Cinebutterflies

Because of my true-to-nature approach, it was a logical progression to try out filming, which I was a bit familiar with already, having spent many hours on every summer holiday making Super-8 “feature films” with my children - spoofs of James Bond, and the Monty Python films.

So I started to work at the butterflies with a clockwork Bolex 16mm movie camera, with several fixed lenses on its turret, and this served as a good introduction to getting closer-up and framing the butterfly through the reflex lens of a movie camera. More encouragement, and the loss of that Bolex to a car-thief in 1968, meant that I moved on to an electric Bolex and trips to faraway places on holidays. I even started to edit the results into primitive 16mm films at home. “Butterflies of Mevagissey” was an early product. You can guess where we spent our family holidays!

But the tropics were the main attraction from early on. Headed off Columbia by a friend on the grounds it was both dangerous and difficult, I twice visited the Tambopata Reserve in the Amazon basin in eastern Peru, calling in also at Iquitos and Tingo Maria, - despite the presence nearby of the Shining Path guerrillas. Then Costa Rica, and a little later my first visit to Malaysia, as well as two return trips to India, and another to Bhutan.

But things changed in earnest in the 1990s. My wife, Pat, believed strongly that many more people than just ourselves would be glad to see the pictures, and urged me to get into production. Then by chance we paid a Christmas-time visit to Cuba, just after the collapse of the Russian Empire (so to speak) and at the beginning of Fidel Castro’s “situacion especial” (crisis period, we might as well call it). We made a good friend in the Coordinator for science in the Natural History Museum in Havana, Luis Roberto Hernandez, and through him and the filming in Cuba, met David Spencer Smith, then the Hope Professor at the University Museum in Oxford, author of the lovely handbook on the “Butterflies of the West Indies and South Florida”. He provided more encouragement as well as plenty of advice on scientific points, and started me off on an interest in the biogeography and evolution of butterflies, which runs now all through the films I have made.

Most films about butterflies deal exclusively with their life-cycle. One can see why; the transformation from caterpillar to adult butterfly, via some miraculous chemistry in the pupa, is surely one of the natural world’s most breathtaking events. Noone knows exactly how it happens; - and many would probably want it to remain that way.

But the fact is that there is a limit to the number of times you want to see it on film. Our view is that there are thousands of other extraordinary things in the butterfly world, which deserve equally well to be explored, examined and reflected on. We live in an age when the secrets of the earth’s history, in deep time, are just beginning to be unravelled, in the wake of our realisation that the continents were once, some 160 million years ago, all united in a single land-mass, Pangaea; and then split into two super-continents, Gondwanaland and Laurasia. The butterflies started their existence in those days, and the species we see today are the survivors of the revolving years, punctuated by catastrophic events, one at least of which wiped out (we now believe) over 90% of the species that had developed.

The advantage of being primarily a film-maker and only secondarily an entomologist, is that one takes more global view, and also a more historical one. As a result we travel more widely to different continents, and so see a much greater variety of genus and species, from many regions and habitats, than most professional entomologists.

Those who take butterflies home and breed them are, I am sure, engaged in a worthwhile pursuit; and they can certainly produce some startling pictures, still and movie, from their sparklingly-fresh emerging adult butterflies, filmed in artificial conditions in their conservatories or wherever. But for us the pleasure and satisfaction is in trying to show the natural world naturally.

We may turn out to be among the last generations to be able to see many of the tropical species that frequent the forests and National Parks today. As we see it, logging, tourist development and road building will sooner or later do away with most of the tropical forests we can still visit at the opening of the 21st century. Much of the rest will probably succumb to “accidents” like the 1997-8 Great Smog in Indonesia, Borneo and Malaysia, or the annual fires raging in northern Brazil. So there is a feeling of urgency in our ‘programme’; we would like to record as many as possible of our inheritance of wonderful creatures, in their original setting as far as possible, - before it may be too late.

Retirement has been the moment to seize for this. Time is not so short, now that there is no office calling one back from a too-short holiday. So Pat and I spent 2 months in the Tambopata Reserve in 1995 and then produced “Diversity in the Rainforest”, which shows 150 species never seen before on film, all taken in their original settings without the benefit of artificial lighting or any other aids, except patience and the accumulated experience of the past years of fieldwork and editing. This was the first time the video camera displaced the Bolex, and the last time the Bolex was taken along. The Canon EX1, using the Hi-8 format, proved its value, especially in the low light of the forest, and for manoeuvrability and tolerance of damp and difficult conditions it totally won me over to video, despite having to see the butterflies through a black-and white viewfinder. Even in Peru, where it meant sending batteries down the river every day for recharging, there being no electricity in Tambopata at that time!

That was a watershed - the transition from film to video. Now, 10 years later, analogue video is out, and we are well into the digital era. The EX1 seems like an antique, and Pat and I have been using Canon’s XL-1 and XM-1, both of which have proved themselves in humid hot forests as well as standing up to travelling to inaccessible locations. but as from 2006, the XL-1 will give way to the XL-2, a heavier but refined version of its predecessor. And back home. the days of visiting the local studio for off-line edits and on-line completions and mixes are also long gone. An Apple G5 with Final Cut Pro does all that we need, and DVD Studio Pro has overtaken iDVD as the medium for editing the discs. A long journey from 16mm, and the Steinbeck 5-plate editor!

Reaching the ‘market’ is another matter. So much good natural history is shown by the BBC that selling non-BBC material is a problem - even to the amateur natural history enthusiasts in Britain, who must be among the best-informed and active in the world - perhaps rivalled only by those in the USA. We hope that DVD will help sell more copies, and in any case we cannot hope to ‘break even’ with such niche material.

But a generous sponsor - himself a keen butterfly-watcher - has offered us some financial help to enable us to transfer all the VHS films onto DVD, and that Project will be a high priority for 2006-07. We should even be able to bring some of our unused early 16mm material to the screen - a nostalgic dip into the last century’s butterfly-filming!

Meanwhile the value of making and publishing the films does not diminish, in our view. Their value as a record, and as a stimulus to encourage people to find out more, can only grow as the years go by. We hope one day we can pass on the ‘business’ as a going concern to some young entrepreneur, to carry it forward when we are too old to do the fieldwork any longer.

There are still so many worlds to conquer.One day we hope we will come across a sponsor who will see that some young successor can take it over and fill in all the gaps we shall have left. Any suggestions?

John and Pat Banks
London 2006

1996 we devoted to accumulating enough material to offer a view of the West European, including British, species, as seen from my bio-geographical standpoint. The resulting film, “Puzzles of the Past” won an Award at the 1998 International Wildlife Film Festival in Missoula, Montana. In 1997, we spent 2 months in Malaysia to get the footage for “Wonders of the East”, which came out in 1998, and shows about 120 species from the Oriental Region, filmed all over Peninsular Malaysia and parts of Borneo.

That was followed by 3 weeks in Ghana in the autumn of 1997, and the film from that led to “Ghana’s Other Gold” which came out in 1999. Research and editing take about 6 months for each film, once the footage has been collected. Pictures and “story” have to be combined and support each other.

Then in 2000 we made another technical leap forward as Digital Video arrived, immediately displacing Hi-8 as the best camera format; the Mini-DV Canon XL-1 was an enormous advance on Hi-8, and though it had a few teething problems (and still has a few focus-retention limitations) it is ideal for fieldwork – sturdy and reliable in a way that the Hi-8 one never was. Equally the Canon XM-1 has proved itself an excellent second best, in the hands of Pat, my wife, whose camera skills are now acknowledged in the credits.

In the editing studio, linear editing using AVID software arrived, making easier the final stages of the edit process, and thereby a jump n the quality of the finished film. At that stage I still did the first (“off-line”) edit at home on VHS machines, but it was marvellous to be able to do the final edits on AID, as used by commercial film-makers, including the Bond films. You can’t get much more unnatural than Bond, but now we can all use the same technology, at our various levels of sophistication (and budget).

Then in 2001, the arrival of Final Cut Pro, at last, made possible the final leap to full editing at home, using an AppleMac 400mhz G3, with extra drives to give about 140GB of disk space. No more visits to the studio. No more offline editing with VHS. It took a year to master the problems of new hardware and software, and the film I was editing included an exceptional number of maps and motion sequences, which I produced on the G3. The result was the 6th in the series, “Palawan…Butterfly Paradise”, based on a 4-week trip to the Philippines in early 2001. It was the most elaborate of the series so far, and gratifyingly won 2 Awards, for scientific content and educational value, at the International Wildlife Film festival at Missoula, Montana in spring of 2002.

The techniques of Final Cut Pro being well and truly mastered, it took a mere 9 months to prepare the next film for copying. It was conceived at the end of a 4-week trip to the Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas in October 2001, with Pat and I being members of one of Jeff Glassberg’s “Butterflies Through Binoculars” groups. The hope was to have it ready for the October of 2002, when the annual Butterfly Festival takes place in the Valley (timed to coincide with the flowering of the blue Eupatorium bushes, which attract butterflies very effectively all over the Valley). Unfortunately the Valley end of the plan came unstuck but the film came out in 2003. It’s called “Butterflies in Close-up; in the Valley of the Lower Rio Grande” and it won a Factual Commentary Award at the 2003 International Wildlife Film festival at Missoula, Montana.

Meanwhile, the Mac G3 has given way to a Dual processor G5, with 2 250GB internal drives, and an external back-up 180GB drive. Final Cut Pro 4 has arrived and a lot of new edit opportunities and extra speed. What a long way we have come from ‘off-line” VHS editing!

2002 saw us in Kenya gathering material for the forthcoming film “The Butterflies of Kenya” which should be ready at the end of 2004. And more pictures of the butterflies of Hungary have been added in the past 3 years so that we should editing the film of those, for which our good friend, Zsolt Balint, Curator of Butterflies in the National Museum of Natural History in Budapest ahs a written a typically fascinating Commentary.

He has promised that we should tackle a film (or perhaps several) on the 5 main Butterfly Families, and their histories. So we have been in the American South West this year, adding to the collection of material with images from Arizona.

I suppose Evolution is partly what the films are all about. The miracle of natural selection and the beauty that the passage of time has created on earth are what inspire me. Discoveries of fossilised butterflies (this year of a complete Metalmark in Dominican amber) continue to add to our understanding of the origins of butterflies. DNA studies are enriching our views of the relationships between different genera. Our appreciation of the complexity and antiquity of the insect world grows quite dramatically every year.

At the same time, every year in the course of “development” we increase the risk of destroying more and more species. I would like the films help us move forward to a state where we understand and love our planet well enough to be willing to forgo some of the benefits of “development” in order to preserve more of its beauty. I think that has to be the way forward for us if we are to avoid catastrophe in many areas.

But in case that never happens, I would like to record as much as possible of the butterfly world as it exists in our lifetime - before I am too old to get close up to a butterfly.

Now that DVD has well and truly arrived in Europe, Cinebutterflies will be moving to issue or reissue its material in that format in the coming months….

If you want to place orders for the new material, please feel free to mail us on our Contact Us page.

Possible projects for the future include a film of the butterflies of Hungary, and a project on the Metalmark Family – the Riodinidae.

If you have suggestions of themes or countries you would like to see covered in a Cinebutterflies film, why not drop us a line? We would be happy to consider any proposal.

We hope in the course of 2006-7 to be able to put all our past material into digital form, and index it, so as to make it more accessible to ourselves, - and others – as a resource for the future.

Who knows when a disaster more total than the 2005 tsunami will make these detailed live records of the world’s butterflies of the late 20th century, and early 21st, a precious and unique resource?

Mailing address:

Cinebutterflies
28 Patshull Rd
London NW5 2JY

tel: +44 (0)207485 4071
email: johnbanks@cinebutterflies.com

The latest release in the John Banks’ ongoing series on the “Butterflies of the World” is now available.Click here to purchase

A delight to watch, and a fascinating insight into the diversity of the marvelous butterflies of Southern Texas - Sir David Attenborough

Filmed in 10 days in October, when the Valley butterfly population is at its greatest, it gives a comprehensive view of the remarkable diversity of species to be found in the Valley at the end of the summer months.

It’s the time when the Eupatorium flowers are blooming, and the Valley hosts its annual Butterfly Festival to make the most of the rush of butterflies nectaring at them.

You can see it all, without moving from your armchair. The film shows a quarter of the 303 species recorded in the Valley - out of 700 for the US altogether.

It’s a dream location for butterfly-watching, because it’s situated at the extreme northern edge of the Neotropical Region. That means that many butterflies that are found in Peru, Brazil or even Argentina can be seen there, with many others native to Central America.

The film brings them to life on the screen in close-up, all filmed in entirely natural conditions. No gimmickry here!