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Alastair Fothergill | |
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| Born | Alastair David William Fothergill 10 April 1960 |
| Education | Orley Farm School Harrow School |
| Alma mater | Durham University |
| Children | 2 |
Alastair David William Fothergill OBE (born 10 April 1960) is a British producer of nature documentaries for television and cinema. He is the series producer of the series The Blue Planet (2001), Planet Earth (2006) and the co-director of the associated feature films Deep Blue and Earth .
Born in London, Fothergill attended Orley Farm School and Harrow School. He studied zoology at St Cuthbert's Society, Durham at Durham University and made his first film, On the Okavango, while still a student.
Fothergill joined the BBC Natural History Unit in 1983, working on The Really Wild Show , Wildlife on One and David Attenborough's The Trials of Life . He was appointed head of the Unit in 1992, and during his tenure he produced Attenborough's award-winning series Life in the Freezer .
He was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Cherry Kearton Medal and Award in 1996. [1]
In June 1998, he stood down as head of the Natural History Unit to concentrate on his work as series producer on the multi-award-winning The Blue Planet. In 2006 he completed his next major series Planet Earth, which won the Cinema for Peace Clean Energy Award at the Cinema for Peace Gala Berlin in 2008. [2]
More recently he was executive producer of Frozen Planet (2011) and The Hunt (2015).
He has also presented several television programmes, including The Abyss and is the author of five books.
In 2008, he signed a multi-picture deal with newly formed Disneynature. The first few titles under the Disneynature deal had been, for now, African Cats (2011), Chimpanzee (2012), Bears (2014), Penguins (2019), Dolphin Reef (2020), and Polar Bear (2022) co-directed with Keith Scholey, Mark Linfield, and Jeff Wilson.
In 2012 he left the BBC to co-found Silverback Films with Keith Scholey. Silverback Films makes landmark natural history series for a variety of clients including Netflix ( Our Planet, Our Planet 2 and Life On Our Planet) and the BBC ( The Mating Game and Wild Isles).
In 2016, Fothergill was made a Fellow of the Royal Television Society for his work in natural history programming. [3] He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for services to film. [4]
Fothergill lives in Bristol with his wife Melinda (née Barker) and two sons, Hamish and William. [5]
Sir David Frederick Attenborough is a British broadcaster, biologist, natural historian and author. He is best known for writing and presenting, in conjunction with the BBC Natural History Unit, the nine natural history documentary series forming the Life collection, a comprehensive survey of animal and plant life on Earth.
The Blue Planet is a British nature documentary series created and co-produced by the BBC and Discovery Channel. It premiered on 12 September 2001 in the United Kingdom. It is narrated by David Attenborough.
George Richard Ian Howe, known professionally as George Fenton, is an English composer. Best known for his work writing film scores and music for television, he has received five Academy Award nominations, several Ivor Novello, BAFTA, Golden Globe, Emmy and BMI Awards, and a Classic BRIT. He is one of 18 songwriters and composers to have been made a Fellow of the Ivors Academy.
The BBC Studios Natural History Unit (NHU) is a department of BBC Studios that produces television, radio and online content with a natural history or wildlife theme. It is best known for its highly regarded nature documentaries, including The Blue Planet and Planet Earth, and has a long association with David Attenborough's authored documentaries, starting with 1979's Life on Earth.
Planet Earth is a 2006 British television series produced by the BBC Natural History Unit. Five years in the making, it was the most expensive nature documentary series ever commissioned by the BBC and also the first to be filmed in high definition. The series received multiple awards, including four Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, and an award from the Royal Television Society.
Neil Nightingale is a British freelance wildlife filmmaker, executive producer and creative consultant with over 35 years experience at the BBC. From 2009 to 2018 he was the creative director of BBC Earth, BBC Worldwide's global brand for all BBC nature and science content.
Earth is a 2007 nature wildlife documentary film which depicts the diversity of wild habitats and creatures across the planet. The film begins in the Arctic in January of one year and moves southward, concluding in Antarctica in the December of the same year. Along the way, it features the journeys made by three particular species—the polar bear, African bush elephant and humpback whale—to highlight the threats to their survival in the face of rapid environmental change. A companion piece and a sequel to the 2006 BBC/Discovery/NHK/CBC television series Planet Earth, the film uses many of the same sequences, though most are edited differently, and features previously unseen footage not seen on TV.
Planet Earth: The Future is a 2006 BBC documentary series on the environment and conservation, produced by the BBC Natural History Unit as a companion to the multi-award-winning nature documentary Planet Earth. The programmes were originally broadcast on BBC Four immediately after the final three episodes of Planet Earth on BBC One. Each episode highlights the conservation issues surrounding some of the species and environments featured in Planet Earth, using interviews with the film-makers and eminent figures from the fields of science, conservation, politics, and theology. The programmes are narrated by Simon Poland and the series producer was Fergus Beeley.
Disneynature is an independent film studio that specializes in the production of nature documentary films for Walt Disney Studios, a division of Disney Entertainment, which is owned by The Walt Disney Company. The production company was founded on April 21, 2008, and is headquartered in Paris, France.
Frozen Planet is a 2011 British nature documentary series, co-produced by the BBC ZDF and The Open University. It was filmed by the BBC Natural History Unit. The production team, which includes executive producer Alastair Fothergill and series producer Vanessa Berlowitz, were previously responsible for the award-winning series The Blue Planet (2001) and Planet Earth (2006), and Frozen Planet is billed as a sequel of sorts. David Attenborough returns as narrator. It is distributed under licence by the BBC in other countries, Discovery Channel for North America, ZDF for Germany, Antena 3 for Spain and Skai TV for Greece.
William Goodchild is a composer, orchestrator and conductor who produces music for film, television and the concert hall.
James Honeyborne is the creative director of Freeborne Media, he previously worked as an executive producer at the BBC Natural History Unit where he oversaw some 35 films, working with multiple co-producers around the world. His projects include the Emmy Award and BAFTA-winning series Blue Planet II, the Emmy Award-nominated series Wild New Zealand with National Geographic, and the BAFTA-winning BBC1 series Big Blue Live with PBS.
The following is a chronological list of 148 television series and individual programmes in which Sir David Attenborough is credited as a writer, presenter, narrator, producer, or interviewee. In a career spanning eight decades, Attenborough's name has become synonymous with the natural history programmes produced by the BBC Natural History Unit.
Mark Linfield is a British writer, producer and director of nature documentaries for cinema and television. He is best known for his work with the BBC Natural History Unit as a producer of two episodes of the television series Planet Earth (2006) and as writer and co-director of the associated feature film Earth (2007).
Keith Scholey is a British producer of nature documentaries for television and cinema, and a former television executive. He is currently a joint Director of Silverback Films Ltd and Studio Silverback Ltd.
Chimpanzee is a 2012 nature documentary film about a young common chimpanzee named Oscar who finds himself alone in the African forests until he is adopted by another chimpanzee, who takes him in and treats him like his own child. The American release of the film is narrated by Tim Allen.
Sophie Darlington is a freelance British wildlife camerawoman and producer-director who grew up in England, Ireland and Iran.
Mike Holding is a Kenyan-born, British filmmaker, cameraman, director and wildlife consultant.
Planet Earth is a television and film documentary franchise produced and broadcast by the BBC. The franchise began in 2001 with the success of The Blue Planet. As of 2017, The Blue Planet has spawned 5 series and one feature film.
Our Planet is a British nature documentary series made for Netflix. The series is narrated by David Attenborough and produced by Silverback Films, led by Alastair Fothergill and Keith Scholey, who also created BBC documentary series Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and The Blue Planet, in collaboration with the conservation charity World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The soundtrack was composed by Steven Price.
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