Herald Café: Tell us about your association with ‘Planet
Earth II’ and your
experience shooting the documentaries?
Sandesh
Kadur: ‘Planet Earth II’ started almost two years ago when Dr Chadden Hunter, a
very good friend of mine, met me in the grasslands in Kaziranga, Assam. He was amazed to see that the
grass was over ten feet tall, the tallest grassland in the world and that’s how
I got involved in ‘Planet Earth II’. Documentaries take a lot of time and you
have to keep hopping back to the same location. If you can hide an elephant, imagine how
many tigers you can hide in the grasslands. We had to use camera trap
technology, put the camera trap in there for many months and hope that it
captures our tiger. We spent a lot of time, hiding, sitting and waiting for this tiger to
come and eat the dead rhino carcass.
HC: ‘Planet Earth II’ was
shot in two different locations. How were they different from each
other?
SK: It was interesting, as one location was
urban and the
other a very wild
atmosphere. I had a lot of fun filming the langurs in Jodhpur. It was amazing
because in Kaziranga, you always had animals hiding from you and in Jodhpur you
had animals coming and sitting next to you. It was nice to work so intimately with
animals that are bold
and don’t care that you are there holding the camera next to them. Over time, you develop a bond.
HC: Tell us
more about Felis Media Company and the work you’ll are doing with youngsters.
SK: Felis Media Company is a conservation media company I
founded in Bangalore; we make a lot of short film and long
films. I just found out that one of my films on climate change called ‘Eastern
Himalaya’ just got the Best Mountain Environment Film award at the Mountain
Film Festival 2017. It is a Felis Production creation and it was screened in
Delhi. We are happy to make films that connect people to the environment. We
make issue based films which try to make a difference.
HC: How can a
city-dweller make a difference and save the
environment?
SK: That is a very important question. A lot of people in the urban
environment, away from wild areas, think that conservation works well in isolation in remote
tiger reserves and national parks somewhere far away from them. But that is not
true. Every action we can modify here will have a huge impact on the
environment out there. For example, we can replace disposable
plastic bottles for water with reusable ones. Plastic bottles don’t decompose for hundreds of years and
there are mountains of plastic bottles out of our eyesight that we are creating
due to our ignorance. Simply knowing and caring can make a huge positive impact
on the environment. Changing small habits can make a difference.
HC: Are there
any wildlife photographers you look up to?
SK: I do much less of wildlife photography, but some of my heroes in that sphere
are Steve Winter, who does some amazing camera trap photography, Paul Nicklen,
an underwater photographer, Michael ‘Nick’ Nichols, all National Geographic
photographers who have done some pretty amazing work and whose work I regularly
follow.
HC: What are you
presently working on?
SK: I’m working on a documentary the details
of which I cannot divulge; it will be out in 2019. We just finished a shoot for it last week in
India. It will be a worldwide documentary, something similar like ‘Planet Earth
II’ in terms of size and scale of production. It will be released worldwide.
