Nature documentaries, unlike most genres, are beloved by particularly wide demographics, panning both age and social class. This is in part due to the perception that documentaries are in some way more 'real' than other genres. This perception is broadly formed from three assumptions:
- The BBC are an established and trustworthy institution, and therefore what we are seeing is 'real'
- A documentary isn't fiction, but a documentation of 'real life'
- A nature documentary in particular lacks any actors, and therefore what we are seeing is 'real'
However, nature documentaries are no more or less real than any other genre. While we may be watching 'real' animals, the images we have seen have been selected from up to thousands of hours of footage. In order to film secretive animals, the camera people have to acclimatise animals to their presence, and may use recording of predators cries in order to get the response that the audience wants to see. Scenes have been assembled using footage from different times to create a compelling narrative. As wild sound is generally unusable, the vast majority of sound effects are recorded using studio techniques and added later. Post production techniques such as slow motion and extensive colour grading are applied to manipulate audience responses. A dramatic (or comedic, or melancholy) soundtrack is added to anchor the response of the audience to match the dominant ideology of the producer. And the animal 'actors' are heavily anthropomorphised through the use of an emotive voiceover.
 |
| Remember that every shot used in a nature documentary has been carefully constructed, a fact the even the animals are aware of! |
So what we ultimately see is no more or less real than any other TV programme. Nature documentarians have been open about this for years. But audiences are unwilling to accept that what they are watching is essentially an impeccably edited fiction. When this mask slips, audiences get upset.
The term 'realism' doesn't really work in media studies, as no media product is 'real'. The second an edit is made, a programme is commissioned or an actor selected, we are as far away from 'real life' as we could hope to be. So the term we use is not 'realism', which is absolute and objective enough of a term to be largely useless, but verisimilitude. Verisimilitude means 'like the truth' and we as audiences all have different expectations of the verisimilitude of different genres and media. You can read more about verisimilitude and exactly how to write about it here.
Below you will find a series of articles on how nature documentarians and photographers use a range of techniques to construct 'reality'. In your answer, you may wish to argue that this is yet another way of manipulating the audience to accept the dominant ideology of the producer.
The recent scandal surrounding Blue Planet's sister show Human Planet has seen audiences find out that certain scenes were 'faked'. This Guardian article explores how valid this criticism actually is.
This sort of controversy extends to wildlife photography as well, which lots of shady tricks used to present a more exciting version of reality.
Prepare to have your dreams shattered and your childhood ruined, as The Huffington Post discusses some common ways in which scenes in nature documentaries are staged.
This excellent article from The Verge looks at how narrative is constructed in BBC nature documentaries. Highly recommended read.
And this article on Vox discusses how sad it is that audiences even need to have a narrative to spice up what is already exceptional and fascinating footage of animals.