NOVA Online | Leopards of the Night

Lighting technician Cecilia Krigge spotlights for leopard in the African night.

Behind the Scenes
by Peter Tyson

If you think filming leopards at night is difficult, you're right. At the same time, you have no idea. Amanda Barrett and Owen Newman, producers of Leopards of the Night, and their team spent more than 3,300 hours over the course of three years shooting the film on location in Zambia and Namibia. It was the hardest film either has ever made, they say. Here's why:

The workday began around four o'clock in the afternoon. That's when the film crew headed out into the bush in two cars. (One held Barrett and Newman with the cameras, the other bore the infrared lights and lighting technicians Vernon Bailie and Cecilia Krigge.) The going was extremely rough. Foot- and hoofprints that elephants and other large animals leave in the wet mud of the rainy season dry out, forming concrete-hard holes during the June to October dry season, when the team filmed. "Leopards just glided over those holes, but it was very bumpy for the cars," says Owen Newman, who was cameraman as well.

The film crew's lighting car sticks to the heels of a roaming leopard.

The first order of business was to find a leopard. That often meant hours of searching for eyeshine with white spotlights and listening for the alarm calls of impala and other prey. Many nights passed when they never even laid eyes on a leopard. When they did, they had to bring the cars close without disturbing either the leopard or its prey. Once in position, hours might pass before something filmable happened. And it was cold: while the days were scorching, nights were chilly enough to require scarves, hats, even mittens. Typically the team stayed out all night, only turning back about four in the morning. Sometimes it was longer. Once they spent 56 hours straight in the car, waiting for a leopard to return to a kill it had placed up a tree. "For all that effort, sitting in the sun all day and no sleep, we used about two shots," Barrett chuckles. In the end, they averaged one good filming night every three weeks.

Night goggles offer lighting technician Vernon Bailie a window into the night.

Filming at night also engendered many technical challenges. The team brought along a Sony 7000 film camera for shooting in low-light conditions, such as moonlight. But they had discovered during an earlier film project that leopards typically only hunt in pitch dark; if the moon is out, the cats will wait for it to slip behind clouds before they make their move. So, in a first in natural-history filmmaking in Africa, Newman turned to infrared cameras. He used either a Baxall or Cohu standard night security camera. Sensitive to infrared light, which the team provided via special infrared lights that Bailie aimed off the back of the lighting car, these cameras can film in total darkness (see The Camera That Caught a Leopard).

Since they were working with technology that no one had ever used in that kind of situation before, they had to learn as they went along, Barrett says. For one thing, neither infrared camera had a viewfinder. So Newman, perched in the back of the camera car, had to fly by the seat of his pants, as it were. First, he took cues from Barrett, who sat up front wearing a pair of night-vision goggles. While these devices, which provide a grainy, bright-green view and are "a bit like looking through very bad eyeglasses," Barrett says, they allowed her to pick out leopards and other wildlife in the darkness. She then described to Newman where to aim his camera. "I would say something like, 'The leopard is at three o'clock, about 25 meters away, crouched down by a patch of grass,'" Barrett says.

Focusing a long-focal-length lens on a moving leopard was a daunting challenge.

Newman then aimed his camera in that direction and watched a nine-inch, black-and-white monitor to see what he was picking up. But whenever he used a large lens, such as a 300 mm, the depth of field was so shallow that he often missed his target even when he was looking right at it. "I could be looking at blades of grass, and the leopard could be six inches behind or in front of that and I wouldn't see it on the monitor because it was so out of focus," Newman recalls. "I would be swinging the lens around and changing focus all the time. It was very frustrating, especially when the leopards were stalking."

As if filming weren't challenging enough, Newman constantly had to switch between the low-light and infrared cameras and their respective lighting systems, depending on what the leopard was up to. He did that in the pitch dark, up to 12 times in a night. "He got it down to seconds," Barrett says, "but you'd only need one thing to go wrong, and you'd have lost a filming opportunity that might have taken three weeks to present itself." And things went wrong a lot, because traveling over the uneven ground meant that cables and other connections were regularly shaken loose.

Even a pestering insect cannot disturb the exquisite concentration of a stalking leopard.

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Even when Newman had successfully zeroed in on a leopard, he was at the mercy of the leopard's own unpredictable behavior. "Compared to cheetahs and lions, leopards are very, very smart hunters," Barrett says. "They'll try one way, then they'll change their minds, double back, go all the way around the target animal in a big detour, and try it from the other side. We would have to move with the leopard, without upsetting either the prey or the leopard." She laughs. "We'd get all the way there, and then she'd change her mind again and try another angle."

They also had to be on their guard against the leopards themselves. While the cats largely ignored them, the film crew could never forget that these were wild animals. "Once we were just below a male leopard that had killed a baboon and was eating it in a tree," Newman recalls. "He got a bone stuck in his cheek and couldn't get it out. After that he became quite aggressive, thrashing his tail from side to side and getting angry with himself. We decided to back away from that."

Leopard researcher Philip Stander and his Bushmen colleagues adjust the radio collar of a tranquilized leopard in Namibia.

Leopards were not the only creatures to be wary of. Once, while filming a pride of lions vying with crocodiles over an antelope kill, the team lost track of the lions in the pitch darkness. "We had five lions behind the car, about three in front, and one by the side," Barrett remembers. "Then a couple started mating. Bear in mind we were in a completely open vehicle. We didn't know if one by accident might jump into the car to get away from a crocodile or another lion. That made us sit up and concentrate." Most dangerous of all, it turns out, was the mosquito. During the filming, both Barrett and Newman came down with cerebral malaria. In fact, the disease caused Newman, who suffered two debilitating bouts, to sit out the only night he missed in ten solid months of filming.

Despite the myriad difficulties associated with making the film, there were substantial rewards. For Newman, it was the chance to be out all night in the African bush, with myriad insect and bird sounds and various plants coming into flower. ("As you moved through the park," he says, "you could sometimes tell where you were just by the flower smell.") Barrett particularly appreciated working with the Bushmen. "They were so much in their element in the desert, whereas we were staggering around hot, sweaty, clutching water bottles," she recalls. "We wouldn't have lasted a second if they had left us."

Sleek fur of the leopard reflecting the sunlight

"His sleek fur reflected different shades of apricot and chestnut in the sunlight."

Most rewarding, of course, were the leopards. The team filmed leopard behavior never before seen, including the supreme concentration the cats hold while stalking prey in the pitch dark, and the surprising fact that a leopard—usually the most silent of stalkers—will sometimes deliberately stamp the ground with its foot to disorient prey. For Barrett, the most fulfilling moment of all came one afternoon when a male leopard they'd been working with for three days and nights sauntered over to sleep in the shade of the car. "He had just killed and was full of food, and he was very relaxed with us because we hadn't done anything to upset him," she says. "We could hear him snoring. He was in the peak of condition, with a thick, muscular neck and his sleek fur reflecting different shades of apricot and chestnut in the sunlight. Beautiful animal."

Peter Tyson is Online Producer of NOVA.

Night Vision | Camera that Caught a Leopard
Behind the Scenes | Seeing through Camouflage
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