Photo gallery for New Filming Project

Filming will begin tomorrow on an exciting new documentary series about the Amboseli elephants and the work of the Amboseli Trust for Elephants. The award-winning production company, Mike Birkhead Associates, will take the lead in producing a 13-part series for Animal Planet and the European-based Off the Fence.

The films will follow the lives of individual elephants while at the same time covering the endeavours of the ATE staff to try to save the elephants and the ecosystem. Martyn Colbeck, who is by far the best cinematographer of elephants in the world, will be filming the elephants, and Chris Barker, who worked on the famous Animal Planet series, Meerkat Manor, will be covering the people.

Martyn first filmed the Amboseli elephants in 1989 for the BBC series, The Trials of Life. Over the next 18 years he made, with Cynthia Moss and ATE, three full-length films on the elephant Echo and her family, plus two others that featured the Amboseli elephants. He has also made many other prize-winning films on animals around the world.

The filming will take place over seven months and the series is scheduled to start broadcasting in January 2009.