ChrisPalmerAU

Quite a lot! Most viewers would be surprised by how much fakery there is in wildlife films--it goes far beyond simple sound effects. Film producers routinely make up compelling stories, rent captive animals and pretend their completely wild and free-roaming, and use computer-generated imagery to spice up their footage.

Thank you. I appreciate the warm note! You can go to college and grad school (I teach at the School of Communication at American University in Washington DC), but that is expensive and there's no guarantee of a job at the end of it either. Grad school would teach you the skills you need, give you lots of contacts, and some great work experiences. I have three of my grad students working on one of our IMAX films this coming week. Another approach is to get to know some filmmakers and volunteer to help them when they go out shooting, and build your filmmaking career from there.

It's very hard to know if what you are watching is real or not, unless you were involved in the production and so could see everything that went on with your own eyes. It is very difficult to detect computer enhancements to the images, or captive animals, or fake stories, or fraudulent sounds, or missed opportunities to add a conservation message. It's sometimes even hard to detect pseudoscience and superstition posing as real science (as in the Mermaids programs, and Megalodon shows). I urge you to be skeptical of everything you watch. It is so easy to be duped. If I see a close up of a grizzly bear eating on the guts of an elk it is alleged to have brought down, i immediately suspect the bear is captive and rented, and someone has stuffed M&Ms into the guts of the dead elk.

I describe many examples in my new book "Confessions of a Wildlife Filmmaker." One example from my past: In a film on whales, we showed the skull of a killer whale on the ocean floor and close-up shots of its teeth to indicate the threats to migrating humpback whales from predatory orcas. We intentionally failed to mention that we had placed the orca skull there ourselves.

Hi Phil, thanks for writing! My favorite project was probably the first IMAX film I produced--it was on whales, one of my favorite animals, and was called "Whales." My friend Dave Clark coproduced it with me. It cost $3 million and has grossed so far about $60 million and carried a strong conservation message.