I Wouldn't Be A Cameraman On Chimp Empire For $1 Billion Dollars A Year
I watched the mini docu-series Chip Empire in the past few days. It's four episodes that are 40-55 mins in length each, so pretty digestible. It's a Netflix series about two rival chimpanzee groups in the forests of Africa that are extremely territorial. These chimps legit go to war with each other and are so violet there are some killings.
The entire time I watched the series I kept saying to my wife, "this footage is insane, how do they get these angles?!" It made no sense. I know cameras are awesome after seeing a ton of NFL in 4k after a big play, but this was on another level. It didn't make sense that they'd have cameras EVERYWHERE and be able to pick up sound too, so how did they do this? Was it really long lenses? How did they even mike up the trees?
The fact that cameramen for this show were legitimately a few feet away from chimpanzees as they went to battle is nightmare fuel. Chimps have eaten people's faces. They've ripped off arms of humans and beat them with them. The fact Netflix or whoever sent out human beings to be close to these creatures in their home turf is insane to me.
Your life would be CONSTANTLY on the line. And I cannot really picture a worse way to go out then being attacked by a group of chimps literally tearing you limb from limb as you helplessly regret making the career choice to film them so closely. Thinking about it, I'd love to own a sports team one day (who wouldn't right?). To do so would take BILLIONS of dollars. But if you offered me one billion dollars a year to do this, I'd say no in a heartbeat and never look back. An absolute no brainer.
Health > wealth and I am not one to risk it all to get some awesome footage of wild chimps.