WELCOME | High Definition magazine

High Definition wildlife photography was always meant to live on the grand vista and Planet Earth and the like has attuned us to expect glorious sweeps of exotic parts of the world when the words ‘wildlife’ and ‘HD’ are mentioned in the same sentence. Small Talk Diaries is maybe the antithesis of the Planet Earth type programme. Although shot in HD it’s use hasn’t been requested by the broadcaster, CBBC. It is strictly for kids and relies for its main thrust of entertainment on the characterisation of insects with human voices, but a Look Who’s Talking for bugs it isn’t!

Small Talk Diaries is a series of programmes that tells you that it’s OK to laugh at insects because really they are quite funny and giving them eyes and other facial expressions catches your attention and has a touch of ‘education-by-stealth’ about it.

The Bristol, UK-based production company Ammonite had an idea for this humanisation of insects as a basis for a programme a few years ago and it was only when producer Martin Dohrn talked it through with a CGI skilled friend that thing started taking shape.

“Initially it evolved from my own idea, I was interested in having a bit of a laugh and getting some humour in to wildlife filming. I was talking it through with a friend of mine, Rowan McCarthy, who has since gone back to Australia, and we developed it with the idea of silly faces.

“We put some eyes on a woodlouse and we made a little movie called Bug Wars. It was really more for grown-ups than children at that time. We experimented with different styles from good blends of facial features to magazine-like cut-outs – everybody said that they hated the crude cut-outs and loved the blended faces.

“So then another friend of mine Richard Higgs of Big Squid New Media who specialise in compositing and CGI and I got together and took it a step further”.

Martin shot some footage of woodlice with a special endoscope lens that he already had and took it to Richard to put the ‘eyes’ on ‘properly’. Martin and Richard with his team put together the comps and once the eyes were there the magic started: Martin, “A couple of trials later I saw a shot that persuaded me that this was something amazing!”

He put together a script, which was called the Decomposers and made a little six minute film with Big Squid compositing a woodlouse and a worm. “I have a great fear of CGI especially HD CGI because of the amount of money it can cost and the amount of time it can use to make something than can still look like a CGI. My intention was to see whether or not we could do with straight compositing. So we would take a 2D part of a human face and we stick it on a 2D picture then the work is in the tracking and the blending of that. So that was how I was planning to make it affordable in the normal world. In the end we did end up using a lot of CGI eyes which start as 3D then to 2D and are composited normally. They were true 3D renders.”

A grant from South West Screen turned out to be a catalyst for the production as it enabled a more professional-looking promo which in turn produced funding from the Dutch distribution company Off The Fence. “They told us that if we got a commission they would give us this amount of money, I’m not sure if that was because of the South West Screen grant or not. So then we went to the BBC with both those amounts and they said yes.”

At that point they had about a quarter of the Pilot already shot so they had to shoot the rest of it and deliver a show that would excite them. They got the commission but with only 10 percent of the series in the can.

Without a broadcaster asking for high definition from the start Ammonite could have decided to shoot SD or even film but there were some very good reasons for shooting HD and ironically resolution was the least of them: “We used the Varicam for a lot of the footage and it is the best standard definition camera ever built if you know what I mean. It’s very flexible with fantastic picture quality. But the whole thing about SD with our particular post production process which is based on Final Cut Pro makes SD really quite complicated. If you’re using DV it’s very simple but we couldn’t really use DV as we needed to use a proper recording format. I didn’t want to use film for various reasons, we couldn’t technically get the images we wanted on film, we had to use a video format.