This delightful, fleet-footed film represents a labour of love both for its writer-director-producer-editor, Briton Ed Sayers, and his many, many collaborators who shot the film’s footage on Super 8 all over the world. Between them they’ve used decades-old rigs in newfangled setups with stock that, like several of the species seen here, would have gone extinct had it not been for the intervention of enthusiasts.
The brief from Sayers was simply to film nature, so we get shots of all manner of flora and fauna, ranging from coral reefs to high deserts, places populated by minute bugs all the way up to whales. Given Super 8 reels can only capture a few minutes’ worth of stock, this must have been a fiendishly complex puzzle in the editing room, so all credit to Sayers not just for his own lovely footage and clever vision but for his nimble collaging of the whole thing together.
It is a work embellished by a sweet, swoony original score by Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres and some dainty Foley work (sound design is by David McAuley) to lay in, for example, the sound of two ibex butting horns. Super 8 cameras don’t record sound, and in fact one of the contributions comes from a British woman who has lost her hearing, and now finds communing with nature in silence all the sweeter.
Indeed, the secret strength of the film is how it includes the film-makers themselves, underscoring the continuum between nature, animals and people, all one big mostly happy, sometimes murderous family across the globe. The mini self-portraits capture characters like the woman filming the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, another who loves snakes in the Mojave, a man who is so close to the white rhinos that he looks after he cuddles up to them in the sun, and a chap with Parkinson’s who reckons his devotion to filming wildlife is one of the reasons his health hasn’t deteriorated too badly yet.
Throughout, we get glimpses of Sayers himself filming seals along the Norfolk coast or lying down in the rain to shoot a snail in his garden, talking a bit about how his mother’s death shaped his feelings towards the project. Altogether, this forms the best kind of crowd-sourced art: a work that is intimate, quirky and intensely accessible.
• Super Nature is in UK and Irish cinemas from 4 September.
