KINGDOM OF PLANTS 3D WITH DAVID ATTENBOROUGH to air on Sky 3D at 6pm on May 26th 2012
LONDON 4th MAY 2012: Sky 3D and Atlantic Productions have today announced that KINGDOM OF PLANTS 3D WITH DAVID ATTENBOROUGH, the ground-breaking three part mini-series, will air on Saturday 26th May at 6pm with the additional two episodes airing at 6pm on the 2nd and 9th June. The series will also be simulcast in 2D on Sky Atlantic HD.
Filmed over the course of a year at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which houses some 90% of all known plant species in one form or another, KINGDOM OF PLANTS 3D WITH DAVID ATTENBOROUGH is the multi-award winning natural history broadcaster’s third collaboration with Sky 3D and Atlantic Productions. The immersive and compelling series reveals a fascinating new look at plant life through the use of stunning 3D time-lapse filming techniques.
Each of the three 50 minute episodes will cover a different area of plant life. Life in the Wet Zone (26th May)looks at the adaptation of plants to wet and humid environments, with episode two, Solving the Secrets (2nd June),exploringthe behind-the-scenes lives of plant movement, scent and communication. Survival (9th June),the concluding episode, focuses on the continual adaptation of plants as well as a look at Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank, which houses almost two billion seeds of more than 30,000 species of wild plants to ensure their future for generations to come.
John Cassy, Director, Sky 3D, comments: “The combination of ground-breaking technology, high quality production, fascinating subject matter and captivating narrative from the master story teller himself ensures that KINGDOM OF PLANTS 3D WITH DAVID ATTENBOROUGH is at once an immersive, compelling and truly breath-taking viewing experience which we’re thrilled to offer exclusively to Sky customers.”
David Attenborough commented: “One of the most wonderful things about filming plants is that you can reveal hidden aspects of their lives. You can capture the moment as one plant strangles another, and as they burst into flower. But whilst time-lapse photography allows you to see things that no human being has ever seen before, the added element of 3D takes the audience even further still. Stamens extend and burst to reveal their pollen grains in exquisite detail, and we can see close-up the incredible insects that partner up with these plants. The whole experience in 3D is just entrancing, and hypnotically beautiful.”
Commissioned by Celia Taylor, Sky’s Head of Factual and Features, KINGDOM OF PLANTS 3D WITH DAVID ATTENBOROUGH is part of Sky’s commitment to increase its investment in original British content by 50% over the next three years. By 2014, Sky expects to invest £600million a year in British programmes across its portfolio of channels.
Since launching Sky 3D in October 2010 Sky has broken new ground across a range of genres, including natural history, live music, the arts, spots and movies. Highlights have included David Attenborough’s The Bachelor King 3D WITH DAVID ATTENBOROUGH, a number of summer music festivals, opera and ballet, Kylie Minogue live from the O2, Got to Dance, the 3D TV world premieres of Avatar, Alice in Wonderland and the Toy Story Trilogy as well as more than 150 live sports broadcast spanning a range of domestic and international sports.
The first episode of Kingdom of Plants 3D WITH DAVID ATTENBOROUGH airs on the 26th May 2012 at 6pm on Sky 3D and will be simulcast in 2D on Sky Atlantic HD.
For further information or interview requests please contact:
Kristoff Clark / Jai Dattani
Freud Communications
Tel: +44 (0) 203 003 6472 / 6448
Mob : +44 (0) 7912 516 722 / +44 (0) 7870 656 962
kristoff.clark@freud.com/ jai.dattani@freud.com
Photography available from stillsdepartment@bskyb.com
Notes to Editors:
Sky 3D and Atlantic Production’s first 3D film Flying Monsters 3D with David Attenborough won the Specialist Factual award at the 2011 Philips British Academy Television Awards.
London based production facilities company ONSIGHT provided cutting-edge shoot technology and support, followed by post production for stereoscopic finishing.
Synopsis:
3D technology reveals a whole new dimension in the lives of plants, from the most bizarre to the most beautiful. In this sensational series, David Attenborough explores their fascinating world, which was shot over the course of a year on location at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and in other controlled environments using a variety of 3D filming techniques and computer enhanced imagery. Using 3D time-lapse and pioneering techniques in 3D macro photography, he traces them from their beginnings on land to their vital place in nature today, exposing new revelations along the way. He moves from our time scale to theirs, revealing the true nature of plants as creatures that are every bit as dynamic and aggressive as animals. David discovers a microscopic world that’s invisible to the naked eye, where insects feed and breed, where flowers fluoresce and where plants communicate with each other and with animals using scent and sound. He meets the extraordinary animals and fungi that have unbreakable ties with the plant world, from hawk moths and bats to tiny poison dart frogs, a giant tortoise and a fungus that can control the mind. And he does all this in one unique place, a microcosm of the whole plant world where, some 90% of all known plant species are represented: The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. This spectacular adventure through the Kingdom of Plants is so immersive and compelling it has the capacity to amaze even the least green-fingered.
Episode 1: Life in the Wet Zone.(26th May)David begins his journeyinside the magnificent Palm House, a unique global rainforest in London. Here, he explores the extraordinary plants that are so well adapted to wet and humid environments and unravels the intimate relationships between wet zone plants and the animals that depend on them. It was in the wet zones of the world that plants first moved on to land and in the Waterlily House David reveals how flowers first evolved some 140 million years ago. Watching a kaleidoscope of breath-taking time-lapses of these most primitive of flowers swelling and blooming in 3D, he is able to piece together the very first evolutionary steps that plants took to employ a wealth of insects to carry their precious pollen for the first time. David discovers clues to answer a question that even had Charles Darwin stumped: how did flowering plants evolve so fast to go on to colonise the entire planet so successfully? He marvels with signature enthusiasm at orchids, the largest family of flowering plants. Many of these captivating flowers evolved to be pollinated by a single insect species and in doing so developed such complicated contraptions of pollination it’s hard to imagine anything more beautiful. One orchid even looks like a bee.
Episode 2: Solving the Secrets. (2nd June) David uses the latest 3D technology to explore a world beyond the confines of our human senses. He begins with the secret world of plant movement and uses sinister carnivorous plants to show just how active plants can be. Bladderwort utricularia is a pond-dweller that is among the fastest known, its traps snapping shut in less than a millisecond. As the seasons change, David demonstrates how plants operate on a different time scale to us; how they modify their lives according to the time of year. We discover insects’ hidden links with plants, both as pests and pollinators. UV-sensitive 3D cameras reveal the invisible alter-ego of plants and their flowers’ mesmerizing patterns; a parallel-dimension of strange colours and stunning patterns through which plants communicate with them. With the aid of visual effects, David steps among the swirling vortices of plant scent; communication signals with which plants are inextricably plugged in to the natural world. And using a tuning fork, he demonstrates how plants and insects can even communicate with music. As autumn envelopes the Gardens, fungi reveal themselves not as the enemies of plants but their vital allies. In Kew’s atmospheric Fungarium, David discovers a specimen that has the power of mind control and another that lives underground where it has grown to be so big it can be counted as the largest single organism on the planet. It is 6 times bigger than Kew Gardens itself. David concludes the film in the Princess of Wales Conservatory, where he meets an old friend, the great Titan arum. At 8ft tall, it is the largest flower in the world and a plant he remembers from a previous filming trip to Sumatra. Using heat sensitive cameras, David reveals the Titan arum’s secrets, how it uses a combination of heat and powerful scent to punch a hole in the stratified layers of air in the rainforest, enabling it to broadcast its presence across vast distances.
Episode 3: Survival. (9th June) David discovers the plants that have evolved to shed their dependency on water enabling them to survive in the driest environments. The story begins at midnight in midsummer as David steps into the Princess of Wales Conservatory to witness the extraordinary nocturnal blooming of a cactus. The queen of the night, with its giant flowers, is the centre piece of a stunning symphony of cacti blooms that burst open in the desert (and at Kew) at night. In a mesmerizing 3D slow motion sequence, we discover the extraordinary connections between cacti and their natural pollinators: bats. The scene typifies the unique splendour of the 3D experience as bats seem to fly out of the screen and into the viewers’ living room. As the sun rises, David meets other amazing plants. Species like the century plant, the Agave franzosini, which grows steadily for over 50 years, only to then flower itself to death with one mighty telegraph pole sized bloom which literally bursts out of the roof of Kew’s green house. Cracking the code to plants’ survival strategies is the key to protecting their future and Kew have built a high tech long-term solution fifty miles south of the Gardens. Described as mankind’s ultimate insurance policy, and with 10% already safely stored deep frozen, Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank has the capacity to store seeds from the vast majority of remaining species of plant on the planet, thus saving plants from extinction in the future.
About Sky:
Sky entertains and excites more than 10.5million homes through the most comprehensive multichannel, multi-platform television service in the UK and Ireland. Sky continues to break new ground with its own portfolio of channels: Sky 1 combines its commitment to UK production with the best of the US; Sky Living pushes ahead with fresh and innovative entertainment formats; Sky Arts is the UK's only dedicated arts channel brand; Sky Atlantic is the home to HBO and other iconic drama and comedy, Sky Sports is still raising the bar in sports broadcasting; Sky News remains a pioneer in television news; and Sky Movies is leading the way in High Definition and on-demand.
Sky also works with dozens of other broadcasters on the satellite platform, as well as online and on mobile through the ground-breaking Sky Go service. Sky has also led the UK into the age of high definition television, launched Europe's first 3DTV channel, Sky 3D, and offers customer even more flexibility and choice through Sky Anytime+, its internet-delivered video on demand service. Since launching Sky Broadband and Sky Talk in 2006, the company has also been the UK's fastest-growing home communications provider.
Sky believes in making a wider contribution to the communities in which it operates, not least by increasing participation in, and access to, the arts, supporting grassroots sports, and taking positive action on the environment.
About Atlantic Productions:
Atlantic Productions is one of the world’s leading factual production companies. In 2011 it won a BAFTA, three Emmy’s and best IMAX award for three different productions. They were also nominated as Best Independent Production Company for 2011.
Television highlights include: triple Emmy-winning David Attenborough’s First Life; The Emmy-winning Jerusalem – City of Heaven; BAFTA-nominated Munich: Mossad’s Revenge; the triple Emmy-nominated The Promised Land five-part series,narrated by Morgan Freeman, and the award-winningthree-part series, Prohibition.
Atlantic’s programmes are broadcast round the world to critical acclaim and high ratings. Programmes which have rated particularly well globally include; Nefertiti: Resurrected; The Link and Predator X and multi-part series; Egypt Unwrapped; The Greeks: Crucible of Civilization and Rome Unwrapped.
The Company’s productions are complemented by pioneering cross-platform projects. Theatrical and 3D highlights include the BAFTA winning Flying Monsters 3D with David Attenborough now showing in IMAX cinemas worldwide. This film also won the Best 3D film at The Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival in 2011, the Special Award for Innovation at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam, and the Best Science Film by The Association of International Broadcasters. The Wildest Dream – Conquest of Everest, narrated by Liam Neeson,won Best IMAX award in 2011 at the GSCA festival in September; The Bachelor King 3D will be released in cinemas in the summer of 2012. The three-part series KINGDOM OF PLANTS 3D with David Attenborough airs in the summer of 2012.
About the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew:
The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is a world famous scientific organisation, internationally respected for its outstanding living collection of plants and world-class Herbarium as well as its scientific expertise in plant diversity, conservation and sustainable development in the UK and around the world. Kew Gardens is a major international visitor attraction. Its landscaped 132 hectares and RBG Kew’s country estate, Wakehurst Place, attract nearly 2 million visitors every year. Kew was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in July 2003 and celebrated its 250th anniversary in 2009. Wakehurst Place is home to Kew's Millennium Seed Bank, the largest wild plant seed bank in the world. RBG Kew and its partners have collected and conserved seed from 10 per cent of the world's wild flowering plant species (c.30, 000 species). The aim is to conserve 25 per cent by 2020, and its enormous potential for future conservation can only be fulfilled with the support of the public and other funders.
Kew receives funding from the UK Government through Defra for approximately half of its income and is also reliant on support from other sources. Without the voluntary monies raised through membership, donations and grants, Kew would have to significantly scale back activities at a time when, as environmental challenges become ever more acute, its resources and expertise are needed in the world more than ever. Kew needs to raise significant funds both in the UK and overseas. Members of the public can support the work of the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership by getting involved with the ‘Adopt a Seed, Save a Species' campaign. For £25 an individual can adopt a seed or for £1000 anyone can save an entire species. www.kew.org/adoptaseed
