Watch: Behind the scenes of Welcome to Earth

This is Televisual’s behind the scenes film with the team behind Nutopia’s epic Disney+ series, Welcome to Earth, fronted by Will Smith.

The Welcome To Earth six-part series was released in December last year on the Nat Geo tile within Disney+.

(Nutopia has now been commissioned to make another Will Smith natural history show by Nat Geo, Pole to Pole, produced with Westbrook Studios, and Protozoa for Nat Geo on Disney+)

Supported by lots of beautiful and stunning clips from the series, our behind-the-scenes film leads with an interview with Showrunner, Graham Booth who provides a detailed anatomy of the creative thinking behind the show.

As Graham says, “There is no doubt that Welcome To Earth is just one of the biggest documentaries ever made in terms of scope and scale and ambition” including 92 shoots in 34 countries and never before captured images from the natural world. “It’s an incredible hybrid of things. It’s an adventure show. It’s a natural history show. It’s a science show. It’s a buddy movie.” It is definitely a contemporary show and takes the viewer on an authentic journey of discovery with Hollywood A Lister Will Smith.

This film additionally goes behind the scenes to look at how the series was shot and includes an interview with Specialist DoP, Robert Hollingworth on the unique macro cinematography sequences and Halo Post’s Head of Production, Louisa Sutherland-Smith who describes a complex post workflow with rushes coming from a broad assortment of cameras for HDR and Atmos HE masters.

The series was produced by Darren Aronofsky (Protozoa Pictures) Westbrook Studios and Jane Root’s Nutopia. It is available to watch on Disney+.

For more in this series of Televisual Factual Films, including interviews with the UK’s leading commissioners of factual television, head to televisual.com/watch

Still to come in the Televisual Factual Films series, Lucy Willis and Denise Seneviratne, commissioning editors at Channel 5, will talk about the channel’s needs in factual TV and Hilary Rosen walks us through UKTV’s factual range

The Televisual Factual Films are all posted on televisual.com and are all open access and don’t require payment or even registration.

We have a comprehensive line-up online already with more films coming up –

Televisual’s recent interview with Jo Clinton-Davis, Controller of Factual at ITV is here

Interviews with BBC commissioning editors Claire Sillery and Jack Bootle are already online here

The interview with Poppy Dixon, Director, Documentaries & Factual, Sky UK and Barney Shingleton, Director of Factual at Sky Studios can be found here

The interview with Shaminder Nahal commissioning editor, arts and topical, Channel 4 is available here.

The interview with Alf Lawrie, head of factual entertainment, Channel 4 is here.

The interview with Simon Downing, head of factual and docs, Discovery UK and Ireland is here.

Televisual’s recent interview with Dan Korn, Vice President of Programming, A+E Networks UK is here

Televisual also caught up with some of the UK factual community’s leading voices at the Grierson Awards to hear their thoughts on opportunities, challenges and the future of factual production. Interviewees include Will Anderson, Sam Richards, Alan Yentob, David Dehaney, Simon Chinn, Christopher Hird, Jess Search, Luke Hyams and Danielle Graham. You can see that film here