Earth-Touch

Last updated March 26, 2019

African Lion (Panthera leo)

Hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius)

Leopard (Panthera pardus)

African Elephant (Loxodonta africana)

Earth Touch is a South Africa-based multimedia company that disseminates its content across multiple platforms, including television networks, video and DVD, the Internet and mobile phones. Earth Touch focuses on topics relating to natural history and wildlife, particularly nature documentaries.

South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by 2,798 kilometres (1,739 mi) of coastline of Southern Africa stretching along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countries of Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe; and to the east and northeast by Mozambique and Eswatini (Swaziland); and it surrounds the enclaved country of Lesotho. South Africa is the largest country in Southern Africa and the 25th-largest country in the world by land area and, with over 57 million people, is the world's 24th-most populous nation. It is the southernmost country on the mainland of the Old World or the Eastern Hemisphere. About 80 percent of South Africans are of Sub-Saharan African ancestry, divided among a variety of ethnic groups speaking different African languages, nine of which have official status. The remaining population consists of Africa's largest communities of European (White), Asian (Indian), and multiracial (Coloured) ancestry.

Wildlife traditionally refers to undomesticated animal species, but has come to include all organisms that grow or live wild in an area without being introduced by humans. Wildlife can be found in all ecosystems. Deserts, forests, rain forests, plains, grasslands and other areas including the most developed urban areas, all have distinct forms of wildlife. While the term in popular culture usually refers to animals that are untouched by human factors, most scientists agree that much wildlife is affected by human activities.

A natural history film or wildlife film is a documentary film about animals, plants, or other non-human living creatures, usually concentrating on film taken in their natural habitat but also often including footage of trained and captive animals. Sometimes they are about wild animals, plants, or ecosystems in relationship to human beings. Such programmes are most frequently made for television, particularly for public broadcasting channels, but some are also made for the cinema medium. The proliferation of this genre occurred almost simultaneously alongside the production of similar television series.

Background

Established in 2007, Earth Touch pioneered a rapid filming and production cycle using high definition (HD) cameras and satellites. Earth Touch has since built up an extensive archive of HD footage of animal behaviour, filmed primarily in southern Africa, but also Thailand, Antarctica, Indonesia, Brazil, Ecuador and the United States. The company also produced a number of wildlife and nature broadcast programmes that were screened in South Africa and Australia.

High-definition video is video of higher resolution and quality than standard-definition. While there is no standardized meaning for high-definition, generally any video image with considerably more than 480 vertical lines or 576 vertical lines (Europe) is considered high-definition. 480 scan lines is generally the minimum even though the majority of systems greatly exceed that. Images of standard resolution captured at rates faster than normal, by a high-speed camera may be considered high-definition in some contexts. Some television series shot on high-definition video are made to look as if they have been shot on film, a technique which is often known as filmizing.

In the context of spaceflight, a satellite is an artificial object which has been intentionally placed into orbit. Such objects are sometimes called artificial satellites to distinguish them from natural satellites such as Earth's Moon.

Ethology is the scientific and objective study of animal behaviour, usually with a focus on behaviour under natural conditions, and viewing behaviour as an evolutionarily adaptive trait. Behaviourism is a term that also describes the scientific and objective study of animal behaviour, usually referring to measured responses to stimuli or trained behavioural responses in a laboratory context, without a particular emphasis on evolutionary adaptivity. Many naturalists have studied aspects of animal behaviour throughout history. Ethology has its scientific roots in the work of Charles Darwin and of American and German ornithologists of the late 19th and early 20th century, including Charles O. Whitman, Oskar Heinroth, and Wallace Craig. The modern discipline of ethology is generally considered to have begun during the 1930s with the work of Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and by Austrian biologists Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, joint awardees of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Ethology is a combination of laboratory and field science, with a strong relation to some other disciplines such as neuroanatomy, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Ethologists are typically interested in a behavioural process rather than in a particular animal group, and often study one type of behaviour, such as aggression, in a number of unrelated animals.

Collaborations

Earth Touch is a content partner in the WikiProject Lights Camera Wiki!, a collaboration designed to encourage public creation of video content for Wikipedia. Earth Touch videos were used for the Wildlife section of this initiative.

Recognition/Awards

In 2008, Earth Touch’s Wildlife podcasts received the ARKIVE NEW MEDIA AWARD at the Wildscreen Panda Awards.^[1] The award is given to the project that best explores the interactive potential of digital technology to raise awareness and understanding of the natural world.

Earth Touch News Network (online)

http://www.earthtouchnews.com currently hosts over 2000 wildlife videos and new clips are added on a regular basis. The videos are available for viewing and download on a number of new media distribution platforms, including MIRO, iTunes, VUZE and YouTube.

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The BBC Natural History Unit (NHU) is a department of the BBC which 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, notably Life on Earth.

Stock footage, and similarly, archive footage, library pictures, and file footage is film or video footage that can be used again in other films. Stock footage is beneficial to filmmakers as it saves shooting new material. A single piece of stock footage is called a "stock shot" or a "library shot". Stock footage may have appeared in previous productions but may also be outtakes or footage shot for previous productions and not used. Examples of stock footage that might be utilized are moving images of cities and landmarks, wildlife in their natural environments, and historical footage. Suppliers of stock footage may be either rights managed or royalty-free. Many websites offer direct downloads of clips in various formats.

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Simon Henry King OBE is a British naturalist, author, conservationist, television presenter and cameraman, specialising in nature documentaries. King received an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 2011.

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BBC Earth is a brand used by BBC Worldwide since 2009 to market and distribute the BBC's natural history content to countries other than the United Kingdom. BBC Worldwide is the commercial arm of the public service broadcaster.

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CuriosityStream global nonfiction subscription video-on-demand streaming service

CuriosityStream is a global nonfiction subscription video-on-demand streaming service. It exclusively delivers nonfiction documentaries and series about science, technology, history and nature. Launched on March 18, 2015, CuriosityStream is headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland. CuriosityStream offers its users over 1,800 original and licensed titles and about 600 hours of nonfiction media worldwide.

A vertical video is a video created either by a camera or computer that is intended for viewing in portrait mode, producing an image that is taller than it is wide. It thus sits in opposition to the multiple horizontal formats normalized by cinema and television, which trace their lineage from the proscenium theatre and Western easel painting traditions.

References

↑ "Giants Orbiting". giantsorbitting.blogspot.com. 2002-10-23. Retrieved 2010-10-25.

External links

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[1] "Giants Orbiting". giantsorbitting.blogspot.com. 2002-10-23. Retrieved 2010-10-25.