The Americas EP Explains How They Choose Which Nature Stories To Tell: "We're All Animals"
How do they find those incredible animal stories in all that footage from The Americas?
The Americas, NBC’s new 10-part nature documentary series, is a hyper-focused exploration of the variety of creatures and species native to the continents of North and South America.
Episodes in the series cover the major ecosystems of the continents, including “The Atlantic Coast,” “Mexico,” “The Wild West,” “The Amazon,” “The Frozen North,” “The Gulf Coast,” “The Andes,” “The Caribbean,” “The West Coast,” and “Patagonia.”
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With such an ambitious range of land masses to cover, it almost seems impossible to whittle down the raw footage captured in the field and turn it all into such intimate stories of survival. But there’s a very specific method to their madness, as explained by executive producer and award-winning nature documentarian Mike Gunton (Life, Planet Earth II).
He spoke with NBC Insider about how they choose the best material and turn it into emotional stories that connect us to the natural world.
How The Americas found the most compelling nature stories
Having worked in the nature documentary field for three decades, Gunton is now creative director of BBC Studios Natural History Unit. He’s learned more than a few things about how to get audiences to care about the creatures around us, and the number one rule is that viewers have to care about what they’re seeing in order to connect to their empathy and invest in protecting those species.
"I'm not ashamed about anthropomorphism,” Gunton said about one of their most powerful storytelling tools. By attributing human emotions to the stories of the animals they film, there’s a connection that becomes very powerful.
"We're all animals and you see in an animal's reaction to something — in their face, in their behavior, in their actions — concern and all the things that we think are just purely human. But they're not,” he emphasized. "If you spend any time with animals, you can see that. So, I think you let the animals and the pictures and the stories sort of speak for themselves, rather than imposing on that some other kind of subtext, which historically is probably less successful."
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Gunton said a big part of the process is casting each episode much like you would for a fictional film with actors. "We chose the hot spots which we felt had an identity and a signature, and possibly places people had heard about,” he said of which stories were chosen for The Americas. "I think it's an enjoyable thing to be enticed by something that you want to find out more."
He said they have a story matrix they adhere to when they assess all of their field footage.
"In an episode, you want a funny story. You want a sad story. You want a scary story and you want a thought provoking story, so that's one grid,” he explained. “Then, we also want different types of behavior, like a courtship story, a home making story and a parental care story, so that’s another grid."
They’re also looking at aesthetics, so finding the cool animals, the cute animals, the big furry animals and the little scary ones. Developing those filters through pre-production means the best of the material will eventually fall into place. In the case of The Americas, they were looking at seven stories per episode.
"And then, of course, you compare that with one of the other episodes to make sure we're not repeating ourselves,” Gunton added. "When you start off, it's like a massive military campaign with probably 100 different potential stories on the wall."
Mike Gunton’s personal favorites in The Americas
Having seen just about everything nature has to offer in his career, Gunton is still enthusiastic about everything they capture, and the unexpected always showing up in their footage. From rare the blue whales they captured migrating with drones to the zombie salmon of the Pacific Northwest, Gunton said nature is always revealing something spectacular.
As for his favorites in The Americas, Gunton offered, "There's a wonderful blue-footed booby sequence in the Mexico episode which is a Love Island story."
He continued: "There's infidelity and yet love wins out. And then in the Gulf Coast episode there's the burrowing owls. That is one of my favorite sequences of all time. As a man seeing that poor little guy going, 'Nobody loves me!' And then going, 'This one! This one!' It's so joyful!"
"And there's also the bizarre,” he added. “Tom [Hanks] found the whole Army ant sequence both utterly enthralling and utterly engrossing, but also...slightly off. He said, "I couldn't possibly go and film those. I'd love to but I wouldn't be able to."
Watch for yourself as new episodes of The Americas will air weekly on Sundays at 8:00 pm ET, and will be streaming on Peacock the following day!
