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Walt And The Natural world
One of the most unusual highlights of Walt's career was a series of nature documentaries, the True-Life Adventures. The first of these films, Seal Island(1949), set the pattern: Walt would hire a team of naturalist-photographers to spend months or even years in the wild, filming the animal life of a region; then the studio would edit their hours of raw footage into a theatrical film. The result was an authentic record of nature's wonders, presented with all the production polish of a major movie studio. The nature series ran for more than a decade and produced ten short subjects and seven features, winning nine Academy Awards along the way. The True-Life films also led to a second, similar series of travel documentaries titled People and Places.
"The biggest problem was getting [the photographers] to keep shooting. They would be too conservative with film because when they were working on their own they had to buy that film. They would cut the camera just as an animal would do something. I had to pound: Shoot, shoot! I had to sell them on the idea that the film was the cheapest thing [in our operation], and if they missed something -- it got to the point that they never dared come in to tell me something they saw that they didn't photograph because I would raise heck with them. Also, they would quit too early in the day. They'd think the sun wasn't right. I said, Keep shooting!" -- Walt |