From a praying mantis braving a suburban Texas backyard to a beetle’s first day in the African savannah, National Geographic’s “A Real Bug’s Life” — narrated by Awkwafina — takes audiences through the tiny yet mighty lives of bugs across five episodes and nine challenging ecosystems.
Using macro and probe lenses, the photography team behind the documentary was able to capture these tiny creatures on location and display them in large, high-quality.
Portraying these small worlds for television did not come easy, as the production team of “A Real Bug’s Life” had to overcome filming in a wide array of environments to accurately portray all the challenges that bugs around the world grapple with.
Nathan Small, director of photography for “A Real Bug’s Life,” spoke about the challenges that came specifically with filming “The Big City” episode, in which a jumping spider tries to find a home in New York City.
“You’re sort of not only having to wrangle the insects, but wrangle the general public as well,” said Small. “I think working in New York, in the middle of the summer, in the blazing heat, with hundreds of thousands of people walking around, while you’re trying filming on a pavement is, is not easy.”
Small, who has also worked on other insect documentaries, like “Tiny World“ for Apple TV and “Planet Insects” for CuriosityStream, began his photography career in advertising in his early twenties but made the transition to wildlife photography about five years ago.
“I just wanted to do something that was a bit more permanent… And I’d always been in love with sort of wildlife documentaries, I grew up with all the BBC David Attenborough stuff, and it was a world I’d always been really interested in, but it just seemed like a very far cry — a difficult one to penetrate for a young boy from Croydon,” Small said.
For Small, photography has served as an umbrella hobby by which to explore his other interests. And when it comes to bugs, he hopes to change audience’s perspectives by giving these small creatures personalities and characters, and highlighting their importance to the ecosystem. He said, “They’re just trying to eke out a living, [a]nd they really need our help at the moment because insects are in massive decline. They’re the base of the food chain. We need them to pollinate a lot of our crops.”
“We’re telling stories in ways that are much more akin to sort of drama, and animation…” said Small, “I want them [audiences] to learn something, but I don’t really want them to realize that they’ve learned anything, that’s the ideal way to do it.”
“A Real Bug’s Life” releases in Disney+ on January 24. It was produced in collaboration with National Geographic and is narrated by Awkwafina.
