What’s not to love about BBC’s “Planet Earth?” Whether the crazy family of baboons or the huge huddle of emperor penguins trying to keep warm, everybody loves the wildlife in this film.

Whether you like the film or not, you may not have known how long it takes to produce it. It took “Planet Earth” 5 years to be fully complete, not even accounting for the countless other animal videos BBC posts. These 5 years aren’t easy for the producers; their goal is not to capture random acts of wildlife but to really show the true side of wildlife. Getting the true side of the wildlife doesn’t come without a cost. When the predator is chasing the prey, it’s brutal and heartbreaking, but the rules of creating this type of film include not helping the animals in any way; whether that’s giving them food when they are starving or killing the predator when it’s being chased. The crew wanted to fully capture daily survival of all types of wildlife. To accomplish this, they went to extreme measures to get a snow leopard fight, emperor penguins huddling to keep warm, bats in a cave, and countless more.

In the beginning of the film, the crew spends a month living in the Borneo caves on an Asian Island. Sleeping with poisonous centipedes and cockroaches, the crew sought after a real life experience with the creatures in the cave. Three weeks into filming in the cave, the crew realized that the liquid coming from the ceiling was bat pee! This job isn’t easy. They contorted and squeezed through small crevasses and rocks just to get the “perfect” shot. Here are some examples that was faced throughout the duration of this film.

Emperor penguins are used to extremely cold temperatures, but humans aren’t. The crew had no way to reach the penguins unless they “were a penguin,” so they walked two miles in 100 mph winds in 100 degrees below zero to film them. When they got there they said it was amazing for them to see the colony of penguins working together to stay warm, rotating the outside penguins in and the inside ones out.

Most likely you’ve seen countless humorous videos of unique birds of paradise showing off to a female. Each one of these birds cost a lot of time to the crew; exactly 300 hours were spent trying to film birds of paradises mating dance. Thankfully, after no luck, the crew got help from a local to find the perfect spot to stay hidden from the birds.

Whether it’s the birds or rams, migration is a staple in “Planet Earth.” For scenes that feature migration, it seems logical that the crew probably used a drone or some type of technology to film an aeriel view. In 2006, when “Planet Earth” first made its appearance, there were no such things as drones so to film this iconic scene; they used a helicopter. The dogs on the hunt scene took 50 hours just to film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0WBz5bOTEo

Those are just some of the countless bizarre stories that “Planet Earth” has to offer. The movie is such an amazing way to see the real survival skills of wildlife such as cool camouflage, weird mating calls, and rapid instincts.