Analysis of a Documentary: Planet Earth

Planet Earth (TV series 2006)

Planet Earth is a documentary television series that was produced in 2006 by the BBC Natural History Unit. It took five years to make due to its ambitious and large scale of it all. It was the most expensive nature documentary series ever commissioned by the BBC to this very day, and also the first to be filmed in high definition. The series was co-produced by the Discovery Channel and NHK in association with the CBC, and was described by its makers as "the definitive look at the diversity of our planet". The series is made of 11 different episodes of approximately 50 minutes. Each of these presents a global overview of a different habitat of the Earth. At the end of each episode, there is a ten minutes featurette which gives us a behind-the-scene look at the challenges involved in producing such a project.

Planet Earth was first broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC One in March 2006, and premiered one year later in the USA on the Discovery Channel. By June 2007, it had been shown in 130 countries worldwide. The original BBC version was narrated by David Attenborough and produced by Alastair Fothergill. For Discovery, the executive producer was Maureen Lemire, with Sigourney Weaver's voiceover replacing Attenborough. The opening episode was its first ever scheduled programme in the HD format, to shown on the BBC HD channel. Besides being BBC One's featured "One to Watch" programme of the day, Planet Earth was heavily trailed on the BBC's television and radio channels both before and during its run. The documentary series received an extremely good reception with Time magazine's James Poniewozik named it one of the Top 10 New TV Series of 2007, ranking it at #4 and it also tops IMDb's list of the highest rated TV shows with a score of 9.6/10. It also won the Science or Natural History award at the Royal Television Society Programme Awards in 2007 and picked up two awards from the Broadcasting Press Guild for Best Documentary Series and Innovation in Broadcasting. It was so successful that a feature film version of Planet Earth
was commissioned alongside the television series.

The genre of this documentary is nature documentary.  A nature documentary film is about animals, plants, or other non-human living creatures, usually concentrating on film taken in their natural habitat, which is what Planet Earth is all about.

The target audience for this series would be extremely varied. It is targeted more toward adults and the older generations as they are more likely to watch a documentary about wildlife than children and teenagers are. It mainly targets people as well who would have an interest in wildlife and mature, it could be used for educational purposes within the classroom too therefore targeting teachers and students.

I will do a textual analysis on the episode: Jungles

This episodes narrative  examines jungles and tropical rainforests. These environments occupy only 3% of the land but is home to more than half the species in the world. This episodes touches a range of topics within the jungle such as: how chimpanzees live, to the many different types of rare birds that live there etc. 

The opening of the show uses an establishing shot of Earth orbiting with the sun gradually appearing from behind it, the titles are faded into this shot as they progressively become more dominant and visible with the use of a plain & simple white font. 

Incidental music is also playing in the background with its pitch getting louder as the sun gets brighter.  The next shot we see is an aerial shot over the Jungles tree tops which shows the audience what this episode is going to be about. As well is narration from David Attenborough (narration is a common convention for documentaries), his voice is calm and clear to understand which goes well with the incidental music which had a slow and peaceful tone to it as well as non diegetic sounds of animal and insect noises. We next see a slow forward tracking shot from within the Jungle and then pans also. The first animal we are introduced to is a male blue bird of paradise we first see this bird in a close up. 

Throughout the whole documentary the camera movements have a slow pace to it; it uses a variety of different shots from pans; tilts; tracking; close ups; long shots; medium shots the list goes on. It uses such a wide range of shots to make the documentary more visual attractive and engaging, especially as it was filmed in HD and this was the first nature documentary to be filmed in HD it needed a stunning diversity in shots to show off this new technology. The camera movements are also slow to coincide with the general calmness the documentary presents. Planet Earth also states facts and statistics throughout such as “only 2% of sunlight filters down to the forest floor”; this is another convention with documentaries. The editing of this documentary mainly uses seamless cuts or jump cuts to show a change of scene; the pace of the editing is slow to yet again to go with the tempo of the incidental music and the general tone of documentary.