The ground-breaking natural world documentary, Planet Earth (BBC, UK), has the absolute record of any nature programme for the most days spent in the field recording footage – with over 2,000 days. The entire one-hour, 11-part series, first screened in the UK in 2006, was shot entirely using High Definition film, by 40 camera crews in 200 locations on every continent. Their successes included recording a snow leopard hunting for the first time on film – a few minutes of footage which, itself took over one year to capture.
With the aid of a heli-gimbal (a gimbal-stablised powerful camera attached to a helicopter), they were able to fly high enough to capture aerial close-ups of African elephants, hump-backed whales ‘bubble netting’ krill in Antarctica and a male polar-bear swimming amongst chunks of Arctic ice – all without disturbing the animals.