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Wildlife cameraman Hamza Yassin has admitted that some of his wildlife scenes are ‘dramatised’ to gain sympathy from viewers.
The 33-year-old, who won last year's Strictly Come Dancing, has worked on a host of shows including Animal Park, Countryfile and more recently Strictly: Birds of Prey.
However, speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Yassin let slip that some of what we see on screen isn’t quite what we might think.
He shared: “The amount of times we'll film a cheetah family, and she's got three babies, and we just zoom in slightly and crop out the last baby.
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“Then you bring in a lion and the lion goes ‘Grr’ and you think, ‘Oh, the lion's killed the baby!’
“And then, five minutes of drama, and we just zoom back out again and then you say, ‘Ah, it's all a happy story.’
“No. That didn't happen. We are dramatising what we are seeing.”
Yassin said the reason they do it is encourage viewers to get behind environmental causes.
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“I want to tell the truth,” he added. “I want to say what's happening in this world.”
Yassin has previously revealed that he was compelled to go into wildlife documentary work after watching the likes of Sir David Attenborough and the late Steve Irwin.
He said: “I am someone who has fallen deeply in love with mother nature and want to look after it thanks to the people like Sir David Attenborough and Steve Irwin, God rest his soul. They gave me the love of mother nature and I want to pass that on to the next generation.”
Yassin’s revelation comes after the team working on Sir David’s new series Planet Earth III admitted to breaking their own rule during filming.
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As fans of Sir David’s work will probably be aware, no matter how brutal nature can get, he and his team don’t interfere with wildlife.
Matt Brandon, series producer of the new documentary series recently told the Sunday Times that they broke this rule during filming, so they could help animals that had been caught up in man-made dangers such as fishing nets and plastic pollution.
He shared: “What we’re seeing now is that many of the things that our crews are witnessing around the world are no longer natural.”
Producer, and director of two episodes, Nick Easton, added: “The context in which we’re working is changing.
“Not intervening in a hunt or saving an animal that might become food for another animal — that still applies as far as I’m concerned. And often that is what we’re filming: it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. But so often now we’re coming across animals that are suffering as a result of unnatural factors.”
Topics: TV and Film, Animals, Environment
Claire Reid