By Charlotte Mountford
Three billion years ago the continents of Africa and South America ripped apart and Mount Roraima was formed. At 9,200 feet, the table mountain is one of the oldest places on earth. For years it was impenetrable, shrouded by cloud on the borders of Venezuela, Guyana and Brazil.
For 300 years man attempted to scale Roraima. Scientists believed it to be a place where time stood still and strange, dinosaur-like species continued to exist, bypassed by the evolution that took place below them. The locals call it the lair of prehistoric spirits and terrifying beasts, where sightings of flying Pterodactyl, violent ape-men and giant snakes are common.
Arthur Conan Doyle was inspired to write his 1912 novel The Lost World by the strange findings of explorers Im Thurn and Harry Perkins, who in 1884 became the first men to successfully scale Roraima. Conan Doyle’s novel, in turn, inspired works ranging from the original 1925 dinosaur movie of the same name to King Kong in 1933, and eventually Spielburg’s Jurrasic Park.
Awed by this legacy, more than 100 years after Thurn and Perkins a team of explorers set out to hunt and document the true secrets of the ancient mountain. Theirs is a story about what really lies above, and lurks beneath, the real lost world of Roraima.
In The Real Lost World award winning Producer
and Director Peter Von Puttkamer and his team of experts make the arduous
journey with 41 native porters carrying food and 600 kg of film equipment. They
crossed jungle, swamp and river, followed by a three-day hike across La Gran
Sabana to the mountain base, finally climbing the steep cliff band to the top
.
Produced for The Discovery Channel and filmed in HDTV, many of the cast and crew are from British Columbia: Director and Producers Peter and Sheera Von Puttkamer are from West Vancouver; Director of Photography and A-cam operator Glenn Taylor hails from North Vancouver; 2nd camera operator Nash Stevanovic is from Vancouver; and Rick West, North America’s leading spider expert, comes from Victoria.
As well, two of the cast are from Whistler: Seath Heald, snake expert and owner of Whistler Outback Adventures, and Andy Dittrich, key grip and photographer. Andy is pictured here with an 18-foot anaconda, his personal favourite of the many dangerous species the team interacted with along the way.
Akanan tour guide Juan-Carlos tells of the bullet ant; its bite, like a gun shot, will cause such excruciating pain a person will attempt to cut off their own blighted limb to stop the agony, before slipping into a fatal coma. The native people flee the area if one bullet ant is sighted.
Heald says the most deadly of snakes, the Fer De Lance: if the bite doesn’t kill you your limb turns black and must be amputated. There is no known cure.
There are also tarantulas the size of breakfast plates and 23-foot long crocodiles. Travelling on foot in such an environment demands great endurance. With fear of agonising death-by-exotic-creature ever present in the minds of the cast, they also had to exercise the self discipline to not itch the countless stings and bites from mosquitoes and fire ants. As Andy points out, skin doesn’t heal in 98 per cent humidity.
Once the team had scaled the craggy citadel they descended far into the fourth largest quartzite cave system in the world, which was only discovered by a Czech expedition in 2002 and remains largely unmapped. Cast member Hazel Barton, cave expert and professor of microbiology at the University of Kentucky, made such extraordinary discoveries of previously unknown plant and animal species NASA is to fund her return visit. It is thought that her findings will provide clues to life on other planets.
It seems fitting that the place responsible for inspiring fantastic theories of extra terrestrial life in the imaginations of men like Arthur Conan Doyle, in reality leads modern science to similar, if slightly less dramatic conclusions. While no dinosaurs were found, Barton proved what original explorers Thurn and Perkins believed: here exist unknown species so ancient time indeed forgot them.
So daring a quest needs film footage to do it justice. With the location extremely remote and the conditions difficult, pioneering film techniques were adopted by the crew to record the findings and sheer human effort. On the tough ascent to the plateau the two camera operators would climb overlapped, thus capturing the cast moving slowly up through the rocky terrain. Getting this footage was difficult and potentially dangerous.
Andy Dittrich was responsible for rigging the panoramic crane shots; the camera panning out from the cast on top of the mountain to capture the sheer drop off at the edge of the plateau, then dipping down to show the great depth of the drop.
“They said it couldn’t be done in such high winds with a 12-foot-long jib arm, two feet from the edge of the precipitous 2000 foot vertical drop,” Ditrich laughed. “Two hours, a harness and several steel safety lines later it was up and ready for rehearsal — the first camera crane on the top of Roraima!”
Helicopters were used to capture stunning aerial shots, while on the ground the filming challenge continued when the cast descended into the caves. All the equipment had to slide over the slippery rocks, down a crevasse and into darkness lit only by the flashlights and headlamps of the cast. All the lighting and camera set-ups took place on the fragile sandstone deep within the unique ecosystem — hardly an environment conducive to simple documentary filmmaking, but then Puttkamer and his team were not seeking the ordinary.
In The Real Lost World Puttkamer’s team brings their viewers to the heart of the natural wonder of Roraima, in startling, imaginative style. It is perhaps the imagination of the project that makes it such a success. Fully embracing the myth, legend and story telling that made Roraima infamous, the documentary uses computer-generated image sequences of dinosaurs to suggest what was in the minds of the explorers and natives who claimed to see them on Roraima.
Equally, re-enactments of Thurn’s and Perkins’s 19 th century exploration bring the text book history of the mountain to life. Thurn is played by Peter Von Puttkamer; Perkins by Dittrich.
The whole package is a striking example of the expanding, consistently diverse genre of the theatrical feature documentary. With its roots firmly grounded in fact, analysis and the sharing of knowledge, the genre makes for a cerebral but also very entertaining viewing experience. Combined with filming techniques previously only used in narrative feature film, The Real Lost World is an intelligent hybrid of epic adventure, drama and discovery: a previously unknown creature that demands we re-examine the way documentary, as a genre, is evolving.
The two-hour
documentary premieres in Canada this Sunday, Dec. 17
th
on OLN. The
film also screens Sunday Dec 17 at 7:30 at MY Millennium Place with the film
after party at Tommy’s.
View the trailer on
www.gryphonproductions.com/thereallostworld
