The Americas Cinematography Isn't Just Pretty. It's Game-Changing.
The NBC wildlife docuseries showed scientists how sperm whales hunt thanks to a two-years-in-the-making camera.
Welcome to the wild and wonderful era of Emmy Awards: Phase 1, a time before nomination voting when the arbitrary rules governing what is timely are set aside, and we can discuss projects that were released weeks or months earlier and deserve to be top of mind again. The Americas premiered on NBC February 23, 2025.
Something interesting has been going on with wildlife documentaries over the last few years. As the cameras get higher def, the level of detail captured for documentaries like NBC’s The Americas gets more mind-boggling. And in the case of The Americas, the team discovered new species (!) and solved long unanswered questions, like how sperm whales hunt. In the process, the series reveals for the first time things no human in history has ever before seen.
Producer/director Giles Badger and underwater cinematographer Dan Beecham worked on the sperm whale sequence (among others) in Episode 8, “The Caribbean,” and joined me on a Zoom call to discuss it.
Rewatching the Caribbean episode, knowing that we would talk about it, I have to say: What you achieve with the camera? AI could never. What was it like watching that footage coming in?
Giles Badger: That's the joy of having someone like Dan on production. From my perspective, watching the footage come in was an absolute delight. It’s always a huge effort to get these shoots out. Some of them take 18 months of planning. They're full-on expeditions. So when that footage comes in, that's the greatest thing. And then when you get to write the scripts and put it all together into a story, and you feel that kind of tug in your heartstrings, that's another buzz as well.
Dan Beecham: I think the word discovery is bandied around a lot these days, but the footage that came back from those sperm whales was a true discovery. I've worked with sperm whales a lot in the past, and we had no idea that they feed on the bottom in that way. A sperm whale is a being of two worlds. It's in the shallows and then in very deep parts of the ocean, where we have no idea what's going on. That was something the series tried to do as a whole, to show animals experiencing their world, bringing the viewer in line with that.
Giles Badger: Ultimately, for us, it was about being as close to the animals as they would comfortably let us get, to see the world from their point of view. And the stories I heard of you, Dan, rolling around next to the sperm whale calf as the parents were down underneath feeding… That's why this story works so well, because you get to see the calf waiting and know that mom is down half a mile beneath the surface. And we get to tell through technology and through Dan's cinematography both sides of that story.
Dan, was this something that you were excited to get hands on with, or were you occasionally going, “Can we get somebody else to roll around with this giant animal?”
Dan Beecham: That's a good question. There's some great superlatives about sperm whales. They’re the largest tooth predator that exists on the planet these days. And I have dived with them in quite a number of parts of the world. There's something very sobering about diving with an animal that, if it chose to at any time, could cause you some harm. It absolutely could. But I guess we are not on its radar at all. But when you interact with one of these juvenile sperm whales, yeah, they're generally not with their parents, and they're getting to quite a bold age. They do absolutely interact with you. So I would be dropped in the water, and two things can happen. It could dive and completely ignore you, or it can come straight up to you, and stick with you for as long as it wants, or until mom comes back from the deep and calls the kid back and maybe scolds it for playing with a silly human.
It must have been a relief to get out of the water and film, like, a hummingbird after that.
Giles Badger: For me, as a producer, that was the joy of The Americas as a whole, and particularly the Caribbean episode. The range of animal characters that we can feature, from a hummingbird who's trying to get a mate to a hungry sperm whale calf that drinks a bathtub of milk a day. And I think that range is what we hope is particularly appealing.
The camera you used took two years of development and attached to the sperm whale with suction, right? That’s the only reason we now know how they hunt, however many thousand feet deep in the ocean.
Giles Badger: To build those tags, you are dealing with a huge amount of pressure. Something like a hundred times the pressure of the atmosphere. So you take a bottle of pop down there full of air, that will be crushed into nothing. A sperm whale, when it goes down, its ribs fold down. Its heart rate goes down to I think a beat a minute or something. If the animal's going through a huge amount of stress, we can't go there. So we develop the cameras that can, and every single part of that camera system had to deal with the pressure. And they need to attach to the sperm whale completely harmlessly. I've stuck that tag on myself. Then you've got the lighting system, the retrieval system, and just as importantly, you've got the data logger in there recording the scientific data, which we can then return to the scientists. What we want to do is find out new science that we can share with the world, and then that new science protects the animal.
Dan, what was it like for you to be involved in a project inventing cameras that are retrieving brand-new information?
Dan Beecham: My side of the work was very much the traditional diving. So we are using rebreathers, big cameras, big cinema cameras, and diving with the animals. And then we did a separate shoot using the onboard cameras. And that put extra pressure on me in ways because I was having to shoot for this footage that we weren't quite sure what it was gonna be when it comes back. The time when they've got their shoot scheduled, there could be a hurricane, or there could be no whales.
Or worse, it all works, and it's just boring.
Giles Badger: [Laughs] I can tell you for free that anything Dan shoots will not be remotely boring. The man is very talented, and to be pushing around one of those huge cameras in the water… One of the things we wanted to do was get split shots, above and below the water at the same time. And to do that, you need a big glass dome so that the meniscus sits relatively stable. But of course that means Dan has to push that giant bathtub through the water and come back with a story.
Was it a relief to get out of the water and work on dry land?
Dan Beecham: Anytime you are on the ocean and you're not being pushed back by weather, by a problem with the boat, a problem with the camera, those are all gifts. You're always fighting the days. There were a number of days when there weren't whales, even though we had planned the shoot many years in advance to be there at the best time of year. And that's the story more and more commonly these days. Everywhere you go in the world, on every shoot, the locals always say it wasn't like this in the past, that the weather was normally better this time of year. That's complicating wildlife shoots at the moment, changing weather and changing patterns in the ocean. And that's a relatively recent thing, just because weather is getting so weird around the world.
You also worked on the stunning sequence of sailfish hunting sardines in that episode. Was that a difficult one to nail down?
Dan Beecham: That was another example of the locals saying, “The weather's rougher than normal. There's normally more fish around.” So yeah, it’s getting tougher and tougher to deliver these big sequences.
Giles Badger: That was a shoot that we had to have two hits at. When you go out into the open ocean, you are essentially looking for a needle in a haystack. In the case of the sailfish, you're looking for frigatebirds feeding and the sailfish. We had to have technology that allowed us to keep up with the fastest fish in the sea. And we had to have luck. When you get that bit of luck, when you get the clear water and the animals are where you want them to be, you hoover up the footage. Those are incredibly special moments.
The Americas is now streaming on Peacock.