“Our Planet”, Silverback Films’ major landmark series for Netflix in association with WWF and narrated by Sir David Attenborough is now live on Netflix, streaming simultaneously in 190 countries and available to over 140 million subscribers worldwide.
The series is wildlife based – each of the 8 episodes showcases the planet’s most precious species and fragile habitats, from tropical jungles to frozen worlds – but more than just a TV series, “Our Planet” focuses on the environmental challenges facing the planet, and the ability to reach a global audience with this message was a strong enticement for Alastair Fothergill and Keith Scholey to work with Netflix.
Alastair Fothergill, Director at Silverback, said: “Our Planet is our most ambitious endeavour to date, we hope it will inspire and delight hundreds of millions of people across the world so they can understand our planet, and the environmental threat it faces, as never before. The crew have ventured to all corners of the globe to capture breath taking natural history sequences and using the latest filming technology to bring these never-filmed-before moments into people’s homes. By launching on Netflix at the same time all over the world, this series will enable people to connect to and understand the shared responsibility we all have. We are genuinely all in this together.”
The HALO effect – leaving a legacy:
http://www.ourplanet.com/en
Partnered with WWF, Silverback and Netflix have created an online destination to accompany the series that will go beyond just showcasing the wonders of our planet to reveal what we must do now to ensure people and nature can thrive. OurPlanet.com is a resource and educational tool that will be part of a wider global project which will help inspire people around the world to discover why our natural world matters.
“60 minutes of documentary can only carry so much when there’s a much bigger and urgent story around the issues” says Keith Scholey, Company Director at Silverback. “No-one has dedicated so much resource to an online site supporting a landmark series of this type.”
The “Halo” is the term we at Silverback use for OurPlanet.com – a wealth of inspiring, exclusive content made especially to complement the Netflix series Our Planet. While the series showcases the great biodiversity that we have on Earth, the Halo’s job is to explain how we can keep it that way – how, as Sir David says, we can build a future in which both people and nature thrive. We have created a web hub, launched with the series, containing over 100 short films, and an interactive “explorable globe”, that together tell the grand story of how our species can learn to live sustainably, and get back in balance with our planet – the project that will pre-occupy humankind for the next eighty years.
It’s a big story, so we’ve decided to split it up into sections that match the episodes of the series – Fresh Water, Forests, High Seas etc. Each of these biomes motivates its own discussion on different ways by which we might change what we do to reduce our impact. For example, for Coastal Seas we talk about how we can fish smarter and improve the health of our coastal waters such that they produce more fish in the future than they do now. For Frozen Worlds, we explore the revolution underway to come off fossil fuels – a revolution that will not only bring atmospheric carbon back to manageable levels, it will also improve the health of city-dwellers worldwide. For Grasslands, we reveal that we can make space for the wild on land by reducing the meat content of our diets and using the latest farming knowledge and technology.
We released the first group of films in April when the series went live, and from May, each biome will have its own month, in which we release further films to keep the conversation about a better relationship between our species and our planet alive throughout 2019. The films themselves will also be released via social media channels, and will be viewable, for free, by everyone with broadband for years to come.
Colin Butfield, Executive Director of WWF-UK and Executive Producer of Our Planet, said: “We’re the first generation to know the full impact of what we’re doing to our planet, and the last that has the chance to do anything about it. We’re at a unique moment in our history where we have the chance to put things right and start on the path towards a better future. Our Planet will showcase the wonders of our world at the critical time when we need global action to protect it.”
Press reviews:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-47793459
https://www.radiotimes.com/news/on-demand/2019-04-08/our-planet-netflix-attenborough-walrus/