Nature

- When I first moved to San Diego, it was everything I imagined it to be.

It was beautiful.

The weather was perfect, the beaches were incredible.

I fell in love with this place as I got to know it a little bit.

One of the things that I wasn't prepared for, and that absolutely blew me away, was that everywhere I looked, there was wildlife.

I think one of the most surprising things about San Diego is that it is the most biodiverse place in all of America.

There's no place in the United States that you can go and find more species of plants and animals than right here in San Diego County.

And the reason why that's the case is because there's so many different kinds of habitats packed into a really small area.

- As you move across San Diego County, you find all these different ecosystems starting from the Pacific Ocean, the beaches, coastal scrub, canyons and oak woodlands and chaparral, and then all the way up to mountains that are more than 6,000 feet tall and then this huge desert in the east.

The fact that there are still today more species here in San Diego County than anywhere else in the continental US is I think even more impressive when you look at just how we've reshaped the landscape.

- About a century ago, this whole place looked very different.

In a very short period of time, humans put highways throughout the canyons.

We dammed up all of San Diego's rivers and we utterly blanketed the entire landscape.

With houses, with schools, with golf courses, it's hard to look anywhere and see a big patch of natural habitat.

But I think if you start looking really closely, you'll see wildlife absolutely everywhere.

- I love shows like Planet Earth, but I think in a lot of ways they show a version of nature that's unrealistic.

Most people will never see these truly wild uninhabited landscapes if they even exist anymore.

And so our goal with this film was to take a more pragmatic approach and tell a real story about wild animals figuring it out.

In our world, - There are a lot of species featured in San Diego, America's wildest city.

These are animals that you can see every day.

If you want to, if you want to see ground squirrels, you can go to the park.

If you want to see hummingbirds, Anna's hummingbird, Costa's hummingbird, a Allen's hummingbird.

You can also go to the park if you wanna see GREs, you can't miss 'em at Lake Hodges.

If you wanna see whales, the migration is visible from the coast.

We wanted to highlight how accessible San Diego's nature is.

- I think finding wildlife in San Diego is actually the easy part.

Capturing everything on film is a totally different story.

It actually took us almost two years to capture all the sequences in this film.

I think we used about a dozen different cameras, including several different drones.

We used a brand new high speed camera called the freely ember to shoot super slow motion.

And we also created some pretty complicated camera support and motion control rigs to capture behavior in what I think are some pretty unique ways.

- A lot of people think that San Diego doesn't have seasons, that things are just the same all year round.

That's totally not the case.

We have some amazing, amazing seasonal events that happen here.

Our film also has a lot of these events that sort of happen at nighttime or happen during the daytime.

So we're constantly transitioning across seasons and from day to night and from night to day.

And we wanted to figure out a unique way to do that.

DJI just came out with this new technology.

It's a, it's an RTK unit that connects with our drones and allows us to fly high precision flights multiple times a day or across many different seasons.

And I think it allowed us to create some really unique transitions from, from day to night, from night to day, and then across seasons showing, for example, flowers blooming in the desert, it being super barren, and then all of a sudden flowers erupting in the desert or going to a place like Lake Hodges and showing how when they decided to drain out water, the reservoir goes from being very full to the water, completely disappearing.

- You can't make a film like this without a lot of advice to make sure that the Grebe sequences really sang.

We worked with a local expert named Brian Caldwell.

Brian knows Grebes better than just about anybody else.

He was able to help us anticipate and capture the behaviors that we needed in order to tell this story.

Whether that was in his boat filming from a gimbal that was hanging from a, a motorized arm, or whether that was just hiking along the perimeter of the lake and wad in, in order to film Greeks building nests.

- Roy Toft is a San Diego who's also one of the best wildlife photographers in the world.

He started working on this project called Wild Ramona a couple of years ago where he started using camera traps to photograph really elusive wildlife just in his backyard.

And he was capturing all this amazing photography.

And when we started working on this project, we reached out to him 'cause we really had to include it in our story.

One of the hardest things about this show was working on the camera traps.

I'd never really done camera trapping before.

Normal camera trapping with photography is very difficult, but once you turn it into video, it gets exponentially harder.

First, just figuring out the, the technical difficulties.

Getting all the cameras to trigger with beams and sensors was very difficult.

And you'd go out for weeks and weeks and set them up, reset them up.

The trigger would go, you wouldn't get any animals moving through.

One camera would go off, but for some reason the other cameras wouldn't go off.

It was just nightmare after nightmare headache after headache.

You put all this effort into it hoping that something will happen.

And I, I do remember going up there and opening up the camera and just when you see that bobcat walk through and start to drink up some water and then you see a baby bobcat walk through and start to do the same thing, I think those are those moments that make the hard work worth it.

Everything about filming the grens was very challenging.

It's an event that's happening at night.

It's dark, so there's no light at all.

There's a huge amount of moisture in the air.

It's very short period of time.

There's nowhere you can film it really without getting, getting, being, being at risk of being hit by a wave.

- Wait, the camera popped off the char.

You got it.

You got it.

Making the gron run scene definitely exacted the highest toll in terms of cameras damaged, deer destroyed pieces of equipment rested.

- I think David destroyed more equipment than anyone else, but it was worth - It.

We worked with Karen Martin, who's a biologist at Pepperdine University, to understand sort of the biology of the grandon eggs and kind of be able to predict what the eggs were gonna do and then to actually film them.

We created these tiny bespoke aquariums using microscope slides and then used little pipettes to simulate the wave action, kind of get the water moving.

- Anybody can go to any park in San Diego and basically observe almost all the things that we filmed with the squirrels above ground.

But it's very challenging to understand what happens below ground, which is where the squirrels spend a ton of their time.

David teamed up with a, another talented filmmaker named Alex to create these really complicated underground sets.

Then they spent basically months collaborating with the Humane Society to film these really remarkable underground scenes where you can sort of see the squirrels behaving underground.

I think from a perspective that that has not been filmed before, - It's always a little surreal filming wildlife in an urban environment.

You know, people stop you and they ask if you're filming a music video, and then you tell them you're shooting a nature documentary.

And a lot of them just act confused.

And then when you tell them that they live in, or you know, maybe they're visiting one of the most biodiverse places in the us, oftentimes they, they just don't believe it.

The flip side of that though is that almost everybody has a cool story to tell you about their experience with wildlife.

So it really is a part of everyone's life here.

I - Think, you know, I think if you're gonna go on vacation in the Amazon and you see like a macaw that feels like wildlife, like you're seeing an animal in a forest.

And I think that there's something about being in a city that when you see that ground squirrel and it's just like an everyday part of your life, or you see that crow or you see that greve, it just doesn't quite feel like wildlife to us.

It couldn't be further from the truth.

Like these are animals fighting for their lives and adapting to a world that we have forced them into.

And I think some of the most interesting things that are happening in nature are happening sort of right here in front of us.

- I remember as a kid watching natural history films and thinking nature is incredible.

It's so beautiful and it's also somewhere else.

My hope is that the next generation of kindergartners that watches this natural history film is gonna see something that they can connect with, especially for folks who are local to San Diego, that encourages them to think like, wow, like nature is beautiful and it's also here - For better or for worse.

I think San Diego is what more and more of the planet is gonna start to look like, you know, a human dominated landscape.

And it turns out that it's still a place where a lot of plants and animals can and do make a living.

And I think we have the power to keep it that way.