Go Wild With Your Camcorder – How to Make Wildlife Films

 Dont Go Wild Without it.....

If you are prone to that urge for the great outdoors and the call of nature, but haven't yet got around to actually filming it, this little book makes an ideal companion.

Slim enough to slip into a side pocket of your rucksac, its 122 pages are packed with  information, making it as essential to the success of your wildlife safari as your camcorder.

Piers Warren is not only an experienced wildlife photographer himself, but also edits Wild Life Film News and is the producer behind wildlife-film.com and also trains  wildlife filmmakers. There's no substitute for experience so Piers Warren is ideally qualified to write a wildlife film primer like this.

Set in a clear typeface, a well laid-out text written in plain uncomplicated English is supported by lots of photographs, making Go Wild With Your Camcorder eminently readable. It doesn't read like a manual, nor does it read like a textbook, though that's what it is, which is a tribute to the conversational style of discourse Warren adopts. Like any good teacher (which he was in a former life) he holds attention and keeps it, so his readers will apparently learn by default through exposure to his ideas as they read through this text.

Content includes advice on selecting a camcorder and other equipment useful for the job. Wildlife filmmakers often find themselves in some pretty remote and inaccessible places, so there are lots of tips on improvising, gleaned from hard experience. Low-budget guerrilla filmmakers would benefit from reading this book. The section on post production is clear and there are plenty of useful tips on wildlife Foley, as wild subjects often fail to make the sounds they should be making, or the filmmaker's microphone stubbornly refuses to pick them up at a distance.

We are taken on a very informative safari through subjects for filming, documentary themes and camera techniques, backed by the fieldcraft that's essential to make sure you keep your subjects in camera range and don't scare them off. Simple set-building is also covered, like a black velvet cloth draped as a background to a small snake clinging on a twig that was apparently an offshoot growing from a chair in a Kenya hotel, to making tunnels and runs so wildlife can be filmed in those places your camera can't fit into.

The posibilties for the end product are explored, whether DVD, web-streaming or TV broadcast and there's also a section on ethics for wildlife filmmakers, not only in relation to the subjects they are filming, but concerning the habitat where you are filming them as well. A directory for wildlife filmmakers completes the resources the book provides.

If you are keen on capturing wild nature, whether  red in tooth and claw or just nibbling daintily at something, this is part of your essential kit. Don't go wild without it.

Just £11.95 including post and packing. Order it here.

Wildlife Films Website