Making a Mini-Epic – A Real Bug’s Life

interview and copy written for VMI

A Real Bug’s Life is among the most ambitious and innovative natural history series ever made. Over nine episodes the Disney+ docu series uses the latest technology to shine a light on the unseen spectacles of the micro-world.

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“Capturing scenes in the film relies heavily on two things,” explains Robert Hollingworth, one of the show’s cinematographers. “The incredible skill of entomologists and animal experts and the precision technology used to scale down the glossy dramatic camera techniques into the world where a blade of grass is a skyscraper.”

Filming for the episode The Busy Farm took place early 2021 to the end of 2022 on location in the UK and in controlled environments to capture everything from the smallest aphid to the widest establishing shots.

It’s a massive project with many suppliers with VMI providing much of the production’s camera and lens kit plus accessories.

“VMI is our go-to supplier,” says Hollingworth. VMI Bristol is close to Plimsoll Productions [the specialist factual producer behind the series] while Haddenham Studios, which is owned by Hollingworth and used for the production, is in Aylesbury.

“Filming insects requires some very specialist kit which VMI have and they also have a lot of expertise when it comes to putting together packages for natural history programming,” he says.

Setting the look and feel for The Busy Farm was key at the outset and involved testing and selecting a lens kit to work from, and also a LUT for the day and night scenes.

The episode was shot on a combination of RED Gemini and Phantom VEO cameras which are commonly used for capturing superfast action at 1000fps.

“With insects you can’t necessarily tell what frame rate it was shot at,” Hollingworth says. “It’s not unusual to shoot 75fps as your base rate which would appear normal to the viewer so its use is more frequent than you might think. Just visually it helps them to see movement without having to go the extremes of super slow motion.”

Specialist lenses included the InfiniProbe, a macro lens which requires a lot of light so is more suitable for the RED than the VEO. “It’s effectively a microscope lens that can focus to infinity and enables you to get a bug’s eye view.”

Hollingworth has a theatrical background as lighting designer and stage electrician and borrowed lighting techniques from theatre to make A Real Bug’s Life.

“We had carte blanche to go full cartoon style which was great fun. In the studio we employ back projection and scrims to give us a large canvas onto which I can paint with light and play with ideas.”

One of these was to stage a shot of a moth flying across the face of the full moon in homage to Disney classic E.T.

“With a Glass Gobo I projected the moon onto the screen and painted blue around it with other lights. We built a meadow in the foreground and animal wranglers managed to get the moth to fly across the moon. We captured on VEO at 500fps. It’s a very ‘Disney’ shot and a perfect for this style of programming.”

The tiny size of the creatures makes photographing them particularly challenging. Any camera movement or vibration, from what are after all quite heavy cameras, are prone to disturb them.

“We work very closely with the animal wranglers. I’d explain the type of shot I need and together we’d come up with ideas for how to achieve it. Inevitably, this results in compromise and it can also be a very slow process.”

Scale is another important part of the storytelling in a show which looks at the world through the eyes of a minibeast.  “Once you are inside the macro world the images can lose their wow factor if you don’t remind the audience of the scale.”

A sequence with bees, for example, was filmed so that the bees flew through the legs of a chicken. “If you have this colossal leg coming into view you can impart a sense of danger and really bring the microscopic world to life.”

Another episode featured background elements shot on location in New York City by DP Simon de Glanville with foregrounds created at Haddenham Studios. “The whole cityscape provided tremendous opportunities for scale but equally we were able to highlight this by adding a dime or a ring pull for ants to crawl over to remind the viewer of the sheer scale of the world that these millimetre sized creatures exist in.”

Hollingworth also shot a sequence with cockroaches for this episode using motion controlled passes. The motion control gear at Haddenham was designed by Hollingworth in collaboration with eMotimo specifically for macro wildlife cinematography.

The Busy Farm was shot within a small radius of the studio reducing its carbon footprint to a minimum. Haddenham Studios itself runs on renewable energy.

“Minimising our environmental impact is key for us, so we use LEDs only and all our electricity is renewable and with the building being EPC rated as ‘A’ the heat is kept in so we don’t need to waste energy heating it unnecessarily,” Hollingworth says.

A Real Bug’s Life is produced by Plimsoll Productions for National Geographic. Martha Holmes, Grant Mansfield and Tom Hugh-Jones are executive producers for Plimsoll. For National Geographic, Justine Schmidt and Pamela Caragol serve as executive producers.