It’s always a pleasure to work with The Garden Productions and the Wilderness team on Wilderness with Simon Reeve, a feel-good series that takes audiences on challenging journeys through some of the world’s most remote and spectacular locations. For Series Two, Simon travels further than ever, with each episode following a single journey through one of Earth’s last great wild places, from the rainforest of Papua New Guinea’s Torricelli Mountains and Mexico’s Sea of Cortez to Canada’s Yukon and Mongolia, from the Gobi to the Altai.
The Garden’s ambition for Wilderness with Simon Reeve is to create a bigger, more immersive and quest-driven series that balances spectacular wildlife and landscapes with genuine jeopardy. As Simon Reeve explains, the series aims to avoid turning wilderness areas into “simple postcards”. This informed a brief for post production that heightened the sense of scale and atmosphere, and balanced moments of visual wonder with the complexity and authenticity of the stories being told.
The aim of the grade, for Colourist Damion Katwaroo, was to show these extraordinary places as they really are: beautiful, raw and worth protecting maintaining a natural, coherent look throughout. Using Chromogen to shape the tonal and colour response at the foundation of the grade, alongside X-Grade for localised hue adjustments, Damion carefully balanced busy, high-contrast surroundings to keep Simon prominent without making the image feel overtly graded. Baselight’s spatial tools also helped match colour, texture and sharpness across the wide range of formats, from main cameras to action cams, drones and underwater rigs, ensuring the audience remained immersed in the journey. Meanwhile, in Online, Ben Salkeld combined Boris, Sapphire, Mocha Pro and Neat Video plug-ins to clean up and stabilise the unique footage, removing distractions and allowing the extraordinary wilderness imagery to speak for itself.
Dubbing Mixer Ben Newth also relished the opportunity to work on Simon Reeve’s adventures, describing the experience as being transported from his sound-proofed studio to challenging journeys through unseen wildernesses. The brief was to make the sound feel real and immersive while keeping dialogue clear and intelligible, matching the series’ beautiful photography, vibrant colours and cinematic soundtrack. Using as much original location sound as possible, including boom and camera microphones, Ben built a sense of place through carefully selected atmospheres , widening the stereo image without introducing sounds that did not belong in these rarely visited locations. Personal microphones were carefully balanced to sit naturally within each environment, while the raw, rustling energy of storms, heavy undergrowth and other challenging conditions was retained wherever it added to the experience. Foley and spot effects added further weight and realism to sounds that microphones could not fully capture at a distance, from a bear running down a river to footsteps on a pier and the remarkable tree communication in Papua New Guinea.
Post Producer Anna remarked, it’s a privilege to help bring the client’s vision to life through both picture and sound, working alongside such a talented team of creatives to showcase places that many viewers may never have the opportunity to visit. Being part of the team behind these feel-good programmes is a source of real pride, and working with Wilderness continues to be a joy.