Great Migrations? More Like, Awesome Migrations

David Hamlin, a senior producer for the National Geographic Channel, told Imus today about Great Migrations, the biggest project in the National Geographic Society’s 122-year history.
 
“It’s a lot more than what people think it is, and what I thought it was three years ago,” he said of the cross-platform event, which strives to bring people into the story of animal migrations around the world. “Every single one of those animals has an individual story to tell of hope, and redemption, and trials, and tribulations; an incredibly difficult mission that is under way everyday, land, sea, and sky.”
 
Initially, Hamlin thought Great Migrations would merely capture the spectacular images for which National Geographic is known. Instead, the seven-part series, which debuts Sunday, November 7, at 8pm, contains stories and narratives that drive these migrations, and are, as Hamlin put it, “the heart and soul of this project.”
 
The first hour, called “Born to Move,” focuses on what compels these animals to migrate. “Literally, trillions of animals, everyday, across the planet, are moving because they have to,” Hamlin said. “Either for the sake of their own life, their family’s future, or the sake of their species. These movements are driven by the most fundamental needs that one can possibly imagine.”
 
The migration that Hamlin said serves as “the spine” of the program is that of the wildebeests. Thought most people are familiar with it, it has never before been captured using the advanced technologies National Geographic used to film the entire series.
 
“We use things like the phantom camera—a slow-motion camera that goes up to 1,000 frames a second, better than high-def quality,” Hamlin said. “It allowed us to dive into some of the iconic moments.”
 
He insisted nothing is lost by using digital cameras instead of film. “It’s sharper resolution, no loss of image quality, and I think that all comes through in the series,” he told Imus.
 
Also visible in Great Migrations is the humanizing aspect of animal life, which Hamlin said is present in every story they tell, like that of the elephants in Mali, whose migration happens in the desert just south of the Sahara in 140-degree heat.
 
“As these animals are marching, we witnessed the death of a calf, a traumatic event for the herd,” he said. Despite efforts by the mother and grandmother to revive it, the calf died. “It was devastating for us to document, and clearly devastating for them.”
 
About a week later, as the elephants prepared to leave this spot in the desert due to lack of water (“That’s what pushes them forward,” Hamlin noted), they all gathered around the pile of dried bones that was once the baby elephant.
 
“The elephants came together, and they were cradling the bones,” he said, describing the “elephant funeral.” “You see the close-ups of the trunks opening and closing; it looks like they’re crying. It was just this incredibly rich, moving scene, that you cannot not recognize the connection that they’re feeling what we feel.”
 
The animal kingdom, in his view, is not a fair place, but it’s a system has been working for a long time. “If anything, our role on this planet has made a tough journey tougher,” Hamlin said.
 
But all Imus wanted to know, of course, was, “Are there lions who are jerks?”

No. Only talk show hosts.
 
-Julie Kanfer