Chapter 19 - The Future of the Genre

Summary

Introduction

This chapter tries to use the history of the past half century of wildlife documentary in Southern Africa to predict what the future of the genre is likely to be – in Southern Africa and more widely. Looking back at Christopher Parsons’ book on how to make wildlife documentary, published half a century ago, suggests some of the ways in which rapid technological developments can change a field drastically, but also suggests some likely continuities (Parsons 1971).

Is the Golden Age Gone?

The fragmentation of television markets and the growth of social media have put considerable pressure on a traditional model in which leading broadcasters could afford to fund leading filmmakers for a considerable time in the field to enable them to make authentic films. Dereck Joubert, for one, is pessimistic about a trend to quantity rather than quality and looks at the flood of digital images and rise of social media with some trepidation:

I have long been worried and said as much in a forum in Durban about 15 years ago […] that South Africa and its filmmakers are in danger of becoming the Chinese knockoffs (we are used to seeing in clothing etc) of the natural history film industry. At the time everyone looked at me blankly, but I knew it would happen and it has. The budgets just prior to this that I was achieving were between $750K to $1M per hour. With the emergence of Nat Geo WILD and Animal Planet and the lust for hours, in combination with a hunger of local filmmakers ready to supply something, anything, just to get in, the budgets tumbled where many today are trying to do films for $75K an hour, 10% of what was around ten years before. Quantity v Quality. (E-mail, 14 June 2021)

We are back again with Carol Hughes’s analogy of the hand-knitted, perhaps designer, garment compared to the mass-produced copies. But the change in wildlife film production norms is part of a larger television industry shift with declining audiences for classic television platforms reducing advertising revenue and funding for projects, new digital technologies reducing production costs and a move to social media and new platforms.