This week’s Wildscreen Industry Summit brought the natural history community back together in Bristol and C21’s key takeaways from the event include the danger of too many A-list voiceovers, the opportunity presented by archive, and the ongoing struggle with the advance of AI.
L-R: Tom McDonald, Vanessa Berlowitz and Grant Mansfield
The golden era is over, and that may not be a bad thing
These are straitened times for all unscripted producers of course, but with its high budgets and long lead times natural history feels like a particularly vulnerable genre to the industry’s present headwinds. There’s palpable angst in the room when the community gather at events like this week’s Wildscreen Industry Summit here in Bristol.
Tom McDonald, exec VP of global factual and unscripted content at National Geographic, made no bones about the ‘golden era’ of commissions and budgets being well and truly over. Nat Geo is spending less than when McDonald arrived there in 2022 and commissioning fewer new titles because they’ve found legacy and library blue chip natural history series still do well on Disney+ so “it’s hard to make an argument for an incessant chain of new”.
“The streaming business model has changed, it’s about profit now not subscribers and, while I hate the term, we’re having to sweat the asset,” McDonald told delegates.
Bad news for producers looking for their next commission from one of the big players that is actively still buying in this sector. McDonald, though, did also point out that there perhaps needed to be a redress and that natural history had perhaps been living beyond its means for a while.
“There was definitely a moment around 2022 where it felt like too many broadcasters were making the same show,” McDonald said. “I think everybody can name some of those shows. They may have had slightly different titles but Netflix, Nat Geo and Apple were putting things out that were to a greater or lesser extent the same pieces, the same ideas…
“I hate to say it, but I have seen a lot of natural history over the past few years where the sequences are broadly the same. In some cases it’s the same animal. I don’t just mean the same species, it is the same animal. There are animals who are now known in screen, they have names because people keep going back and filming them.
“Do I think that’s good for audiences? I don’t regret, to some degree, what I hope will be the end to duplication. There simply aren’t enough locations, animals and stories to go around to make the amount of natural history that was being made. Let’s be honest, if that story has been told, why are we shooting it again? I don’t understand it. It costs so much money, why are we going out to make the same bloody thing again?
“I’ve got a lot of close friends who have worked in this industry for 25 years who are struggling to find work, and it’s horrible… but I can’t say I regret not stumbling on a sequence that I’ve seen a million times. It’s hard for people in this room who were making some of those series but, you knew it too. People were sending me photographs from the location of the crews queueing up to film the same thing. A collective who cares about the natural world sort of lost their minds, that doesn’t feel right to me.”
Archive could be the ‘new kid on the block’
In that environment, archive could become a big asset.
Having come through a traumatic summer of bankruptcy and rescue as CEO of Off The Fence, Bo Stehmeier believes archive could hold one of the keys to new business models that companies must adopt to avoid falling foul of the industry’s current dire financial straits.
Emily Renshaw-Smith and Bo Stehmeier
Stehmeier said: “Archive sounds dusty and boring, but in actual fact it represents a gold rush and speed to market. Working with companies like Getty Images, it’s a total gold mine where you can go from zero to production within a day. It’s the new kid on the block.
“There is still business for originally shot wildlife, but going to channels [pitching] to shoot new behaviour from a lion pride is a very long journey. What channels are needing more and more is fast turnaround, either anniversary docs or something that’s happened in the news.”
He added: “A lot of channels don’t have marketing budgets anymore so they jump on the back of headlines and news to lift their shows and give them a halo effect. In order to react fast enough to a news story or anniversary, you need to work with archive because the production cycles for originally shot content just don’t work anymore.
“There is still a sense of romance in this industry, almost like Indiana Jones, of flying to East Africa to film lions, and we’re clinging on to it. Calling Getty Images to license some lion footage is not as exciting, but we have to drop that [mindset].”
It was a point echoed on the same Wildscreen panel, titled The Archive Advantage – Earn From What You Own, by Emily Renshaw-Smith, MD of Open Planet Studios. “Budgets are challenged so we need to find more creative ways to tell stories with what we’ve got already,” she said.
“How many times do we need to go and film a polar bear on an ice cap? We’ve done that already. With Nat Geo’s Ocean with David Attenborough, we filmed for the first time the destructive effects of bottom trawling, so nobody needs to do that again. We’ve got it now, we can distribute and sell it. There are great economies to be had.”
A-list talent can help, but let’s not go overboard
One thing that is cutting through with audiences and buyers alike is the use of A-list talent as voiceover artists. Nat Geo’s Underdogs with Ryan Reynolds has been something of a darling of the conference this week. But producers should beware of overkill, and attaching celebrities to projects for the sake of it rather than because they have a genuine, authentic connection.
Grant Mansfield, CEO of UK- and US-based Plimsoll Productions, which attached Paul Rudd as narrator to its Tiny World project and more recently made Surviving Pompeii with Tom Hiddleston for Nat Geo, says without genuine, authentic connection to the topic producers risk “killing the goose that laid the golden egg”.
“Back in the day I co-created a show called I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here and essentially the criteria for getting on that show is you are a celebrity. I think the criteria in natural history programming has to be I’m a celebrity plus… It has to be celebrities who have some knowledge, passion or genuine engagement with the subject,” Mansfield told delegates.
“We are going to kill the goose that laid the golden egg if we just start chucking celebrities at shows willy nilly. I can think of some shows, particularly in specialist factual, where they haven’t been a good fit so it’s up to us to make sure we’re using them properly.”
AI – friend or foe
One way to solve long lead times and high budgets is just to get AI to generate the image for you.
The threat of generative AI to the natural history genre has been exercising execs in this part of the world for a while, and last year’s Wildscreen was stunned by a polar bear clip shown by Canadian filmmaker Christopher Paetkau who had taken some genuine shots but then used AI to add sequences, voice over, score and storyline and produced a five-minute film that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the BBC’s Blue Planet in a day and a half.
Walter Köhler (left) and Markus Mooslechner
Terra Mater Studios, the Red Bull-backed factual production company led by industry veteran Walter Köhler, is attempting to fight back against AI ‘slop’ and deepfakes with a new standard mark scheme. Terra Mater is taking the fight for authenticity to big tech by launching its Wild Footage – AI Free Seal, an open source symbol that productions free of AI video generation can apply for to certify the authenticity of the footage they contain.
Following a similar launch at last month’s Jackson Wild conference in the US, Kohler and Terra Mater producer Markus Mooslechner took to the stage on Monday to encourage Bristol’s community of natural history producers to join the scheme.
Mooslechner said: “It’s important to make clear we are not against artificial intelligence – not at all, I love working with AI. What is important is we do not mess with AI when it comes to actual footage that can be shot with a camera. If it should be shot with a camera it should not be messed about with using generative AI, and that’s what this seal is all about.”
It is easy to forget, however, among all the justified fear, that AI could be a force for good in a struggling industry. Menial tasks, time consuming admin, laborious edits, can all be done by the tech now, vastly reducing headcounts, lead times, production budgets and so on. TV producers can make more television for less money in a faster time, which has got to be good news.
It was something that was brought home to me while chairing the AI panel here in Bristol this week with an audience question.
We’re fresh back from a Mipcom where every third word was YouTube – 20 years ago the video streaming platform was seen as a copyright-stealing pariah, now the industry thinks it’s the future. Is the industry in danger of making the same mistake again? James Fulcher, non-executive director at Plimsoll Productions, asked my panel from the floor: “When YouTube came out lots of young, entrepreneurial people who weren’t in broadcast went and created businesses, employment and really good content. Ten, 15 years on we’re still trying to work out how to use YouTube. How do we not miss the boat on AI in the same way? How do we attract young, entrepreneurial talent? And more importantly how do we encourage them to represent the natural world in a responsible way?”
Worse to come?
Jack Bootle, head of commissioning for specialist factual at the BBC, started his week worrying about the talent drain that will happen in these economic circumstances. “There is a crunch happening, we’ve talked about it for a few years and it feels like we’re now really seeing it now. I worry about creatives not working, I worry about companies I know can make amazing shows closing, and I worry about young people not being able to get a foot on the ladder. I worry there will be a real talent drain in the fulness of time because of this,” Bootle said.
What really wouldn’t help with that would be further erosion of the BBC. The corporation currently has 28 natural history projects in production. We’re two years from its next royal charter and potentially less than four from a Reform government that has already said it would scrap the licence fee and is openly hostile to the UK public broadcaster.
“It is worth saying that the BBC may no longer exist at the end of 2027, certainly not in its current form,” Bootle told delegates. “The charter renewal will happen at the end of 2027 and currently we don’t yet know what the deal is, we don’t know what it will look like, we don’t know if the licence fee will continue to exist.
“I say this not to alarm people, I say this because people in this room have power and influence – you may not think you do but you do, because the DCMS [Department for Culture Media and Sport] listens to you. And if you believe the BBC is important to the future of natural history filmmaking – I would argue very strongly that it is – then you need to make your voices heard.
“Write to your MP, write to Lisa Nandy. I’m not telling you what to write, but I would suggest that without the BBC there is a big problem for the Bristol [production] sector and you can’t just imagine or assume that it’s a thing that will be there forever. We have to fight for it.”
