A Life on Our Planet

Drone operator on Silverback Films’ A Life on Our Planet — Sir David Attenborough’s personal witness-statement feature for Netflix, released October 2020. The film traces Attenborough’s eight-decade career through the corresponding biodiversity collapse and presents an active argument for the rewilding case as a route out.

My contribution was aerial cinematography across the East African segments — the wide-establishing landscape, herd, and habitat passes that anchor the film’s “what’s been lost” sequences against the scale of the places where it’s still possible to see something close to original ecology.

Production context

Silverback Films is the Bristol-based Attenborough-canon production house behind Our Planet (Netflix), Blue Planet II and Planet Earth III (BBC). The cinematography credit on A Life on Our Planet is held by the named feature DPs and aerial-specialist contributors who together built the archive used in cutting. The drone-work component sits within that team — long-lens-plus-drone is the standard NHU broadcast workflow at this tier and the aerial sequences are part of how the film’s witness-statement framing reads as cumulative rather than anecdotal.

Outcome

Production won Outstanding Cinematography for a Nonfiction Program at the 2021 Creative Arts Emmy Awards. That award is the production’s; the contribution is mine alongside the credited team.