Our Planet Silly Reflections

I need background noise when I draw. I find it so odd to just shut up and focus without a single decibel of audio playing. Even in the quietest environments, like an office or a library, I need to put on music or an excessively long and interesting video. Blame it on my low attention span, but I somehow need that audio texture to convince my mind to focus on a task rather than the empty, silent void.

After exhausting all the interesting videos I could find on VTuber drama, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to watch One Piece or any anime because I’d be more obsessed with reading subtitles or musi,c because I feel like I’m wasting time chasing good music. Hence, I realised I could put on a documentary—something intellectual but also long-running.

Meet Our Planet.

It’s two seasons long on Netflix and is narrated by David Attenborough. It’s a documentary on animals living in all the little corners of the earth: the white ice lands, lush green tropical forests, and blue oceans lit by sunlight. Attenborough’s narration is sophisticated but also playful and compassionate, a treasure, truly. 

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Our Planet often showcases brilliant shots of nature. Wide, overhead shots of the ocean where dolphins and whales splash in and out, panning drone shots of rainforest canopies with extravagant trees or close-ups of little ants on the trees or the seal cub are some examples.

There is an artistry I can appreciate. Backgrounds are beautifully softened out, and for the small creatures, every little detail is emphasised with superior camera quality and good lighting. 

The camera is also always there to capture the zenith of some violence—a stampede of walruses or the way dolphins and birds conspire together to hunt for anchovies swimming in coordinated whirlpools like a dance. 

It’s there for the sadness, like a baby flamingo who trips and falls with salt accumulating on its legs like chains or a chunk of ice falling into the ocean. 

Alternatively, the camera is invited to spectate on an animal's playful scenes, like a bird's courting ritual or the epic moments of an eagle soaring through the rainforest for the first time. All from multiple angles.

They’re stock footage to the normal view, but as someone who enjoys drawing nature, they are a work of pure cinema, capturing nature at its multifaceted complexity. It's especially so when we pair this footage with music. Playful bursts of sound on beat to a mating dance, dramatic orchestral crescendos to a hunt scene or tender piano pieces to mourn a death. The audio experience is given as much love as the visual to create a human touch in a high-end nature documentary.

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The people who deserve my flowers here are wildlife photographers and videographers. They're the ones in the trenches, or if not, they're the ones who set up the equipment and follow the animals in the wild for days. They're the ones who spend forever to get that perfect shot, to invest real energy planning when and how to get that shot, alongside their resilience in failed attempts.

Additionally, real people need to colour-correct the footage and sequence it all neatly. They also have to find appropriate music and time it to the spontaneity found in the natural world. There also needs to be scriptwriters to come up with Attenborough's poetic lines, and then Attenborough himself needs to narrate it beautifully and carefully. In sum, Our Planet is a joint human effort celebrating nature's liveliness. 

Perhaps tangentially, this could lend itself to discussions on AI. People fret all the time about whether AI can replace human creatives, especially human videographers who make stock footage. As biased as I am, I strongly believe that AI can never replace human creative effort.

No AI tool can replicate the love and attention to detail that a human can to the thing they care about. An AI  cannot go to these forests and film these animals in their natural habitat. Behind the colour corrections, cuts, and composition is a mark of authenticity that the camera caught a real animal, that there's care for the viewer's time and feelings. 

Emotional rant aside, the simple takeaway is that I'm inspired by this documentary. I'm delighted. 

It threw me back to the days when I spent afternoons after school in my parents' bedroom watching nature documentaries that made me think that not only were there worlds outside my home in Singapore, but also that they are absolutely worth seeing.