While making their acclaimed BBC miniseries "Planet Earth," Mark Linfield and his colleagues knew there were some things in nature too big for a TV screen.
So while filming the miniseries, they also shot footage that would become "Earth," a moving nature film being released by Disney's new documentary arm, DisneyNature, in theaters nationwide Wednesday: Earth Day.
" 'Earth' isn't a cut-down of 'Planet Earth,' " said Linfield, who co-directed the movie with Alastair Fothergill. "We shot them side by side. We were going for rather rare and difficult behavior, and frankly if we hadn't have had the resources from the TV series to allow us to put in days into the field, we'd never have been able to get that rare behavior. ...
"But, at the same time, cinema does need slightly different images. We would frame bigger, wider shots, things that looked more powerful for the cinema, on the same shoots. And we would hold back shots that we felt would work particularly well on the cinema."
There's also a difference in how one tells a story.
The TV series could focus in on different aspects of nature in each episode. Also, on TV, there's the need for commercial breaks, five during "Planet Earth." "You end up structuring your editing around those commercial breaks," he said.
For the sweep of a 90-minute movie, Linfield said, the filmmakers built a narrative thread around "one unifying force that touches pretty much all of life on Earth," the sun. They chose a family of animals from each of the polar regions -- polar bears in the Arctic, humpback whales in the waters off Antarctica, both affected by the seasonal changes in sunlight -- as well as African elephants, representing the planet's equatorial regions.
With all three species, the raising of their young is a key part of the story. "We deliberately wanted to include cubs, calves and the youngsters," Linfield said. "We felt that was a subtle nod to the future."
Along the way, the filmmakers also captured other animals -- wolves hunting caribou in the north, big cats on the prowl in the Kalahari, birds of paradise seeking mates in Papua New Guinea -- that "emotionally added light and shade" to the story, Linfield said. And they featured time-lapse images of plant growth "to get a sense of the physical earth," he said.
Linfield said the makers of "Earth" tried to avoid delivering a heavy-handed environmental message. "We thought, actually, the most powerful thing you can do in conservation is to see what's at stake," Linfield said. "Also, in a positive way, we show what we still have left."
