Go and make a film. I know that might sound a bit hard, but there’s really nothing like practise. I decided I wanted to do this kind of thing when I was a student. I just got a camera, went off and made little films – they weren’t very good, but I learned so much by doing it about how you put stories together.

Don’t try and make a masterpiece first go. It’s almost better to make a bad film than a good film first, because if you make a good film you think “I know how to do that”. Whereas making a film that doesn’t quite work is how you learn to get better and better and to try things that are a little bit different.

Being on people’s radar is a really important thing, particularly nowadays, because so many people are interested in this kind of business. There’s quite a knack to keeping yourself known by people who can give you a job, without being annoying. It’s a good idea to come to our RTS Futures events at the Natural History Unit in Bristol, where people at the start of their careers can come and meet their peers and hear what people in the industry have to say.

You don’t have to be a biologist but it doesn’t half help. You can come in to natural history filmmaking without studying natural history at university, college or A levels, but it’s important to have at least a knowledge of, or an amateur interest in, nature. 

It doesn’t matter how good a natural historian you are, if you don’t understand how to tell a story or turn your idea into television. You have to have the same basic skills that all filmmakers or all programme-makers have to have. The ability to recognise, distil and articulate a story is paramount. Superimposed on that, you do have to have some level of understanding and sensitivity to what animals do in nature, so you can recognise whether something is interesting or not.

Nature is endlessly fascinating and beautiful and surprising, if you know where to look. The skill and the excitement is finding the new and the surprising. Also it’s one of the few places left where you can absolutely indulge in the photography; it is such an important part of what we do. 

One of the things I particularly enjoy is showing people the unseeable – this idea that the cameras can show you things that even your eye can’t see. That is a wonderful piece of theatre for an audience, and why I think people still like natural history films.

In Focus: The Importance of Worrying

Almost every series I’ve worked on you go through a kind of depressing, despairing phase towards the beginning of the research when you think “Oh goodness, there’s going to be no stories”. But it’s important to worry – in fact I worry if I don’t worry. That’s what keeps you questioning and pushing and interrogating what you’re doing: Is this as good as it can be? Is there a better, more interesting, more exciting way of telling the story? Is the audience going to enjoy that? I think that questioning is what makes projects get better and better and better.

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