Shooting “Tiger Island”
“Tiger Island” is a new BBC documentary series, created by a team of filmmakers and animal behaviorists who spent 3 months following the elusive cats in the forests of Nepal. Tiger populations in Nepal have been bouncing back in recent years, and this show tracks a group of cats near Bardia National Park near the Indian border. We recently talked to nature cinematographer Max Hug-Williams about his experience filming these majestic creatures with the GSS Cinema Mini 512EX gimbal.
The producers planned out some interesting angles, including drone aerials to help track the tigers from the air, a thermal camera to follow them at night, and behind-the scenes conversations with the crew to make an engaging story about the expedition. To capture the essential centerpiece of the show - close-up beauty shots of the tigers - they brought a GSS 512EX gimbal with a Red Raptor camera and a Canon CN20 50-1000mm lens, and mounted it to a Polaris UTV off-road vehicle.
One thing that was special about this particular expedition was that they designed it to be following their subject around the clock. By combining drones overhead with a mobile team tracking the tigers at ground level, along with a thermal camera for night shooting, they were able to observe previously-unseen behaviors and document new facets of tiger life.
And tigers are quite different from their African cousins, as Hug-Williams discovered: “I’m very used to working with big cats in Africa. Leopards and lions are often very habituated to vehicles, so I don’t bat an eyelid when a lion walkls past a car, because you know they’re not seeing you as a prey item, they’re seeing you as a part of the vehicle. But with tigers, it’s a very different ballgame. They’re ambush predators and far more of an unknown quantity; we hadn’t really followed them in this way before. You have to treat any apex predator like that with maximum respect, and as wildlife filmmakers, the last thing you want to do is disturb the animals.”
Nepal put the equipment through extremes most shoots never see. The crew arrived in near-freezing temperatures with the Himalayas visible in the background; by the time they left, the region had turned to monsoon — dust one week, deluge the next. The Polaris UTV carrying the gimbal took the worst of it. "The buggy was completely beaten up by the end of it," Hug-Williams said, “but the gimbal was working great.” That kind of field durability story is no surprise; it's baked into how GSS builds and supports its systems.
Nighttime brought its own discoveries. With thermal cameras running after dark, the crew began picking out tiger heat signatures scattered across the forest — and lost count. "I think on the last night we counted 17," Hug-Williams said, describing a density of tigers he called among the highest anywhere in the world, in a patch of community forest that isn't even a national park. Sightings like that are now feeding into published research on the population — a reminder that better tools in the field don't just make for better television, they change what scientists know about one of the most-studied predators on Earth.
Hear what Max had to say here: