Latest news with #Secretsof
Forbes
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Secrets Of Great Salt Lake Brings Urgent Environmental Story To The Giant Screen
Secrets of the Great Salt Lake will showcase the remarkable story of the lake's formation and its ... More importance to the people and wildlife of Utah. Utah's Great Salt Lake is drying up, foretelling a dire future for residents of Salt Lake City and the surrounding region if something isn't done soon to reverse the lake's decline. An unprecedented coalition of state leaders, agencies, conservation organizations, foundations and private philanthropists have assembled to head off what some are warning could be an environmental disaster on a scale America hasn't seen since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. A key part of that effort is to make people across Utah and the globe aware of Great Salt Lake's importance and the urgent need to save it. After nearly two years in production, Secrets of Great Salt Lake is set for release in giant screen theaters worldwide, including a destination theater and interpretive center currently under construction at Utah's Antelope Island State Park located near Salt Lake City. It is estimated that Great Salt Lake has seen an 11-foot drop since the late 19th century. The 3-D film was produced by Denver-based Mission Partners Entertainment Group and is narrated by Mike Rowe with support from the Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation and wetlands conservation leader Ducks Unlimited. Toronto-based SK Films will handle distribution of the film to giant screen theaters worldwide in multiple languages, and Secrets was directed by Tyler Mifflin. The film is part of a broad communications and educational effort that includes a television series as well as short form content and curriculum that will be distributed to more than 10,000 US schools through the world's largest conservation education portal. A team of the world's best cinematographers have created an indelible portrait of one of North ... More America's most remarkable natural wonders. 'It's not just about creating a film,' says McGraw's President and CEO Charlie Potter, who also serves as one of the film's executive producers, 'it's about igniting a movement to save the lake.' Great Salt Lake once spanned 1,700-square miles but has dropped nearly 50 percent. Of nine saline lakes found in the American West, more than half have withered from 50 to 95 percent of their earliest recorded levels. None is more important than Great Salt Lake, and the struggle to save it is emblematic of the growing demand for water across the globe. The world's human population has nearly doubled since 1980 and with that growth has come exponential demand for water. For Great Salt Lake and all the people and wildlife that benefit from it, the clock is ticking. Narrator Mike Rowe has been named by Forbes as one of the Country's 10 Most Trustworthy Celebrities ... More multiple times. 'We see this as a chance to highlight the incredible effort underway to save an invaluable ecosystem,' says Antonietta Monteleone, CEO of Mission Partners. 'Our purpose is to empower conservation through powerful storytelling and engaging media.' Great Salt Lake and the businesses that depend on it are the economic engine sustaining much of Utah's health and wealth. Direct industries derived from the lake--including commercial fishing, mining and recreation--bring in more than $1 billion a year in net economic output. The lake also provides the key moisture behind the state's world-renowned billion-dollar ski industry and supports other forms of outdoor recreation, creating a massive economic driver for the state. Most importantly, Great Salt Lake makes life in much of Utah possible. With so much of the lakebed now exposed, its naturally occurring arsenic and mercury--two well-known carcinogens—are swept up in periodic dust storms that now befall the region. Artist's rendering of the giant screen theater being built on Utah's Antelope Island. Beyond the lake as a sustainable economic force, it is one of the most important migratory bird habitats found in the western United States. The lake is home to most of the wetlands found in Utah and is a federally managed bird refuge. The adjacent 74,000-acre Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge was founded in 1928 and is a key nesting and migratory bird stopover area for millions of ducks, geese, cranes, swans and myriad shorebirds that traverse the Pacific and Central flyways. The production team launches a drone equipped with an 8K camera over Great Salt Lake. 'Great Salt Lake is a uniquely beautiful place. It draws millions of people to Utah each year and is vital not only to tourism but also to our quality of life. It's critical to the environment, ecology and economy, not just in Utah but across the western U.S.,' says Joel Ferry, head of the state's Department of Natural Resources, the agency responsible for the film effort along with the associated destination theater and interpretive center that's set to open early 2026. 'We know we're on the clock,' says Potter, 'and the state is moving with extraordinary resolve to sustain the lake before it's too late.'
Forbes
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
What It Took To Film ‘Secrets Of The Penguins' In -40° Cold
Two chicks face to face, still between their parents' legs. Filming penguins is always a bit of a marvel. Filming them while enduring hurricane-force winds on a frozen shelf in Antarctica for nine months, with no sunlight and limited food variety? That's a different kind of mission—closer to something out of NASA than Nat Geo. With Secrets of the Penguins, National Geographic's newest installment in its Emmy-winning 'Secrets of' series, the line between survival and storytelling blurred like never before. Premiering April 20 on Nat Geo and streaming April 21 on Disney+ and Hulu, the three-part series is a visual triumph made possible by engineering grit, field science, and the kind of rugged tech innovation typically reserved for space exploration. Helmed by BAFTA- and Emmy-winning filmmaker Bertie Gregory and executive produced by James Cameron, the series takes audiences from the volcanic shores of the Galapagos to the endless blue-white sprawl of the Ekström Ice Shelf. But behind the stunning visuals are months of unforgiving darkness, unpredictable ice, and a production crew that had to work smarter than the elements to document behaviors never before seen on film. For filmmakers Pete McCowen and Helen Hobin, this wasn't just about capturing nature—it was about becoming part of it. I sat down with the two of them--part of the team that overwintered on the Ekström Ice Shelf alongside a colony of 20,000 emperor penguins, enduring 274 days of isolation, including 65 consecutive days without sunlight--to talk about the experience. 'It was more, it was kind of depressive—not like depressive making sad, although there was an element,' McCowen said. 'It was just like… yeah, well, for me, I was tired a lot of the time. You sleep longer, and still really tired. So just not having the sun… there was a lethargy that was kind of with it.' The absence of light didn't just take a toll on morale—it created enormous challenges for cinematography. In the polar night, penguins go quiet, and everything slows down. The only sounds? The wind, and the scraping of claws against ice. 'Before the polar night, the penguins are really vocal,' Hobin said. 'Then when they go into the polar night, and the females leave to feed, and it's just the males with their eggs, it's just quiet… that was just a strange thing that I think, unless you're there, you can't necessarily appreciate.' Capturing the emotional stillness of a penguin colony in eternal darkness required a meticulous approach to equipment design. Traditional rigs wouldn't survive the cold—or the sheer physical brutality of the conditions. 'We had the camera body, the RED and then the CN20 long lens rigged fully together with all the cables set out… because if you try and touch a cable in the cold, it's very prone to snapping,' Hobin explained. 'We even went to using hot water bottles in cases for the batteries to keep them warm.' That's not metaphorical. The team literally insulated their gear with hot water bottles and created laser-cut foam inserts for their snowmobiles to keep camera setups intact and ready to shoot instantly. Every moment spent fumbling with gear in those temperatures came at a cost—to fingers, batteries, and hard drives alike. Seeing a single penguin in a zoo is cute. Seeing 20,000 of them in the wild, in silence, under a star-splattered sky, is a different experience entirely according to Pete and Helen. 'It seems like a kind of a fantasy landscape,' Hobin said. 'With these amazing creatures out in the middle of nowhere… I don't think I got over it by the time we left.' But the grandeur was a challenge in itself. 'You're blown away by the spectacle of all of it,' McCowen added. 'But one of the differences is, then how to film that that gives a sense of it to the audience, and also how to pick out one bit of behavior… and then you get a whole lot of photo-bombing penguins as well that just stand right in front of you.' Even with the best gear and intentions, the ice shelf had the final say. The production team followed strict protocols: satellite imagery, ice thickness drills, real-time weather updates, and a station chief with veto power. Still, nature had its surprises. 'One particular day we went out and a storm came in a bit earlier than we expected… and the drive back was like, 'Okay, where's the next marker?'' McCowen recalled. 'When we got back to the station, I was really, really glad to see Neumayer Station, because it was quite sobering how easy it would have been to get lost.' There were moments of levity too—Hobin admitted to singing loudly into the wind to calm her nerves during one especially harrowing ride through whiteout conditions. 'Because it was quite a tense situation finding our way back home again,' she said, 'I was the whole way home singing to myself out loud—which is a horror for anyone that's ever heard it.' Despite the hardships—or perhaps because of them—the footage achieved is nothing short of astonishing. From chicks leaping off cliffs to rare hybrids known as 'rockaronis,' Secrets of the Penguins captured evolution in motion. And thanks to strategic framing and platform-conscious editing, the series has already made its mark across digital platforms, with over 74 million TikTok views and counting. The audience reach wasn't just incidental—it was engineered. With visuals optimized for vertical and cinematic presentation, and data tagging for potential AI analysis, this is tech-enabled storytelling at its most forward-looking. In many ways, Secrets of the Penguins is less about the cold and more about the convergence of biology, filmmaking, resilience, and innovation. As climate change accelerates and ecosystems evolve faster than our ability to study them, series like this go beyond entertainment to provide ecological documentation, scientific collaboration, and maybe even emotional education. McCowen said, 'When it gets too cold, we retreat back to the station… and these little chicks… they're out there all the time.' And so were the filmmakers—quietly rewriting the rules of what tech, teamwork, and tenacity can accomplish at the end of the world.
Sky News
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Sky News
Is Starmer's voice coach his Carole Caplin?
Why you can trust Sky News Is history repeating itself in the row over Sir Keir Starmer's voice coach Leonie Mellinger? After all, she is not the first person who has coached a prime minister to be caught in political controversy. After the Tories demanded a police probe, are there echoes of the row over Tony and Cherie Blair's "lifestyle coach" Carole Caplin? At Prime Minister's Questions, Sir Keir defended meeting Ms Mellinger during lockdown in 2020, claiming "I was working" while the Tories were "partying". The Conservatives then stepped up their attacks, announcing that leader Kemi Badenoch wants a police investigation into whether laws were broken. That is not going to happen, however. The Metropolitan Police said that because the alleged offence was more than three years ago, no action will be taken. But have we been here before with a political row about a Labour prime minister receiving specialist coaching? In the 1990s, before and after he became PM, Ms Caplin coached Sir Tony and wife Cherie, advising him on fitness and his wife on style. And so, as the Tories continue attempting to embarrass Sir Keir over "Voice Coach Gate", are there similarities between his voice coach and Ms Caplin? 10:10 It has been suggested, for instance, that both have a racy past. Now 65, Ms Mellinger, an actress, was once married to the star of the "Confessions…" movies, Robin Asquith. In her acting career, she appeared in Channel 4's political comedy The New Statesman as the leather-clad wife of a Conservative MP. She also appeared in the 1981 film of the bleak Doris Lessing novel Memoirs Of A Survivor, which also starred Nigel Hawthorne, later star of TV's Yes Minister. Carole Caplin, a former dancer who once dated Gary Numan and Adam Ant, hit the headlines in 1994 when The Sun published topless photos of her under the headline "Secrets of Blairs' Girl Friday". To make matters worse, it happened at the very moment the then Labour leader, elected earlier in 1994, was celebrating a successful party conference speech. But much worse was to follow. In 2002 it emerged that Ms Caplin's boyfriend, Australian Peter Foster, was a conman with a conviction for conspiring to supply a weight-loss drink that turned out to be tea. The problem was that Foster had helped Cherie Blair buy two flats in Bristol when their eldest son Euan was at university there. The result was one of the biggest controversies of Sir Tony's premiership. More than 20 years later, it is now Sir Keir's turn to face questions about his own coaching. In the Commons, Tory MP Gagan Mohindra challenged the PM: "Can he repeat his assurances that all rules were followed while the country was in tier 4 lockdown in December 2020, not just by him but his team as well, but also his voice coach Leonie Mellinger?" Though he did not repeat the claim he made in Brussels on Monday that no rules were broken, a furious Sir Keir hit back: "In December 2020, I was in my office working on the expected Brexit deal. "With my team we had to analyse the deal as it came in at speed, prepare and deliver a live statement at speed on one of the most important issues for our country in recent years. That's what I was doing. "What were they doing? Suitcases of food into Downing Street, partying and fighting, vomiting up the walls, leaving the cleaner to remove red wine stains. That's the difference: I was working, they were partying." But a spokesman for the Tory leader responded: "The key question here is: is a voice coach a key worker who can travel from Tier 4 to Tier 3 during lockdown? "It doesn't matter if you're part of a core team, that is the question. Now, Keir Starmer said that lawmakers can't be lawbreakers. It is almost unimaginable to disagree that that was a clear breach of the COVID rules." And asked if Mrs Badenoch thought police should investigate, he said: "Yes, she does." Some years after the Carole Caplin controversy, Sir Tony wrote in his memoirs that she was "a good friend and reliable confidant" for his wife, but he should have acknowledged at the beginning that she was working for them. And as for Sir Keir, the threat of a police investigation into allegations of breaking lockdown rules did not last long. "We can confirm we have received a report," said a Met Police spokesperson. "The specific legislation that would be used by police forces dealing with offences during COVID has a three-year deadline for initiating proceedings.
