A PRIDE OF LIONS SILENTLY patrolling the grassland at dusk; a cheetah closing in on its prey with mind-blowing speed; a watchful leopard curled artfully in a tree. There’s nothing quite like a big cat in the African wilderness to make the heart skip a beat.
We and our colleagues at the BBC Natural History Unit have long thought about how we could create a new series that would really get under the skin of Africa’s three big cat species, using a format that would appeal to a contemporary audience. Well, cue a revolution in night-time filming technology, plus the chance to immerse an international team of cinematographers in one of the last truly wild places in Africa, and the idea of Big Cats 24/7 was born.
Big Cats 24/7 is a deep dive into the lives of the cats that reside in the south-west corner of the Okavango Delta, Botswana. Its six episodes follow the fortunes of a cast of individuals day and night across two dramatic seasons, as well as charting the highs and lows of the cinematographers that are out tracking them. It’s a thrilling new format in which our camera team are the primary storytellers. It’s through their unfiltered experiences and relationships with their subjects that the stries unfold, creating a natural-history show with a very different look and feel.
