How we made it: The meerkat’s outdoor classroom

When meerkats find a cobra in their territory they don’t try to attack it. Instead they mob it, leaving it in no doubt that it has been seen. The snake may strike to push the meerats back, but they are too fast to be in danger. The situation quickly turns into an outdoor lesson for the youngsters in how to see-off a snake. This fascinating behavior is only understood because of the work of Cambridge University scientists, who have undertaken long-term studies on wild meerkat populations in South Africa.

In filming Life Story we have tried to take the camera into the animals’ world, wherever possible, in order to offer the viewer a sense of what it is like to be an animal as they face the great challenges of their lives. So we asked the scientists if they thought it was possible to film this interaction with a camera in the meerkat mob.

The scientist’s method for studying this behavior is to bring a snake into a wild meerkat territory, well away from the burrow system, and wait to see if a meerkat finds it. If it does then the natural behavior unfolds. They have recreated this for film crews in the past and agreed to do so for us, with one of their experts overseeing the process to ensure there was no risk of harm coming to any animal.

This allowed our crew to test a technology new to wildlife filming - the steadicam. It’s a heavy, counter-balanced system used in filming dramas, that makes the camera effectively weightless so the operator can move it smoothly around a scene. It was first used in the movie Rocky, to film the famous scene of Sylvester Stallone running up the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum.

By adapting and miniaturizing this system and hanging the camera beneath it, almost at ground level, cameraman Toby Strong was able to film a unique point-of-view perspective of one of the most vital learning experiences in the lives of young meerkats.

This technique was so successful that our crews were later able to use steadicam to film more meerkats as well as taking the viewer into the worlds of seals, turtles and kangaroos.