By Juliette Martineau, Researcher and Assistant Field Producer
Lions spend roughly 80 per cent of their time lying down. As a result, three years into filming Kingdom, the vast majority of the hours I had spent in their company had been spent watching them sleep. Assigned on my first night shoot, I was about to experience for myself that following those big cats in the dark is a very different proposition. On a hot late afternoon, equipped with a military-grade thermal camera in a specially adapted filming vehicle, we were heading off to find the pride.
Inevitably, we arrived to find some very sleepy cats. But as the sun set in blazing colours and the light got dimmer, the lionesses slowly started to stir: getting up, stretching, yawning. And then, they all started to roar. A roar is a long-range advertisement, designed to be picked up at a distance. Close up, you can hear all the low frequencies in the sound. It resonates through your entire chest and taps into some real primal feelings of fear…