Custom Robotics Capture New Animals and Behavior on Earth’s Wild Home

Lil: … the cave crocs shoot that I directed was all very new.

I mean, we were using off-the-shelf cameras, which are called Z Cams, but they were adapted so that they could record infrared, which meant that we could set infrared lights up in the cave and see what was happening. But to the animals in there, it still looked pitch black.

And we also had each camera on its own bespoke little remote head, covered by an umbrella to stop it being covered in bat poo.

And we fed all of the cables up to a shack in the jungle above so that we could monitor everything.

So, that was kind of a new setup to be able to record what was going on in the cave without disturbing any of the wildlife, because everything in there was very shy. So we needed to make sure we could capture it without being in there.

Cabe: Oh, yeah. I did notice that. That was a fun sequence.

How long was that shoot, just out of curiosity? How long did you guys wait to get that footage? I don’t know if it came through in the video.

Lil: Oh, it was a while.

I mean, it’s sleepless nights, not only because we were doing shift work, but for me as a director, you know, you’re worrying: Are we going to get the thing that we would like?

We wanted to see them hunting. We knew they had to be eating something in there, but we weren’t sure if we were going to come home with the goods.

But finally, yeah, it was after — I think it says in the making-of — but it was after quite a long time of having people monitoring those feeds day and night that we finally saw the crocs getting a bat.

Cabe: Those robotic heads, were they something you guys developed, or was it, like, an off-the-shelf product of some sort?

Lil: Yeah, they were developed by us. Yeah.

You know, it’s pretty simple — simple when you know how — motors. The sort of theory of it is quite basic.

But we just wanted something small that we could carry into the cave and set up, and then have control over our cameras, basically.

…So, you could do pan, tilt.

You can’t tilt it up too far because of the weight of it. They would get stuck up, and we couldn’t go back in there to sort them out. So, you had to be quite careful. But, yeah, to give us the ability to follow action.