Constructing A Story For A Wildlife Film
Wildlife films are an amazing way to get people interested in nature and caring for our environment. But how do you actually construct a story about the wildlife or habitat you’re filming which will be engaging and have people raving about your film?
What's the subject of your film?
Are you making a film about a habitat or a single species? Are people involved, or do you only want to film wildlife?
These are important questions to ask yourself when deciding to make a wildlife documentary. They affect not only how you structure your film, but also how you think about your subject when filming. It’s not enough to woo the audience with pretty pictures of your subject; you need a story to keep them engaged and thinking about your film.
While the Planet Earth style of featuring one animal per five minute segment is popular amongst the general public, it arguably makes the story more difficult to communicate – especially in the early stages of development of a wildlife film. How do you explain what the story is to someone who has never seen the BBC’s flagship wildlife programmes? If you think about it, it’s not easy at all. The individual story segments within episodes might be easier to explain – for example, “a sloth’s journey takes him out of the safety of the tree canopy in which he lives, crossing not only the forest floor but also across shallow seas in search of a mate” is a fairly accurate communication of the sloth’s story arc in the Islands episode of Planet Earth II, but what is the story for the episode as a whole? Well, there isn’t really one cohesive story in these episodes; they’re more like a series of short stories stitched together by an underlying theme.
This style might suit your project well if you’re aiming to produce a film or programme about a habitat and the creatures found within that habitat, as it allows you to form the story after filming, based on the behaviours and species you’ve filmed. However, it only allows a snapshot of the story of any one species, making it a less than ideal narrative for films focusing on specific species.
If you’re looking at a specific group of animal species, you could compare attributes amongst the different species. Dancing with Birds is an excellent example of creatively conveying the different behaviours among the various species of Birds of Paradise. While there’s still a bit of a fuzzy story – the last sentence pretty much sums up the narrative – its strength lies in the creative methods employed to guide the film and get the desired information across to the audience in an engaging manner. Utilising a well delivered narration, nicknames for the different birds and animated title cards, it easily captures the engagement of the audience. Alternatively, you could employ the same strategy as the BBC in Dynasties, which follows a specific family of a specific species and tells their individual stories. The BBC arguably took this a little far by anthropomorphising the creatures, applying human logic to explain their behaviours, but the format clearly works.
Having a human element to your wildlife film can change the story quite a lot. If your subject focuses specifically on the conservation of an animal, plant or habitat, having expert involvement is fairly important and the audience will expect this. How much humans influence the story is down to how important they are to it – My Octopus Teacher probably wouldn’t have won the Oscar for Best Documentary if the filmmakers had only focused on the observed behaviours of the octopus and ignored the human element, for example. Humans are inherently interested in other humans though; Craig Foster’s connection to the octopus and how that affected him is the story and that’s why the film is so impactful.
Why are you making your wildlife film?
Do you want to help raise awareness of an endangered species, or perhaps tell the world about an amazing new species discovered? Are you aiming to shine a light on new research into an unusual species?
The why of your film might be obvious to you, but that doesn’t necessarily make it obvious to everyone else. It needs to be something that people will easily understand both when you’re talking about the film to the press and when the audience watches it. When making our film The Tigers Of Scotland, the purpose was to raise awareness of the Scottish Wildcat, a creature now classed as functionally extinct in the wild. Even today, years after the film’s release, we still have people saying they’d never known Britain had a native cat species before watching the film – and they often ask what they can do to help wildcat conservationists. The film therefore serves its purpose well.
You don’t need to explicitly state the purpose of your wildlife film in the narration or script, but it should be conveyed in the film and the best way to do this is through the story. There are story beats you can use to convey your purpose throughout the film – for example, introducing the species or habitat, explaining the threats against it and then how the audience can help. Try not to make things too bleak, as you don’t want your audience to switch off before they finish watching the film, but the best films (and this is particularly true of conservation films) end on an impactful message of hope that encourage their audience to do what they can to help. Racing Extinction is a fantastic example of this – the purpose of the film is to open the audience’s eyes to what we as a species are doing to the planet and it is at times quite horrifying. But it makes you as an audience member want to make whatever changes you can to help – whether that’s refusing to use traditional medicine created from endangered animals, cutting out plastic from your lifestyle or getting rid of your fuel-guzzling car in favour of public transport, bicycles or an electric car.
Where to find the story
Start with why you’re interested in the subject. If your subject is a rare species, why are there so few? Are there mysteries surrounding the habitat or species which you could uncover the answers to in your film? Has something new recently come to light about your subject? Or is there something really unusual and fascinating about a plant or creature that most people you’ve spoken to have never heard of?
Sometimes it can be difficult to find or articulate your story – in which case, you need to keep digging to uncover it, ideally before you start filming. Other times, it goes in a completely different direction to where you think it would, and that can be even more engaging than the original idea. Never be afraid to follow the story if it does change direction, though be wary of the recent trend of turning the camera on yourself. If done well, this can add a new perspective to the film – A Plastic Ocean is a great example of this. The filmmakers originally intended to make a “traditional” BBC style documentary and were intending to film humpback whales in the Indian Ocean – indeed this is the opening to the film – but the huge amounts of plastic they encountered where the whales should have been led to a completely different story, and this story needed a different style of filming, one which was far more “hands on” than your typical natural history programme. However, it is incredibly easy to become blinded by your own bias if you turn the camera on yourself. It’s therefore advisable not to rely on yourself as a character in your own film unless you are key to the story. Should behind-the-scenes content come to form an important part of the story then by all means include it, just be aware of how your presence influences the film’s narrative.
Occasionally, interesting stories can appear in places you would never have thought to look for them. In The Blue Planet, there’s a segment about how orca in the Antarctic hunt seals by creating a bow wave which flips the ice floe the seal is lying on. This behaviour had never been filmed before and came to the attention of the filmmakers from anecdotes of biologists and ex-whalers who had visited Antarctica, however the exact same behaviour is detailed in the reports of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova expedition from 1911-1913. There are several descriptions and sketches of the orca’s hunting method from the various crew members who witnessed it, but the expedition’s photographer Herbert Ponting could not film it with his cinematograph given that he was the orca’s prey and was forced to jump from ice floe to ice floe while clutching his (very large and cumbersome) equipment in order to find safety from them! Had Ponting managed to film the behaviour, we would have all known about it for the past century, though equally if another wildlife filmmaker had read the reports from the Terra Nova expedition, it would have been observed and filmed decades before it eventually came to the attention of The Blue Planet‘s filmmakers.
In short, keep your eyes and ears peeled for interesting facts, anecdotes and reports relating to your chosen subject (especially if they appear in unusual places) and it shouldn’t be difficult to find a story among them, even if that’s not the one you originally envisioned.
How to link all the elements together
The previous sections of this guide all give potential story beats that you can use as the backbone of your film’s narrative and this will help you structure the film as a whole. Filling in the details between those story beats is where you can get creative and is important for keeping your audience engaged.
If you aren’t especially confident in your own skills as a writer, seek out someone who can help guide you – someone who will give you honest and constructive feedback that you can work on. This could be another filmmaker, or someone wholly unrelated to film who simply has a good understanding of how to write. Not everyone can afford to work with a writer, but if you can, it might lend an interesting perspective to the film – one you hadn’t thought of yourself. After all, sometimes it just takes a fresh pair of eyes to see where things link up and how to make a story flow.
Documentaries can present facts and information in a number of creative ways that draw influence from other word-based art forms. Take a look at how stories are structured in other documentaries and work out what you liked and what you didn’t like about each one you watch. Perhaps look at how poems are structured, or plays or novels, and incorporate these into your narrative structure and your script. Alternatively, you could write out the in between sections and work out how one section flows into another.
The best stories often come from the heart – you should be passionate about your subject and the purpose of your film, so don’t be afraid to let this show.
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