Oxford Scientific Films

Last updated

Oxford Scientific Films
Type Private company limited by shares
IndustryTelevision production, Film production
GenreDocumentary, Nature
Founded Oxford, UK ((1968-07-08)8 July 1968)
FounderGerald Thompson
Peter Parks
John Paling
Sean Morris
David Thompson
Headquarters
London
,
United Kingdom
Key people
Clare Birks, CEO, Caroline Hawkins, Creative Director
Products Meerkat Manor , Lemur Kingdom , Fatal Attractions
Parent ITV Studios
Website oxfordscientificfilms.tv

Oxford Scientific Films (OSF) is a British company that produces natural history and documentary programmes. Founded on 8 July 1968, by documentary filmmaker Gerald Thompson, the independent film company broke new ground in the world of documentaries, using new filming techniques and capturing footage of never before filmed activities of its various subjects.[ citation needed ] In 1996, Oxford Scientific Films was sold to Circle Communications, where it retained its own identity as a division within the company. The following year, Circle Communications was taken over by Southern Star Entertainment UK. Under the new ownership, Oxford Scientific Films continued to enhance its reputation for innovative film-making,[ citation needed ] producing multiple award-winning series and films, including the Animal Planet series, Meerkat Manor .

Contents

In March 2008, Southern Star merged its Sydney-based factual business division into the Oxford Scientific Films division, retaining the brand name for specialist documentaries, while using "Southern Star Factual" as the brand name for its features and entertainment style documentaries. When Southern Star was sold to Endemol, Oxford Scientific Films was retained by parent company Fairfax Media. In 2011 Oxford Scientific Films was acquired by Boom Pictures Productions, who own a 70% share of the company.

History

Formation and growth

In 1967, cinemicrophotography pioneer, professional film maker, and Oxford University lecturer Gerald Thompson, was approached by the Ealing Corporation of Harvard about expanding its catalogue of short educational films. Universal Education and Visual Arts, a New York City, company also was interested in talking with Thompson about the works he'd produced. Thompson and five of his associates and former students: Peter Parks, who worked with plankton; John Paling, a fish specialist who worked with Parks; recent Oxford graduate Sean Morris; zoologist John Cooke; and Eric Skinner, who assisted Thompson with his films, wanted to form an independent film company. Thompson and Parks travelled to America to meet with the two companies to show their work. At the end of the meeting, they told the head of the company about their desire to open their own company and, impressed with the films he'd seen, he offered to finance them for the first three years and give them the funds to build a place to work. [1] [2]

When they returned to the United Kingdom, Thompson sold them a quarter acre of his garden, at a steeply discounted price, to be the home for the new building. They formed Oxford Scientific Films, taking part of the name from Parks' existing company Oxford Biological Films. Thompson, Parks, Morris, Paling, and Thompson's son David, headed the new company, which began operating on 8 July 1968. Thompson remained at his position at Oxford University while the company building was being completed, while the other four travelled to America to make the film loops for Ealing. Thompson resigned from the university on 2 September 1969, taking on the work at Oxford Scientific Films full-time. [1] [2]

The company focused initially on filming nature at a microscopic level, including insect and aquatic wildlife. Using specialised equipment and camera techniques the developed themselves, the company gained fame for its ability to record never before seen footage of the natural world. Its cinematographers became experts in micro, macro, snorkel, slow-motion and time-lapse photography. As the company grew, it expanded into other innovating filming and post-production techniques, and moved from creating short loops to creating television programmes and series, commercials, and feature films. [3]

Southern Star acquisition

In September 1996, Oxford Scientific Films was purchased by film and television rights company Circle Communications for £3.9 million. £3.85 million of the purchase price was paid in cash, with the rest paid through a stock exchange. [4] Less than a year later, in May 1997, Australia-based Southern Star Entertainment made a £8.3 million take over bid for Circle Communications, due to its distribution business, strong catalogue, and the company's drama and factual production business. [5] [6] Oxford Scientific Films, which had retained its own identity under Circle Communications, became a core division of Southern Star Entertainment. [5] [7] [8]

On 4 December 2003, Oxford Scientific's extensive libraries of over 350,000 still images and over 2,000 of film footage libraries were acquired by Photolibrary. The acquisition was done as a share exchange, with Photolibrary acquiring shares in Oxford Scientific Films Limited, and Southern Star paying A$1 million to purchase a 46.46% equity in Photolibrary. Photolibrary retained existing employees of the library divisions, and continues using the names "Oxford Scientific" and "OSF" in promoting the libraries. Southern Star retained full control of Oxford Scientific Films production unit, and through that unit, continues supplying images and footage to the Photolibrary. [9] [10] [11]

In March 2008, parent company Southern Star Group merged its Sydney-based "factual business unit" into the Oxford Scientific Films division. The merged company now uses two brands, with the existing Oxford Scientific Films name being used for its "specialist factual programmes", while the Southern Star Factual brand will be used for "features and factual entertainment shows." [9]

Oxford Scientific Films today

Some time later, Oxford Scientific Films became part of the Twofour Group, which was acquired on 24 June 2015 by ITV Studios. [12]

Notable works

Oxford Scientific Films has produced numerous award-winning programmes and films. In 1998, its film "The Forbidden Fruit" produced for the BBC's long-running series The Natural World and WNET Nature, won seven industry awards. Heroes of the High Frontier, produced as a National Geographic Special, won four awards and was a finalist for the Best of the Show Grand Award Trophy at the New York Festivals. [13]

In 2005, the company launched Meerkat Manor , a docu-drama commissioned for Animal Planet. The series has since become Animal Planet's highest rated series, [14] and has been nominated for two Primetime Emmy Awards, [15] two Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival Awards and was a finalist at the 2006 Wildscreen Festival [16] [17] It won multiple awards at the 2006 Omni Awards and 2006 and 2007 New York Festivals Award Gala. [17] [18] The series is also noted for capturing never before seen aspects of the lives of meerkats, being the first to capture meerkat infanticide on film, and for expanding the boundaries of the documentary genre. [19] [20]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Thompson (actor)</span> Australian actor

Jack Thompson, AM is an Australian award- winning actor, who is a major figure of Australian cinema, particularly Australian New Wave.

David Whyte MacdonaldCBE FRSE is a Scottish zoologist and conservationist. He is the Director of the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) at the University of Oxford, which he founded in 1986. He holds a Senior Research Fellowship at Lady Margaret Hall with the Title of Distinction of Professor of Wildlife Conservation. He has been an active wildlife conservationist since graduating from Oxford.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Participant (company)</span> American film production company

Participant Media, LLC is an American film production company founded in 2004 by Jeffrey Skoll, dedicated to entertainment intended to spur social change. The company finances and co-produces film and television content, as well as digital entertainment through its subsidiary SoulPancake, which the company acquired in 2016.

<i>Meerkat Manor</i> British television series about a meerkat family

Meerkat Manor is a British television programme produced by Oxford Scientific Films that premiered in September 2005. Originally broadcast on Animal Planet International for four series, until its cancellation in August 2008, the programme had a revival in 2021 with the programme now known as Meerkat Manor: Rise of the Dynasty in some countries. Using traditional animal documentary style footage along with narration, the series told the story of the Whiskers, one of more than a dozen families of meerkats in the Kalahari Desert being studied as part of the Kalahari Meerkat Project, a long-term field study into the ecological causes and evolutionary consequences of the cooperative nature of meerkats. The original programme was narrated by Bill Nighy, with the narration redubbed by Mike Goldman for the Australian airings and Sean Astin for the American broadcasts. The fourth series, subtitled The Next Generation, saw Stockard Channing replacing Astin as the narrator in the American dubbing. In 2021, Nighy could be heard narrating the new series of Meerkat Manor when it was broadcast in the United States on BBC America and on Channel 5 in the United Kingdom, making it the first time that both television markets have used the same voice over on the programme.

ITV Studios is a British multinational television production and distribution company owned by the British television broadcaster ITV plc. It handles production and distribution of programmes broadcast on the ITV network and third-party broadcasters, and is based in 12 countries across 60 production labels, with local production offices in the UK, US, Belgium, Australia, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Israel, France, Spain and Scandinavia.

Wildscreen is a wildlife conservation charity based in Bristol, England.

ARKive was a global initiative with the mission of "promoting the conservation of the world's threatened species, through the power of wildlife imagery", which it did by locating and gathering films, photographs and audio recordings of the world's species into a centralised digital archive. Its priority was the completion of audio-visual profiles for the c. 17,000 species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neil Nightingale</span>

Neil Nightingale is a 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.

Bill Rauch is an American theatre director. He was named the inaugural artistic director of the Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center in 2018. Currently in development, the Perelman is the final piece of the plan to revitalize the World Trade Center site and will create work which inspires hope.

Krupakar and Senani are wildlife photographers from Karnataka, India. They have produced the wildlife film Wild Dog Diaries for National Geographic Channel. For this documentary they won the following awards:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Honeyborne</span>

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.

<i>Meerkat Manor: The Story Begins</i> 2008 television film directed by Mike Slee

Meerkat Manor: The Story Begins is a 2008 television film created by Discovery Films and Oxford Scientific Films as a prequel to the Animal Planet series Meerkat Manor. A scripted documentary narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, the film details the life of a meerkat named Flower from birth to her becoming the leader of a meerkat group called the Whiskers. The film is based on the research notes of the Kalahari Meerkat Project and primarily uses wild meerkat "actors" to represent those in the story. Shot over two years at the Kuruman River Reserve in Northern Cape, South Africa, the film employed a much larger crew than the series. Some scenes were shot at a wildlife park in the United Kingdom, while others were created using camera tricks and trained film animals.

<i>The Meerkats</i> 2008 British film

The Meerkats, also known as Meerkats: The Movie, is a feature-length 2008 British wildlife fiction film which anthropomorphises the daily struggles of a clan of meerkats in the Kalahari Desert. It was produced by BBC Films, and filmed by the award-winning BBC Natural History Unit. It is the debut directorial feature of James Honeyborne, previously a producer of natural history programmes for television. The worldwide premiere was held at the Dinard Film Festival, France in October 2008, expanding to a wide release the following week. The film was released in 2009, on 7 August in the UK. This was dedicated to actor Paul Newman, the narrator of the film, who died in 2008, shortly before this movie was released making it his final film role.

Christopher Eugene Parsons OBE was an English wildlife film-maker and the executive producer of David Attenborough's Life on Earth, widely regarded as one of the finest and most influential of nature documentaries. As a founding member and a former Head of the BBC Natural History Unit, he worked on many of its early productions and published a history of its first 25 years in 1982. Besides television, he was also passionate about projects which helped to bring an understanding of the natural world to a wider audience, notably the Wildscreen Festival and ARKive.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Poore</span> British independent musician (born 1966)

David Nicholas Poore is a British independent musician, who has composed and produced music for over 200 films by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Disney, PBS, National Geographic, RTÉ and other broadcasters.

<i>Survival</i> (TV series) British TV series or program

Survival is one of television's longest-running and most successful nature documentary series. Originally produced by Anglia Television for ITV in the United Kingdom, it was created by Aubrey Buxton, a founder director of Anglia TV, and first broadcast in 1961. Survival films and film-makers won more than 250 awards worldwide, including four Emmy Awards and a BAFTA.

Dilys Breese was a natural history television producer for the BBC and an ornithologist with the British Trust for Ornithology, who commemorate her contribution by awarding the Dilys Breese Medal, funded by her bequest to them.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Pike</span> Australian film historian

Dr. Andrew Pike, OAM is an Australian film historian, film distributor and exhibitor, and documentary producer and director. Pike formed Ronin Films, an Australian film distribution company, with his first wife, Dr Merrilyn Fitzpatrick, in 1974. With Ross Cooper, he co-authored the book, Reference Guide to Australian Films 1906–1969 and has produced and directed many documentaries since 1982. Pike has been honoured with numerous awards including a plaque on the ACT Honour Walk in Canberra City, appointed of the Order of Australia (OAM) and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Canberra.

Argonon is an independent media group founded in 2011 by James Burstall, the CEO of Leopard Films. Argonon has offices in London, Los Angeles, New York, Liverpool, Oklahoma, and Glasgow. The group produces and distributes factual entertainment, documentary, reality, entertainment, arts, drama, and children's programming for various television networks and channels worldwide, although they focus on the UK, US, and Canadian markets. Argonon produces shows such as The Masked Singer UK (ITV), Worzel Gummidge, Dispatches, Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard, House Hunters International (HGTV) and Hard Cell (Netflix).

References

  1. 1 2 Christopher Parsons (Interviewer), Derek Kilkenny-Blake (Cameraman) (3 September 1998). Oral History Interview: Gerald Thompson – Chapter 8:Setting up Oxford Scientific Films (Flash) (Documentary). WildFilmHistory. Retrieved 29 August 2008.
  2. 1 2 Morris, Sean (21 September 2002). "Gerald Thompson: Pioneer of filming plants and small animals". The Guardian . Retrieved 29 August 2008.
  3. Plank, Joselynn (1999). "OSF". Heroes of the High Frontier companion site. International Canopy Network, Evergreen State College . Retrieved 29 August 2008.
  4. Montgomery, Emma-Lou (26 September 1996). "Circle pays £3.9m for call of the wild". Electronic Telegraph . Archived from the original on 25 November 2004. Retrieved 1 September 2008.
  5. 1 2 Bousé, Derek (2000). "Nature Designed and Composed". Wildlife Films. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 221. ISBN   0-8122-1728-4.
  6. Clarke, Steve (29 September 2003). "U.K. Arm Develops Drama, Docu Docket". Variety . p. B3.
  7. Maher, Sean (January 2004). The internationalisation of Australian film and television through the 1990s (PDF). Communications Law Centre. Australian Film Commission. p. 50. ISBN   0-9580152-6-0. Archived from the original (PDF) on 28 July 2008. Retrieved 29 August 2008.
  8. "Evolution of the UK Independent Production Sector". Mediatique, BBC. September 2005. p. 8. Archived from the original on 18 May 2008. Retrieved 1 September 2008.
  9. 1 2 "Southern Star Announces Merger With Oxford Scientific Films". 4rfv.co.uk. 18 March 2008. Retrieved 29 August 2008.
  10. "Division Name – Southern Star Merger of Oxford Scientific Films Libraries And Photolibrary". Southern Star Group. 30 April 2004. Retrieved 29 August 2008.[ dead link ]
  11. "Southern Star Announces Merger of Oxford Scientific Films Libraries And Photolibrary". Southern Star Group. 3 December 2003. Retrieved 29 August 2008.[ dead link ]
  12. "ITV acquires Twofour Group". ITV Press Centre. 24 June 2015. Retrieved 24 June 2015.
  13. Warren, Piers (January 2000). "Newsletter Number 7". Wildlife Film News. Archived from the original on 9 February 2010. Retrieved 1 September 2008.
  14. Bellafante, Ginia (10 October 2007). "'The Desert Has Lost Its Favorite Rose': Death Comes to the Whiskers Family". The New York Times. Retrieved 28 October 2007.
  15. "The 59th Primetime Emmy Awards Nominations Summary". Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 13 January 2008.
  16. "Wildscreen 2006 Finalist Films". Wildscreen Festival. Archived from the original on 27 September 2007. Retrieved 13 January 2008.
  17. 1 2 "OSF Award Winning Productions". Southern Star Group. Archived from the original on 30 August 2007. Retrieved 13 January 2008.
  18. "TV Programming & Promotion Showcase". New York Festivals. International Awards Group. Archived from the original on 12 February 2008. Retrieved 13 January 2008.
  19. "Meerkat Manor – The Cast and Crew". Animal Planet. Archived from the original on 9 December 2007. Retrieved 10 December 2007.
  20. Smith, Lynn (29 September 2007). "Tributes to the passing of a meerkat matriarch". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on 15 June 2009. Retrieved 28 October 2007.