Ready for a bit of adventure? If the answer is yes then National Geographic Explorer series Animals Up Close with Bertie Gregory is for you. The best stories are often the hardest to get to, but if you’re National Geographic Explorer and BAFTA Award-winning cinematographer Bertie Gregory, that’s part of the fun!
In Animals Up Close with Bertie Gregory, the filmmaker embarks on a new set of adventures to capture wildlife behaviors like never before. Armed with drones, state-of-the-art gimbal-mounted cameras and underwater tech, Bertie follows individual animals for weeks at a time, building up an intimate picture of their daily battles.
He and his team travel to the most spectacular corners of our planet — Antarctica, the Galapagos Islands, Botswana, Patagonia, Indonesia, and the Central African Republic — to take viewers deep into the natural world and showcase extraordinary animal lives. The six-part series will stream only on Disney+ from 13 September 2023.
In the series viewers will get the chance to see unique and rare moments, like humpback whales purposely disrupting the hunt of an endangered pod of B1 killer whales — just 100 are in existence — in Antarctica. Other standout moments include a male sea lion defending pups from a huge Galapagos shark and, by using a military-grade thermal imaging camera in Patagonia, Bertie and his team filmed a guardian shepherd dog defending his flock of sheep from a hunting puma.
Bertie and his team brave subzero seas, climb snow-capped mountains, and sleep suspended 120 feet in the air to reveal the challenges animals endure, their fierce rivalries, and the threats they face on our changing planet. Throughout the series, there are emotional highs and lows as Bertie comes face-to-face with the shocking truths about the impact of humanity on the wildlife he is so passionate about.
The immersive series captures the challenges of natural history filmmaking and shows the behind-the-scenes moments Bertie and his team face while adapting to unpredictable wildlife in remote environments where filming rarely goes as planned. There is no script for this unique wildlife series, but through it all, Bertie brings the audience with him every step of the way.
Animals Up Close with Bertie Gregory is produced by Wildstar Films for National Geographic. Bertie Gregory is host, creative contributor, co-producer and director of photography. For Wildstar the executive producer is Anwar Mamon and the series producer is Jennie Hammond. Will West, Maddie Close, Spencer Millsap, Mark McClean and James Brickell produce and direct across the series. For National Geographic, Janet Han Vissering is SVP, Production and Development, and Drew Jones serves as executive producer.
