![]() Every few years it is paid a visit by as many as a million visitors of one particular kind: flamingos. In order to breed, the birds fly thousands of miles to the middle of the 1,040km² lake, which is fed by underground springs from Ol Doinyo Lengai. Before making their journey, they wait for conditions to be perfect: The lake needs to be drying out but still contain enough water that it leaves a substrate of soda and salt, out of which the flamingos can build individual mounds. On the mounds, above the danger of the water level, sit their eggs. Its water is so still that pilots lose their reference to the ground. In 2007, a helicopter crashed into the lake. “Everything is working against you,” says camera operator Matt Aeberhard.īut the footage the team wanted to capture would mean traveling to the lake and getting to grips with it in all its gruesome glory. They wanted to film the flamingo chicks being born but, crucially, they also wanted to capture the three-mile journey the young birds take as they travel on foot in a huge crèche towards springs on the lake's edge. The footage they got was even more dramatic than they had imagined. Trusting each other was crucial to the process. Silverback FilmsĬordey was at the same company as Aeberhard in the 1990s and knew that he would be a major asset. Aeberhard, who lives in Vermont and owns a turkey that appears onscreen during our Zoom call, has filmed Lake Natron before. Cordey speaks highly of him (Aeberhard, not the turkey), and the admiration is reciprocal. “Without Huw's bravery there, we wouldn't have got this particular one off the ground.” “No matter how good your team is, you have to have a producer who's willing to take risks,” says Aeberhard. Two crucial members of the team remained. ![]() One was assistant producer Darren Williams. With Cordey tied up in editing the rest of that episode, Williams would be the man at the coalface, charged with tackling the everyday hurdles in East Africa - a job that required a huge amount of perseverance and ingenuity. Once the footage had been captured, they needed a world-class editor to wade through it all.
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