Through the green lens

An ace cinematographer, an environmental activist, an Emmy award winner and a socially committed individual. Alphonse Roy is all this and more. He is the man behind many path breaking documentaries that we've seen in BBC and National Geography. He opens up about his 23 years of wildlife journey, the passion it takes to be a part of it and the future of it all.

Having studied at the Film and TV institute of Tamil Nadu, Chennai what made you take up wildlife cinematography?

I always wanted to be a Wildlife cinematographer. My father was a photographer for the railways and during my childhood days he used to take me to wildlife sanctuaries. So at a tender age I started developing an interest towards wild life. As a film institute student I was exposed to the technical aspects. This merger of interest and education in the field paved way for my successful career.

What is your opinion about wildlife cinematography as a career in India?

Wildlife Cinematography is a great career opportunity. To specialize in this patience is very important. I took nearly four years for me to complete my first movie on tigers. The viewership is good in India but what we are lacking is encouragement and the passion towards the field. How many of us have been to wildlife sanctuaries and spent a night or two there?  A very few of us and we give it minimum importance.  The kind of passion to go out and understand their world is the fundamental need for a wildlife cinematographer. If you have the passion for it you can do it.

Can you elaborate on the various special cameras you have used in your works? Especially about the Red Camera.

I started out with using the basic cameras. Then I moved on to High Definition cameras and I can tell you that Digital is the future. Red camera was used in one of my films ‘Anything for you’, directed by Anand Algappan. A red camera has an incredible resolution of 4 K.

What is the history behind the 14 feet tall Elephant Tripod?

The story of Elephant tripod is interesting. A wildlife cinematographer faces challenges everyday on field. One such challenge was to shoot tigers sitting on elephant backs. Tigers can’t be shot from ground level we have to do with the help of elephants. During this the shoots would get shaky as they constantly keep moving. I tried befriending an elephant and I would sit under its four legs and shoot. But this proved difficult for the long run. So thus I invented the 14 feet tall stool- the Elephant Tripod. I would climb on the elephant and shift to the 14 feet stool.

An AIDS awareness movie with the granddaughter of John F Kennedy, Rory Kennedy. A bit of a shift from wildlife, how did it feel?

It is a real life story and for this movie we watched the AIDS patients go through this. We had the whole story developed around a married couple where the husband is an AIDS patient and how they decide on having a baby and how their baby was born with AIDS too. The movie also contained the new drug developed which was given to the wife during her pregnancy and before her operation. It was a good experience overall.

You are a winner of the prestigious Emmy awards for the one-hour film ‘Tibet: The End of Time’. How was the experience?

I was quiet young when I received the award. To be quite honest I was not very excited and I dint know the value of it then. But thanks to my Friends in the USA, who started making noise about the award and t told me that an Emmy Award is equal to an Oscar. So it was after then I started hanging it up.

Your opinion about Green media?

I call it  flying in on borrowed feathers. Projecting the problems is great effort but what happens after that  is my real question? There should be some realistic activities. What is essential for the media to cover and inform is about the people who live near the sanctuaries. They are economically very backward and their state of livelihood is very sad. If you ask me why it is important to know about them it is simple. They are the people who live close to nature and they know how to protect it. So for us to protect them is important.

The Endangered Spirits

Monday evening as I sit down in front of my monitor filled with words in my mind for my next post I come across something in Google. A Polar bear, is he not cute? I get distracted as usual and click on the link to view the photo. But little did I know one click can open a different world. I entered the world of Spirit Bears. Be it the first time or the fifth time they will still look like polar bears. But they are not.What makes them unique? How can you differentiate? With too many questions in my mind I hit the search button. In an instant thousands of suggestions popped up. But Im going to consolidate the information , basically free you from the boring zoological terms.

Spirit Bears or the Kermode Bears  is a subspecies of the American Black Bear living in the central and north coast of British Columbia. What is the reason behind that particular fur type? They are not Albinos(partial pigmentation or absence of pigment), They are not related to Polar bears in any way nor are they related to the blond brown bears of Alaska. The colour morph is mainly because of recessive allele, which in simple terms means the dominance of one gene variant over another gene variant. The name Kermode comes after the researcher Francis Kermode, who researched the subspecies. Also what most of us dont know is that Kermode bears are the official animal of British Columbia. Now that we know the basics lets get to the complicated part.

Just like any other animal, spirit bears also have to fight for their life and space. 'Spirit bear faces pipeline threat' as I read the headlines from a news website my heart almost stops beating because it took hardly 15 minutes for me to discover this species and its endangerment. A proposed 1,172 km pipeline at the cost of $5.5bn in Canada from Kitimat to Bruderheim poses threat to one of the cute and nearly-extinct creatures on Earth. Will the selfishness of Homosapiens ever stop? But maybe I should not generalize it. When I'm here talking about Spirit bears and the fight for their living I should mention about Simon Jackson, the founder of Spirit Bear Youth Coalition.He has been fighting over 8 years now for the spirit bears. And how we can help better the situation is by spreading the information. I have done my part. Its upto you now.

In an era when the world sees the end of species that first brought life on earth, humans-the latest entry in the race for survival, cannot contain their avarice. As tigers and bears struggle to survive, the ungrateful sapien robs their basic right to life in an attempt to see an end to his never ending needs. But all it is, and will be, an attempt. Meanwhile, too much would have been lost, nature stripped of its right to create and pro-create.