The Back Story

Ammonite began in 1994.

Our first commission was for BBC2 - The Natural World, Crossroads of Nancite, a unique film about a small beach and forest on the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica. This project included a unique experiment to use an image-intensified camera for recording animal behaviour at night.

The incredible success of this experiment led to significant development of the Starlight Cameras, and another Natural World commission, Mara Nights, a film specifically about nocturnal life on the African plains - lit entirely by the moon and stars, no infrared was used. Later that year, our Starlight Camera was used in the first Big Cat Diary. More nocturnal films from Ammonite followed, both in Kenya, the first about bushbabies A Leap in the Dark. and in 1998 a beautiful film about the relationship between the Maasai, hyenas and lions, A Balance of Power.

Ammonite also continued to make films in Costa Rica; one for the BBC about three species of monkey resident in the northern dry forests, 3 Monkeys, and another in the wet forests of the south, about the mysterious and unknown white-lipped peccary, Creatures of the Black Lagoon for Survival Anglia.

In 2000 Ammonite joined forces with Scorer Associates.

Martin Dohrn worked closely with Brian Leith on a film about skydiving with peregrine falcons, Terminal Velocity, for National Geographic, and another about ants, Killer Ants for the BBC and Discovery, for this film Ammonite developed a special remote motion controlled rig for filming tiny dangerous subjects; Antcam. This necessitated not only the development of control electronics, but also miniaturising Martin Dohrn’s original Straight-scope (now usually called Bosherscope) to work on a much smaller scale.

In 2003 Scorer Associates became ‘Quickfire Media’ and made one more project jointly with Ammonite, Norfolk Broads about Britain’s most famous wetland, and which required more lens and motion control development, producing the Megascope and a remotely controlled crane.

After working with BBC on David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth and Granada Wild’s Impossible Journey, the technology that was Antcam was reconfigured to make Frankencam, a much more precise motion control device for filming small things. This formed the basis of the photography for Ammonite’s next venture, 10x 15 minute shows for the BBC’s children's channel, CBBC, about invertebrates, Smalltalk Diaries. With the help of Richard Higgs, Big Squid New Media and some computers, we were able to give these small creatures a face and a voice, so they could tell their own stories.

Ammonite has several nocturnal projects on the go using it's brand new high definition Starlight Camera, high definition infrared camera and thermal imaging technology. With our motion control rigs we are still getting up close and personal with the smaller end of the animal kingdom and will be off shooting the next ant film very soon.