Blue Planet III keeps murkier shots in so viewers know its footage is real
Producers say they have left in plankton, boats and buoys they once would have cut, as new camera kit captures ocean behaviour never filmed before.
The makers of Blue Planet III have deliberately kept cloudier and less polished footage in the new series, so that viewers can be confident the animals on screen are real and not generated by artificial intelligence.
The BBC's natural history unit has spent four years filming across five oceans for the six-part series, which is narrated by Sir David Attenborough and starts on BBC One and iPlayer on Sunday 1 November.
Why rough edges are staying in
In earlier series, shots with a lot of plankton drifting in the water were often dropped. So were scenes where the water was murky, or where a boat or a buoy crept into the frame.
Executive producer Elizabeth White told journalists at a preview screening that the team is now leaving those imperfections in. She said the rise of AI had made the production want to be even more authentic, and that real deep-sea creatures were probably more remarkable than anything AI could invent.
The thinking is simple. One common sign of AI-made video is that it looks too smooth and too perfect. A little murk in the water helps to show that a sequence was filmed in the sea rather than built on a computer.
The new cameras
The series has also relied on equipment built for the job. Among the kit the crews used:
- An underwater CCTV system, nicknamed the stonefish cam, which can be left in place to watch animals for long periods. It recorded dolphins using sea sponges to block holes in coral and trap fish.
- A mini dome camera designed to follow an octopus as it moves.
- Splash drones and long-term remote underwater cameras for behaviour that is hard to film from a boat.
- A deep-sea selfie stick, lasers for filming in the deep, and leg-mounted scooters that let camera operators move through the water alongside the animals.
Other scenes in the series include 200,000 crabs lining up in formation to feed and grouper fish communicating with another species.
A long-running series
The first Blue Planet was shown 25 years ago, and Blue Planet II followed nearly a decade ago, when its final episode helped to push plastic pollution up the public agenda.
The new series returns to that theme. Its last episode, Future Seas, looks at how the oceans can be protected, and the producers say other episodes deal with warming seas and with pollutants including so-called forever chemicals.
The producers said Sir David, who is now 100, was closely involved and made changes to the scripts himself. The first episode is on BBC One next Sunday and will also be available on BBC iPlayer.
