BIG CATS 24/7 | ©2024 PBS

The six-part docuseries BIG CATS 24/7 launches on PBS NATURE on Wednesday, September 18. The series takes advantage of new technology to show three species of African big cats – lions, leopards and cheetahs – in their activities by night as well as by day.

During PBS’s portion of the summer Television Critics Association (TCA) press tour in Pasadena, BIG CATS 24/7 producer/director Rowan Crawford sits down to discuss this deep dive into mega felines. Some of Crawford’s other credits include THE ZOO, COAST, NATURAL WORLD, and DOGS IN THE WILD.

Crawford is a staff series producer with BBC Studios Natural History Unit. She explains she was out on maternity leave when she was approached about BIG CATS 24/7 in late 2022.

“The executive producer, Roger Webb and co-executive producer Tom Jarvis were both people that I had worked with previously on NATURAL WORLD, which was a long-running strand in the U.K. We used to make quite a lot of content with WNET, so we partnered with them.

“When this project came to life, it had been in the minds of our department for a long time, that we might want to revisit the old BIG CAT DIARY, which was a really successful series for the BBC in the ‘90s and ‘00s. With the rise of heritage brands and titles, there was a consideration as to whether we could revisit that.

“And so, the development team and Roger and Tom were involved in deciding what would we do with it for a modern audience, how could we make it more contemporary, how could we make it new, and how could we give it a new identity. But we didn’t really know how we were going to make it.”

Part of the spark for the new series was the opportunity to work with work with wildlife cinematographer Brad Bestelink. “He had been tied up with another production company for a long time, another production company, and he was looking to collaborate with new people, and we were blown away by his location and his team. And so, we thought, ‘This is a great place to try something new.’”

Still, Crawford says, “When I joined the team in early ’23, we hadn’t really settled on a cast, and we hadn’t really decided the series’ direction, so that was my task when I came in.”

By “cast,” is Crawford referring to the wildlife cinematographers who we see in their filming activities in BIG CATS 24/7, or is she referring to the animals themselves?

Crawford laughs. “I’m referring to the people, but also the cats. We knew from Brad some of the cats that we would want to follow, because he was already seeing and had relationships with some of those cats. So, we had a really great in to start with.”

When she speaks of Bestelink having relationships with the cats, Crawford confirms that she is talking about individual animals. “The priority of our series was to find individual cats that we could follow for long periods of time. One of the things that sets our series apart from other natural history content out there is that it’s quite bingeable. We have closed episodic narratives, but we also have long digital storytelling [BIG CATS UNLEASHED, available on the PBS Terra YT channel and on PBS-owned platforms] across the series, following individual cat stories across six hours, meaning that, as a viewer, you can keep watching more.

“It’s not a classic sequence-based natural history series, so we really wanted to find individual cats that we could really get to know, and invest in, that the audience could invest in, and that we could develop and bring out their characters through the voice of our human storytellers.”

The narrator for BIG CATS 24/7 is Nigerian-born, U.K.-based actor Adetomiwa “Tomiwa” Edun. “He is a fantastic and talented young actor who also has an incredible subtlety to his voice,” Crawford notes. “We chose him because he has a passion for African wildlife. He spent quite a bit of time in Botswana and the Delta when he was younger, so he felt like he had a real connection to what we were doing.

“But we also picked him because we wanted somebody who wasn’t necessarily that well-known. Our ensemble cast of onscreen crew carry the narratives. They’re the primary storytellers, and we wanted Tomiwa to come in and move narratives along, inform things that were missing, but be part of the gang, part of the fabric of the show, not to feel like a voice of God.”

Each of the three main cat species is “quite distinct,” Crawford observes. “Lions are the only social big cats. Leopards and cheetahs tend to be solitary. We may show that to be not the case all the time, which is an interesting bit of behavior that we delve further into as you watch the series.

“But the three are distinct in the way they behave, and they are very different characters. I think that was what attracted us to this location, but also to the concept of the show, to have all three species in one place. Their territories cross over each other, living side by side, interacting with each other sometimes for better or worse.”

Location is of great importance in BIG CATS 24/7. “What’s really exciting for us as program makers is, the Okavango Delta in Botswana is a very wild place. It’s considered one of Africa’s last wildernesses, right in the heart of the Kalahari Desert, and this annual flood that comes through that creates one of the largest inland wetlands in the world, draws life in from all around, and makes a complete paradise, an oasis of life, which meant that we could really capture wild cats’ behavior with very little interruption from tourists. Although there is a small tourist footprint, it’s a very temporal landscape, so it’s not like the Maasai Mara or the Serengeti, where you have tens of thousands of tourists going every year, and you have to fight to get access to the animals you want to film.

“We were able to be alone in the bush with these cats, which was phenomenally exciting, but also quite daunting, because we didn’t know them like we know them in the Serengeti or in the Maasai Mara, where they’re studied or they’re observed all the time by trackers. We were really going in there relying on Brad’s knowledge, and then relying on the skill set of that team, that cast of onscreen people, to find the cats we could film.”

How aware of the cats of being observed and filmed? “Some of the cats that Brad knew, for example, Kuda the leopard, who he’s known since she was a cub, she would sometimes come right up to the truck, have a look and then pass by. The dominant pride male lions, Madumo and Big Toe, the first time I was there, came right up past our truck, and they looked at us in a very passive way. They knew we were there, but they weren’t interested in us.

“We use long-lens technology, we can shoot from a very far distance. Our interest is wild behavior, so our priority is not to disturb the cats. If they come to us, and they show interest in us, that’s fine, it’s on their terms, but from a filming perspective, and something we’re very proud of, the BBC Natural History Unit is our field craft and working with the best in the business to be respectful of the animals, and to be allowed the space to live their lives uninterrupted by us. And that’s what we set out to do in the show, and what we’ve done.”

So, there is nothing done to encourage the cats to come toward camera, such as setting out food?

Crawford is emphatic. “Absolutely not. We have no interaction with the cats whatsoever. And we don’t need to do something like that. We have, as I say, long-lens cameras. Likewise, our thermal technology is second to none. It’s military-grade. We have no need to bring them closer to us. And I think what is important to recognize is that, if you want to be successful in natural history filmmaking, you want to arrive and leave as if you were never there. You don’t want to change or interrupt any of their behavior.”

Filming the cats at night was always part of the show’s concept, Crawford relates. “The 24/7 element was a really big driver in how we approached the show. The evolution of nighttime filming technology has been radical in the last twenty years, and it has really opened up the opportunity to film wildlife in a different way. So, for us, it was a really exciting opportunity to follow individual cats in an extraordinary place, and now peel the layers back on what they do after dark, because historically, that wasn’t possible until this technology came along.”

Does each cinematographer specialize in a particular species and/or environment?

“I think they overlap to a degree. We have no one single storyteller. What we’ve tried to do is pair up, to a degree, the people with the right expertise with the right species. So, Gordon Buchanan and Vianet Djenguet follow the lions in Series 1; that’s their species. However, they can pick up leopard or cheetah if they come across them, because they’re out there, and we’re following the action as it happens.

“Gordon has twenty, thirty years’ experience as a wildlife cinematographer, and a huge amount of that is with lions. So, it makes sense that he follows lions. Vianet has a huge amount of experience filming social animals – elephants, gorillas – it makes sense to have him follow the social cats.

“We paired Anna Dimitriadis up with Greg Hartman. She also worked with Reatile ‘Rea’ Schulte to Brinke to capture the cheetah content. [Dimitriadis] hadn’t filmed cheetah, but she’s got a real can-do attitude and is a really all-rounder, so we gave her quite a tough task. Cheetah were the hardest to find, and we felt she was a really good fit. She regularly did night shifts for us. We’d pick up lions, so she would pick up the lion narratives.

“And then we had Brad Bestelink and Tristen Woodward filming the leopard. They are leopard aficionados. Brad’s been in the bush since he was four days old. His field tracking skills are phenomenal. So, he very much focused on leopard, but Brad can find you any cat, lion, leopard or cheetah.”

As a director, Crawford is often out in the bush with her crew. “I go out at the beginning of each filming block for about three to four weeks to set everybody up, to embed everybody in, and to get it going, and then I leave the team to finish up for the last few weeks, which they’re very capable of doing. They’re a great bunch of people, and they’re incredibly professional at what they do.

“But it is fantastic being able to spend time out there. It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been to – the sights, the smells, the grasses. It’s a magical place, and it feels like winning the lottery when you’re out there.”

Although Crawford is the director, she allows the BIG CATS 24/7 cinematographers “a degree of autonomy, because they are experienced professionals. In natural history filmmaking, as a whole, often [the cinematographers] work on their own on assignment. They know what their target is, it may be a specific species, and they might be given a brief of what the sequence is, and then they build it.

“We wanted to control that to a degree, in terms of following individual cat stories, more from an editorial point of view than a visual perspective. So, my role initially was to think about how we visually would capture the whole package. The cinematographers are capturing this premium, high-quality, ‘blue chip,’ as we would call it, film of the animals, but we also need to capture footage of them working. So, each of those cinematographers was accompanied by a self-shooting producer, who filmed the action as it happened.

“So, a big part of my role at the beginning was figuring out physically how we would do that, and setting the style for that. And then, the next part of that was thinking, ‘Okay, once we’ve found the cat characters we want to tell the stories about, we need to ensure our cinematographers are telling those stories.’ But we’re also capturing the stories of the cinematographers.

“So, that’s our double-layered process of a film within a film. I give the cinematographers direction when I’m there, and then I have another senior producer who oversees when I’m not there. But we don’t pick their shots. They pick the shots, and they decide what they’re going to shoot. We give them direction if we want the sequence to be about a specific cat, or if we want it to be about a specific bit of behavior, and then they capture the shots, and we build that in the edit later.”

Do other species besides lions, leopards and cheetahs show up in BIG CATS 24/7?

“If other species cross into the prism of our cats’ lives, if the cats are affected by elephants or hyenas somehow, we would film them. Or if they affect the human characters. In Episode 1, we have an elephant come into camp, and then eventually it outstays its welcome and we have to ask it to leave. So, if they come into our world, either the world of the cats or the humans, then we would film them.”

However, “The point of the show is the cats. Of course, the Okavango Delta is bursting with life. So, when we look at the place and the environment, then we will often see and show other species, but that is more of a breather, and a chance to observe, rather than follow specific behavior.”

Were there any behaviors or incidents that surprised Crawford?

“There were lots. The fantastic ability to film into the night opened up a world that we hadn’t really seen. Now, there are other series out there that do film at night, and that we’ve seen a great deal of an evolution of that over the last five, ten years, as we’ve discussed. I think what’s so fantastic about this show is following those individual characters, and being able to stick with them. In the past, where you may have had to just wrap it up because it’s gotten dark, and you need to pull out if you don’t have the technology, we’re not limited to that.

“So, we were able to capture things like, in Episode 1, our lions fishing for catfish. We’ve never filmed that before. This is a particularly desperate time, the flood was still to arrive, so it was incredibly dry. It was part of our co-op of females, they had six cubs at that time between them, and they were incredibly hungry, and we saw them failing to catch anything substantial for days. It was becoming quite difficult to get food, because when the flood hasn’t arrived, a lot of the herbivores that the lions rely on will look for water elsewhere.

“And on one of these nighttime forays, with Gordon following the lions, one of them had become so desperate, she considered eating one of the catfish, which we were able to film with the thermal imaging camera.”

It’s not that a lion eating a catfish is normally out of the question, Crawford explains, but “the waterholes had almost completely dried up. So, this catfish was in almost no water. This catfish was in mud, basically, and hippo feces, flopping around. We found the lioness fishing out the catfish, and thinking about eating it, which she quite sensibly didn’t.

“And it was really desperate, and quite tragic. The upside was that we later were able to see [the lions] succeed, and that, again, is so gratifying to be able to follow, day, night, day, and see how that journey evolves.”

What would Crawford most like audiences to get out of BIG CATS 24/7?

“I would like people to watch the show and be, first and foremost, amazed by the extraordinary depth of big cat life. These animals are fierce predators, but they’re also mothers and troublesome teenagers and big brothers and big sisters to each other. And I would love people to understand that there’s far more to them than just fierce predators.

“Second to that, I would like people to engage with big cats, and reinvigorate passion for them. Because they are in decline globally. Lion populations in some parts of Africa have declined by sixty percent. There are only 7,000 cheetahs left in the wild, and all three of the species we feature are listed as vulnerable on the IUCN [International Union for Conservation of Nature] Red List. So, what I really hope is that people will connect with these cats.”

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Article: PBS NATURE: BIG CATS 24/7:  Producer and director Rowan Crawford on new docuseries – Exclusive Interview 

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