by Thinus Ferreira
A second season of A Real Bug's Life makes its debut today on Disney+, filled with more incredible - and amusing - stories about insects from across the world, stories that producer Bill Markham says took ingenuity behind the camera and a lot of patience to capture.
The second season of this National Geographic series is a continuation of the beautiful, irreverent and informative series meant as family viewing and which is once again narrated by Akwafina.
Settle in for big stories told with cameras that zoom in on the insect kingdom all over the world across five episodes.
The second season's episodes boast impressive details captured by the filmmakers, with the title that is obviously a play on the Disney and Pixar film A Bug's Life.
The new season will showcase luna moths, hermit crabs, peacock spiders, army ants and several more, in places as diverse as a tropical beach, mangrove swamps, rainforest canopies, and even New York City highrises.
Using ultra-high-speed lenses and cameras, motion-controlled cameras, probe and microscope lenses, as well as drones, the producers of A Real Bug's Life capture all of the uncanny antics of insects.
I sat down with series producer Bill Markham to talk about the second season on Disney+, how the big insect behaviour got captured with a lot of patience, and how the evolution in filmmaking technology means better natural history stories on screen.
First off I must just ask, the title treatment of A Real Bug's Life looks exactly like the one for the film A Bug's Life. It's genius but how difficult was it to get approval for that?
Bill Markham: Well, good question.
Actually, since National Geographic works with Disney, and Disney owns Pixar, it was about working through Disney to put the two parts of the business together and actually Pixar was surprisingly open to it.
They signed off on the ideas and then we gave them updates and we gave them cuts and they just fed back saying they were delighted. They didn't have any editorial input, they just really enjoyed it.
It's really so cute to see that. I'm wondering in terms of the work requisite for the crew, is it sort of on page 50 that you're not supposed to be scared or squeamish of insects?
Bill Markham: Well, I think it always helps to love the subject of your film, but it doesn't always start that way and I think that this series has been a real journey for people not only working on it, but also watching it.
Many people call them creepy crawlies, many people are innately scared of spiders.
It's a cultural thing that's very weird, you know, it's passed down from your parents or not and in some cases, I think I was lucky my parents let me play with bugs when I was a kid and I grew up to love them.
For a lot of people, even our production manager, she couldn't watch the early episodes on her computer when she was seeing them.
By the end of it, she was watching it on a big screen down in a cinema here in Bristol, you know - a jumping spider, full frame, big eyes, big fans and actually she was fine with it. So I think even if they didn't start off loving it, most of them, if not all of them, ended up adoring these creatures.
'we want viewers to feel that
these things are happening
in their backyards'
Why did you decide to do episodes filming insects across the world? You have a beautiful Southeast Asia beach episode for instance, to South America and Africa. You could have made all the episodes about just insects in the UK?
Bill Markham: For sure, I mean, I think there are over 10 million described species in the world and 9 million of them are insects, so there's a lot of choice about the storylines you go for.
What we set out to do was to find the biggest diversity to represent the different types of bugs all over the world - the different habitats they have to deal with, you know, maybe some of the more extreme versions of those habitats or the most beautiful versions of those habitats.
Then there are the most spectacular ambassadors for their kind. We wanted to have tiger beetles, there's a tiger beetle in the UK but the one in Borneo had never been filmed before, it was one of the fastest creatures on the planet.
The new second season of A Real Bug's Life has an extraordinary story about the fact it runs so fast its brain can't keep up, so it goes blind. It has to stop to reorientate itself and then go again.
So the world was our oyster, you could say, but we were therefore able to pick and choose the best stories around the world.
The other thing is that our viewers these days are all over the world. Disney+ is available in 180 countries or more, so we want the viewers to feel that these things are happening in their backyards, on their beach, in their patch of jungle or at the end of the garden.
We don't want to be Western-centric or British-centric, I mean it helps financially if you can shoot it all in England, but no, it was much more fun for the crew as well to go overseas.
Can you talk a little bit about the tricks of the trade, what was so fascinating was that orchid bee where you got the person to lure them with the scent, otherwise you're not able to film them up high in the canopy.
Bill Markham: I think that orchid bee example is where entomological expertise and filmmaking come together absolutely perfectly, where you can get the best out of an animal in its wild environment and film its incredible story.
All of our stories came from the minds of filmmakers who were reading books and online, but then it was all tested out with entomologists.
We had a group of entomologists that we could talk to regularly, people like Dr Tim Cockrill, who we could run all our stories past and we could talk about how to film them and how to film them humanely.
Animal welfare is very high on the agenda when you're making something like this, so we worked with the entomologists to find the best animals, the best places, the best field entomologists and it all came together.
There were 450 people who worked on this series in various capacities from producers to drivers, from entomologists to cooks, from researchers to camera operators and they had to all come together, I suppose like an army of ants, each one knowing their role and each one doing their bit.
The end result is remarkable if only you think about it from the point of view of that it took so many people working together to create a cohesive series like A Real Bug's Life.
'You can't just wander out and
hope you're going to find one.
You have to work with someone
who knows where they are'
This is also an exercise in patience as filmmakers. Were there times you waited and waited for the perfect shots and had to make a calculation of "do we stay or give up"?
Bill Markham: It's always the case in natural history filming that you go with a plan A, plan A probably doesn't work so you've got to have a plan B and a plan C in your pocket.
In this case, in A Real Bug's Life, some stories like the army ants or like the orchid bee, like the fireflies, you know, you go at the right time of year, to the right place, with the best expert to give yourself the best chance of filming what you want.
It really should pay off because it's an expensive mistake if you fail.
There are other things, which as you'll see from the behind-the-scenes episode where we had to give ourselves a better chance by working with entomologists and "bug wranglers" - whatever you want to call them - who could help us with jumping spiders, with peacock spiders, to get them in the right place.
Some of these animals we are talking about are less than a millimetre long.
We were filming peacock spider babies hatching and they are smaller than a grain of sand. You can't just wander out into the field and hope that you're going to find one. You're just not.
You have to work with someone who either knows where they are or even keeps them. We worked with people in Australia who are entomologists in the field but also keep them.
For some scenes like a hatching peacock spider, we'd have to go onto a set and film that tiny macro world with super powerful lenses but under quite controlled conditions.
Can you talk about the advanced camera technology since you mentioned it's one millimetre and even in the first episode of this second season very quickly it comes up that where they go it's so hot on the sand. Then the camera zooms in further and brings into focus the little white hairs on their legs that reflect sunlight.
Bill Markham: It's really difficult.
You can have all the technology in the world but you need really, really great operators, and really experienced operators.
We have worked with a number of expert camera operators who are experienced in dealing with micro subjects.
They were helped with new technology. So a couple of aspects of that which I think are really fascinating is firstly the lenses.
We use these probe lenses which are literally like a probe. They can be about a foot long and they can get you right up close to the subject, down at its level so you're on eye-level, which is really key for telling a story and meeting a character.
Sometimes these lenses have a 45-degree angle in them so that you can be down even beneath your hero subject, looking up at it.
Those lenses are able to get close and wide and therefore present your animal in its context. It's not like the olden days where you'd get the animal just about in focus but you wouldn't really see anything else because it was all out of focus.
These days you can get the animal in focus and its background.
The other thing with that is that if you're touching that camera your heartbeat will reflect in movements in the camera and when you're at that level those get magnified - those movements.
So we devised various techniques where you're controlling the camera with remote controls like you do with a PlayStation or a Nintendo Switch. You're moving your camera with a remote controller so that there's no heartbeat vibrating it.
And the third thing which I think is really key, is the lighting. In the olden days you would blast the animals with light - really high-powered light - because the cameras were not very sensitive so they needed a lot of light.
The lenses when you're filming micro cut out a lot of the light so you need a lot of light.
My very first day of filming ever, back in the 90s, we were blasting some woodlice with light and light - also in the olden days equalled heat - and I remember seeing the ground starting to steam.
I remember the woodlice running off and I was thinking "We've got to stop this because we don't want to hurt the woodlice and we also don't want to just film it running off".
You're never going to get parental care displayed or going to get mating behaviour if the animal's under heat stress.
With the advent of LED lights which don't emit heat you're able to light really beautifully these tiny animals without overheating them, without stressing them, so that they can continue their natural lives.
There's no harm done and you can film them doing their thing without any worry of harming them or stopping them doing what they want to do.
For a behavioural series like A Real Bug's Life this is really key to be able to get down in their world and seeing them beautifully and filming their natural behaviour.
How important is it then to do slow camera movements as well, or do they not get skittish when it's faster movements?
Bill Markham: It's trial and error and it depends on the species.
If you're filming a moth flying through the jungle as you'll see in this second season's forest episode - that's filmed at 600 frames a second.
Normally you film at 25 frames a second but when you film at 600 frames a second or a thousand frames a second you're slowing the action down by 30 or 40 times.
So then you don't need a big move. And when you see it on TV that's a lovely slow-motion shot.
Sometimes the camera movement doesn't need to be that much to get an awful lot of beautiful detail.
With the tiger beetle - it's running so fast, we could never keep up, so we had to try and just snatch glimpses of it.
Some animals will be very shy of the camera others really don't care so it's about knowing your subject really well.
Season 2 of National Geographic's A Real Bug's Life releases on Disney+ on 15 January 2025
