When it came to the end, I counted. There were more than 50 assistant camera people in Winged Migration, a 2003 Oscar nominee for Best Feature Documentary.

With cameras mounted on gliders, RC flying machines, helicopters, delta wings and all sorts of other rigs, the five crews followed birds across all seven continents during their annual migration.

The three year project involved some 14 cinematographers and promised that no digital special effects were used in the filming of the birds. (More details about the filming can be found on Sony’s elegant Flash site.)

When all this comes together, the result is some amazingly rich and up-close pictures of fascinating animals traveling extreme distances (some fly more than 6,000 miles each year) to produce offspring.

It’s also a lot of silence — the narration makes up perhaps 10 minutes out of a 90 minute film, and there sometimes seems to be no rhyme or reason to the structure. In addition, a digital special effects house was credited and some shots were clearly dramatized (e.g., birds being shown at such a height the continent outlines were visible) so it left me wondering what was real and what was doctored.

Perhaps it was just the fact that it was my 3d movie of the day, but I left wondering if the material would have been better presented as a tightly-edited PBS hour.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 31st, 2003 at 6:28 pm and is filed under Film.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.