richard hammond's invisible worlds

This was a bit of a different thing for the old rental list.

When I first got the BR drive I naturally considered buying a few BRs to watch to see what it was like.  Much to the relief of my bank balance I managed to resist this temptation and instead added a few of them to my rental list.

I added this in particular because it was one of a couple of series that the Beeb had put together when HD was becoming a thing.  My PVR digital tuner thing isn't HD, so when I watched this at the time it was in nromal definition.  However, it was quite interesting in and of itself and not just a bunch of pretty pictures, so I thought it would be a good thing to re-watch in HD.

It really does look great in HD.

By the nature of what this is about there's a lot of CG stuff, but there's also a lot of use of slow-motion (those digital cameras where they can speen up and slow down are used a lot) and extreme macro photography.

The series has three episodes - Speed Limits, Out of Sight and Off the Scale.  The names are pretty obvious - speed limits is about things that happen to fast or slow for us to really see, out of sight is about things that our senses can't really detect and off the scale is abotu stuff that's too small for us to see.

Hammond is essentially jsut a presenter for it, which seems to have become something of a trend - drafting in someone who is otherwise famous to present where you might normally expect a scientist or naturalist to present somethign like this.  That's not intended as a criticism - Hammond does a very good job with these - I just mean don't go thinking Hammond came up with the program!

I personally preferred the Speed Limits and Off the Scale ones.  I've always been particularly fascinated by perception - how we see the world and how the world really is.  For example, and I don't think this was covered in this program, but we only actually see a small section of the world in colour (the cones are in a small section of the retina) and the rest is in black and white.  However, you don't see that in your head becase your brain fills in the black and white bits with colour.

And tiny things are always fascinating - the classic being things like a fly's compund eyes, which are are amazing when you see them close up but you don't bat an eyelid about splattering them with a newspaper when they're buzzing around the room gettign on your nerves.

One thing I woudl say was that it was a shame there weren't any extras.  Particularly something in the way of a "making of" or some other stuff on the disk would have been nice.  In terms of the making of it's odd there wasn't actually, as a lot of recent BBC documentaries have that 10 minute bit at the end where they are essentially filling in for us so that the show is un-edited for other countries with adverts.