Robin Williams
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
The huge change, in fact, amazingly didn't recognise us at the time or how all-pervasive it is.
The huge change was to electronics from film.
Not only, of course, is the electronic camera so much more sensitive than any emulsion that camera people have been able to produce, but it's also the fact that you can run it for 24 hours, which you can never do with film, so that it means you can stake out somewhere for 24 hours or more and see if something happens in that 24 hours.
You don't have to be a cameraman there.
And then you whiz through at high speed and see whether anything went across.
And then it's so small.
It has simply everything going for it.
And that has had a huge change on what we've been able to film.
Yeah, I remember when they were filming the gastric brooding frog and they had to be there with their ten-minute film.
That's right, to press the button.
That's right.
And staying up all night just in case it actually looked after the offspring and put the offspring in the mouth.
And it was so fleeting that you had the team in Adelaide up all night.
Of course, the opposite of that is that in Oxford where Betty the Crow was doing amazing things with tools.
Yeah.
And they discovered that only because someone had left the video running.
The thing was going all night and suddenly there was this amazing picture of a creature behaving in a completely different way from what they expected.
Let me take you on a bit of a tour around Australia, starting actually with Lord Howe Island, where I was earlier on this year and where the naturalist Ian Hutton looked up.
from the shore where we were looking at tiny crabs, and he said, you see the mountain?
You're not going up there because you're a bit of a wimp.