by people living inside the areas we filmed. Fixers are credited on screen as crew, not as service providers.
Locations withheld
Coordinates for denning, nesting, and rhino sequences are stripped from all published material. We will not trade an animal's safety for a location tag.
A fixed share of every licensing fee goes back to the ranger units and community trusts that made the filming possible — committed at contract stage, not decided afterwards.
Read the policy
The crew
Four people who spent most of three years outdoors
Ade Fenwick
Series director
Cut the Borneo canopy episode from nine months of unattended rig footage. Believes a sequence is finished when nothing else can be removed from it.
Priya Raghunath
Lead camera
Shot the 34-day elephant walk on a long lens from a moving vehicle. Holds the production record for consecutive days without a usable shot: eighteen.
Tomás Bergara
Field biologist
Sets approach distances and can end any shot. Spent the Patagonia winter scat-sampling to confirm the puma's litter before we filmed her.
Nkechi Olawale
Location sound
Recorded the Arctic ice-shift audio that opens episode four. Every ambience in the series is location sound — there is no library track in the mix.
Field journal
Notes written in camp, published unedited
Weekly dispatches from the crew while the season was still being shot — including the weeks nothing worked.
Rigging a camera 48 metres up and leaving it there
Nine months, four rigs, one lightning strike. The full method, the failure rate, and the two things we would build differently next time.
We moved camp twice because the ice would not hold
The freeze came late for the third year running. What that meant for the shoot, and what our guide's family has recorded about it since 1974.
Press
What reviewers said after the festival cut
It refuses the usual triumphant score and lets you sit in the silence of an animal deciding what to do next. That restraint is the whole achievement.Marisol Vane The Evening Review
The episode notes tell you exactly what was not filmed and why. I cannot think of another natural history series willing to do that.Dr Ingrid Solberg Field Ecology Quarterly
Eleven weeks with one herd, and you feel every one of them. By the final crossing you know the animals well enough to be frightened for them.Callum Reyes Northbank Film Journal
A season that trusts its audience to wait. The Arctic episode alone justifies the three years it took to make.Hana Delacroix Continental Broadcast
Where to watch
Streaming now, broadcasting weekly
All four episodes are available to stream in full. The broadcast run repeats each Sunday with audio description and open captions.
Sun 9 Aug
The Long Dry Episode one · Southern Africa
20:00
Northlight
Sun 16 Aug
Wind Country Episode two · Patagonia
20:00
Northlight
Sun 23 Aug
Islands in the Green Episode three · Borneo
20:00
Northlight
Sun 30 Aug
Late Ice Episode four · High Arctic
20:00
Northlight
From 1 Sep
Behind the Rushes Companion film · 42 min
Streaming only
Field dispatch
One letter a month, sent from wherever the crew is
Shoot notes, unpublished stills, and next season's schedule before it goes public. No sponsorship, no forwarding, one click to stop it.
Roughly 11 letters a year. We have never sent two in a week.
Contact
Licensing, press, and footage requests
Broadcast licensing, festival submissions, educational use, and archive footage all come through the same desk. We answer within two working days, and faster if you are on a deadline.
Email
contact@example.com
Phone
+1 (000) 555-555
Production office
123 Maplewood Lane Apartment 4B
Springfield, IL 62704 USA
Springfield, IL 62704 USA