Now multiply by 10. “We got all the remote traps available,” says Thurston. Unfortunately, the 10 traps used a mix of Sony V10s, Sony V18s and Ikegamis, so the parts weren’t interchangeable. But the team took whatever it could, figuring — correctly — that only half of the traps might work at any given time. Inherently temperamental, the remote-camera systems were being asked to perform for several weeks in a rainforest environment. “A gas-powered soldering iron turned out to be one of our most treasured — and dreaded — possessions,” says Allen. With 95 percent humidity and 20' of annual rainfall, the jungle often seemed to conspire against the production, adding a layer of mist on the lens or knocking a camera out of position with a falling branch.

Setting the traps required meticulous timing. Bauer and Thurston had to estimate the tiger’s gait, gauge the distance between sensor and camera, and then factor in additional seconds for the camera, lights and recorder to come up to speed. They then had to correctly set the sensor’s sensitivity. “It would have to be triggered for longer than, say, ¹⁄100 of a second, which would be a bird flying or leaf falling through [an infrared beam],” says Thurston. “But you don’t want the trigger to be too long, or something might walk through and not trigger it. That was all trial-and-error, guesswork and experience rolled into one.”

Weeks of false alarms followed, wherein cameras were triggered and ran their pre-set two minutes, yet recorded nothing on the trail, despite fresh tiger tracks all around. After nearly a month of disappointments, Thurston finally bagged his tiger — a high point in the program, accompanied by cheers and handshakes. “Photographically, it’s a bit disappointing because it’s just black-and-white footage,” he admits. “But we were extremely excited to be able to get the first shots of the tiger in the wild.” The infrared footage also had scientific value, revealing bats swooping down and picking insects from the oblivious tiger’s back.

Deep Jungle gives considerable play to this camera safari, which wound up paying off nicely. What it doesn’t show is the effort behind other shots of a Sumatran tiger that were edited into a dream sequence: color images of a tiger padding through a misty forest, beautifully backlit by rays of sunlight breaking through the canopy. “We wanted to set up a teaser for the audience,” Thurston says of the dream idea. To do so, they needed a tiger in a controlled setting where they could bring in several large HMIs and a smoke machine. They found their site near Jakarta in a refuge for tigers whose history of manslaughter necessitated their capture and confinement. When Thurston collected urine from a cage to bait his camera traps, he got an up-close look at one snarling beast. “It was seriously frightening,” he recalls. “I looked into his eyes, and there was a real evil, I-want-to-kill-you stare.”

That encounter was uppermost in Thurston’s mind when he and Allen stood face-to-face with the refuge’s tamest tiger inside a forested pen built especially for the dream sequence. Allen was operating the Sony DVW790, but Thurston had no camera between him and the beast. “It’s amazing how detached you can become looking down at a viewfinder,” he notes. “Without the camera, you’re more engrossed in the tiger than in getting a nice image of it. So I was very aware that [we were standing in front of] a bloody great animal with 20 claws, which can probably run 30 mph and jump 10 feet in the air, and all we had for ‘defense’ was a little bamboo stick. In the end, he was like a big pussycat. But it so easily could have gone desperately wrong.”

Though the logistics of filming a wild tiger with an infrared camera is spotlighted in Deep Jungle, the challenge of lighting and stage-managing a captive tiger on DigiBeta is not. The series involved many other instances where the cinematographers’ skills were as critical as the showier gadgetry. One such case involved the chicken-eating spider, a previously unclassified tarantula that Peruvian farmers believed was killing their chickens. Amateur arachnologist Martin Nicholas was brought in to investigate, and cinematographer Kevin Flay came along, armed with a “tarantula cam.” The brainchild of producer Rupert Barrington, the device consisted of a black-and-white pinhole camera with a wide-angle lens, auto exposure, and a manual-focus ring that allowed the operator to focus down almost to the front element of the lens. This was mounted on the seat of a 2" model tricycle with functional wheels. Lighting was provided by five petite LED lights (the size used in model trains) soldered onto a circuit board and glued to the camera. All ran off a 12-volt battery. The signal ran to a Sony PD-150’s video-in socket so the filmmakers could see and record the image on MiniDV. “We never expected much out of it,” says Flay. But after shoving the rig down countless holes only to find rodents, the filmmakers finally hit pay dirt, yielding another program highlight: the 10" spider tries to sink her fangs into the camera, and even pursues it out of her burrow.

Luck and persistence enabled the team to capture this scene, whereas cinematography skills were mandatory when shooting the macro reenactments of chicken-spider tales. Flay wanted close-ups of the tarantula trundling around the village unnoticed, with a dog dozing or people passing by in the background. A normal macro lens wouldn’t have allowed both planes to stay in focus. Instead, he used his borescope, designed by camera engineer Les Bosher. Flay explains, “It’s a combination of different lenses. In the back there’s a macro lens, then you’ve got a couple of relay lenses, a conventional lens and, on the front, a wide-angle lens. What it basically does is pull all those images together in the film frame to create a macro wide angle. Because the focal plane and film plane are so far apart, when you pan the camera, it looks like you’re tracking. So you can pan with the spider, but on film it looks like you’ve got a mini-track set up. From that point of view, it’s very useful.”

As optics have improved, so has such systems’ light sensitivity. “There’s a new one out now that costs about £35,000 [$67,700], and it’s like prime-lens quality,” notes Flay. Even so, “because there are about seven or eight sets of optics in a borescope, to get the best out of it, you have to have an exposure of f8. That’s the drawback.”