大象传媒

By Rowan Crawford, Series Producer

Making Big Cats 24/7 is one of the most exciting – and toughest – things I’ve ever done as a Series Producer.

Image above: Big Cats 24/7 Series Producer Rowan Crawford in camp as the filming trucks are rigged with cameras.

A six-part series, filmed over just six months, this was a hugely ambitious project for 大象传媒 Studios’ Natural History Unit to undertake.

For me personally, it felt like a landmark moment. I’ve worked in the NHU for more than a decade, but this was my first foray into Africa. The density and proximity of the wildlife there is truly breathtaking, and to say my mind was blown is an understatement!

The series is a deep dive into the lives of the big cats – lions, leopards and cheetahs – living in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. The aim was to follow individual big cats day and night, across two dramatic seasons. And if that wasn’t enough, we also wanted to feature the highs and lows of the cinematographers filming the incredible footage of them.

Within the genre, big cats are not new territory, so the bar for capturing engaging and revelatory content was going to be high. The task made even harder as we only had around a sixth of the filming time afforded to a traditional landmark natural history series, it didn’t feel like it was going to be easy!

And it wasn’t easy.

No two challenges were the same, and they came thick and fast! Figuring out how to film 8 individual cinematographers with a crew of just 5 self-shooting PDs and APs; getting to know our cast of big cat characters in an area almost completely unstudied; managing the health and safety of a large crew working in the wilds of Africa; directing roving film units working day and night in an area of 150 square miles from a hand held radio at base camp; adapting daily to the unprecedented unpredictability of the seasons; bumping into one, sometimes three bull elephants that regularly visited our camp; keeping track of yet more cat characters as an unexpected baby boom in the lion pride took hold; and probably most significant of all, facing the biggest wildfire in the area for 5 years that nearly burnt down our film camp in the early weeks of filming.

It’s been a hair raising ride, but one I wouldn’t change for a second!

A year and a half after I kicked off production – and with the help of an incredible team – the result is a new format: a blend of genres, creating a premium style, warts and all observational documentary about the big cats in one of Africa’s last wildernesses.

It’s a truly immersive watch, where viewers are invited into the trucks of the cinematographers – our principal storytellers – and into the heart of the action. It feels like you are right there with them, living and breathing every moment.

Watch Big Cats 24/7 from the 25th August 2024 on iPlayer for a greater understanding of the intricacies of big cat life.

They are incredible animals, that lead complex lives, and the drama of their reality is endlessly captivating! What’s also exciting about our new format is that we feature both closed and open narratives – stories that resolve in a single episode, and others that run across multiple, much like a soap opera. It feels like a truly engaging and entertaining way to package natural history.

There is no compromise on the specialist factual content, we’ve just found a new way to serve it up.