In April 2008, Grizzly Creek Films executive producers Leslie M. Gaines, Mailande Becker Holland and Thomas Winston began documenting the grizzly bears of Yellowstone National Park for a one-hour special for the National Geographic Channel. On location, the crew paired the Panasonic AG-HPX500 P2 HD camcorder with a Fujinon HA42x13.5BERD lens, as well as a Panasonic AJ-HPX3000 P2 HD camcorder with a Fujinon HA13x4.5 wide-angle lens for special segments. Aerial footage was shot by Aerial Director of Photography Gary J. Kauffman of Omniscience High Definition Video, who used a gimbal-stabilized Sony HDC-F950 camera outfitted with a Fujinon HA42x9.7 lens.

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The special, Expedition Grizzly Featuring Casey Anderson, chronicles naturalist Casey Anderson’s yearlong odyssey to shed light on Yellowstone’s “island” population of about 600 grizzlies. Anderson is joined by his curious best friend Brutus, a 6-year-old, 800 lb. grizzly bear.

With a subject as difficult to locate and document as wild grizzly bears, lens selection was critical, according to producer/DP Winston. “The Yellowstone grizzlies are quick to retreat at the first sign of human intrusion, so we had to have the longest and sharpest lens available. The Fujinon 42x allowed us to shoot from a distance without affecting the behavior of the bears.”

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In order to simultaneously capture both the natural history of the Yellowstone grizzly and Anderson’s on-camera analysis and reactions, the crew devised a two-camera strategy that integrated dynamic handheld vérité footage of Anderson tracking and observing the bears with more traditional natural history footage of the grizzlies. A Panasonic AG-HVX200 was used for the footage of Anderson, while the HPX500 equipped with the Fujinon lens was used to capture the natural history footage. In order to maximize P2 card capacity in the field, the production was shot at 720/24pN.

For a two-week window late in the shoot, the production team added the HPX3000 with Fujinon HA13x4.5 wide-angle lens to shoot special video segments the crew dubbed “Brutus Breakouts.” The segments include up-close footage of Brutus, who has been raised by Anderson since birth and is therefore comfortable around people. Juxtaposed with stunning HD footage filmed in some of Yellowstone’s most treacherous, beautiful and remote terrain, the breakout segments allowed the filmmakers a safe way to capture grizzly bear behavior.

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“When we shot the Brutus Breakouts, we added the HPX3000 on a CamMate crane [operated by veteran CamMate operator Tony Haman] to the mix so we could have three cameras rolling, knowing that we wouldn’t have the benefit of multiple takes.”

In the field, footage was downloaded and backed up onto 1TB FireWire 800 drives from Maxx Digital. “Upon returning to our edit suite in Bozeman, all P2 offloads were permanently backed up to tape on a Quantum LTO-3 deck, and the footage from the drives was logged and transferred into Final Cut Pro 6 for the edit,” Winston notes. The color correction and final HD output were done at Digital Arts in New York. Colorist Axel Ericson used Apple’s Color software.