National Geographic is taking docs into high-drama and even higher production values. Kavita Daswani talks to some of the people driving a new age of adventure, exploration and investigation.

In Warlords of Ivory, the documentary on elephant poaching premiering on National Geographic Channel (NGC) in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong later this month, fake tusks made of resin hiding satellite-tracking technology make their way across three countries to a kingpin’s lair. In the jungle, correspondents armed only with cameras run into AK-47-wielding military men, navigate their way through live grenades and encounter human remains.

Welcome to the new world of factual programming. This is NGC’s slick and modern new face, with programming predicated on intrigue and drama, and with top-of-the-line Hollywood production values.

NGC chief executive, Courteney Monroe, says she and her team are focusing on a more radical type of documentary programming. The impetus comes from the success of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, the 2014 award-winning 13-episode series, helmed by popular astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

“Cosmos demonstrated to us that smart and entertaining and high-quality (programming) with distinctively Hollywood story-telling and Hollywood production techniques can draw an audience,” Monroe says,adding: “Over the last six months, we have really crystalised this vision and the desire to have the channel really up to the promise and expectation of the National Geographic brand.”

Warlords of Ivory, which airs in Asia on Saturday, 26 September, at 8pm, was among NGC’s star rollouts at the Television Critics Association in Los Angeles in July. The 60-minute episode marks the return of the channel’s critically praised Explorer series, which garnered more than 50 Emmy awards over its 25-year run. The series ended in 2010.

“Explorer was the creative trailblazer in that documentary strand,” says Tim Pastore, NGC U.S. president of original programming and production. “So not only is (Warlords) moving us forward with those platforms and those iconic strands that we have always had success with, but again it’s just as we move forward to become that premium network in adventure exploration and investigation”.

In Warlords, executive produced by NGC’s Robert Palumbo, investigative correspondent Bryan Christy and co-producer JJ Kelley tell the story of an ongoing crisis in a new and radically enhanced way. Renowned taxidermist, George Dante, was brought on board to create a pair of lifelike tusks with a compartment inside for a tracker. The tusks were taken to Africa and embedded with a shipment of real ivory, allowing Christy and his team to follow the trail.

“We’d get shot if we tried to walk in the door,” Christy says. The idea behind the fake tusks was to “create what is in effect a suitcase of money, put a tracker inside, let them carry it”, sometimes through known terrorist territory. Commercial satellites were used to track the tusks.

“I want to go after the worst guys,” Christy says. But he denies doing it “to tell a cool story. I’m doing it to make a difference”.

Christy is also the founder of National Geographic Magazine’s Special Investigations Unit, and says that the advocacy continues long after the programme has aired; online content will continue to be delivered to show viewers the progress of the decoy tusks, where they end up, and what happens to those at the receiving end.

The making of the show had its own challenges: the tusks were so lifelike that Kelley was arrested at Tanzania airport for attempting to smuggle ivory out of the country. That footage was recorded on his cellphone.

Kelley describes the production as “results-oriented journalism”, and says that the finished show proves that the killing of elephants for their tusks is no longer the work of random poachers. “It is militarised slaughter,” he says. “Entire herds are being gunned down, potentially from a helicopter.” Their investigation also uncovered young women being traded as sex slaves, boys as soldiers and terrorist regimes being funded through the sale of illegal ivory.

Kelley says the use of hidden cameras – including button and pen-cameras – created visuals that would have been impossible to attain otherwise.

This avant-garde approach to factual programming underscores other NGC shows bowing later this year.

The two-hour Wild Yellowstone uses technologically advanced drone, time-lapse and infrared camerawork to capture never-before-seen footage of the sprawling 3,472-square-mile Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and its 100-odd wildlife species. The cameras zero in on the fight for survival among the park’s many breeds: bighorn sheep battling for a female mate, bears and wolves lunging at one another for the fresh meat off a deer carcass. The programme also shows the harshness of winter in the park. The action, much of it close-up and vivid, is captured in high-definition, the narration dramatic.

But perhaps the most evident example of the fusion between NGC’s traditional factual programming platforms with glossy Hollywood aesthetics lies in Breakthrough, a six-episode series involving industry heavyweights such as Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, two of the executive producers. Each hour-long episode was directed by a Hollywood luminary: filmmakers Howard, Peter Berg and Brett Ratner, actor Paul Giamatti and actress Angela Bassett and Oscar-winning screenwriter Akiva Goldsman.

“This series is what I’d like to call a little nerd bait with a touch of muscular curiosity,” Pastore says, adding; “It’s a premium lens for science and has a real heart. And each director gravitated towards a theme or topic that they truly were passionate about.”

Breakthrough’s subjects are wide-ranging. Bassett’s episode, Water Apocalpyse, focuses on drought and what a handful of visionaries around the world are doing to mitigate its effects. In Fighting Pandemics, Berg examines a revolutionary vaccine that replaces the needle with a treatment the size of a postage stamp. Giamatti explores the future of technologies that can give average people superhuman skills. In Energy from the Edge, Goldsman investigates potent alternative energy supplies. Howard tackles The Age of Aging, and asks if aging is indeed inevitable, while Ratner’s The Brain: The Final Frontier, probes the workings of the brain.

Breakthrough: Fighting Pandemics and Breakthrough: How Long Can We Live air in Asia in November this year.

“We were looking for significant issues,” says Kurt Sayenga, executive producer of Asylum Entertainment, which partnered in the production. “We’re looking at people who were actually trying to change the world for the better,” he adds.

Each segment pulls in experts and human stories, laid out in the way that a scripted show might: each has an arc and an evolution, but with scientific heft.

Fighting Pandemics focuses on the work of Dr Maria Croyle, a professor of pharmaceutics at the University of Texas. Croyle has created a vaccine that is like a tiny square of film. In her vision, entire warehouses of pharmaceutical drugs can one day be replaced by folders of these edible strips, housed in nothing larger than a file cabinet. In The Age of Aging, viewers meet Laura Deming, a science wunderkind who was accepted into MIT at 14 but dropped out to focus on revolutionary protocols to halt aging.

Ratner says what makes these shows different is that they’re being directed and made by narrative filmmakers, filmmakers who are used to making television or theatrical films that have great characters in them,” Ratner says.

“So the process of achieving that through the casting process, picking people who are going to be dynamic, interesting stories, interesting characters, the set pieces – treating it like a mini-movie instead of treating it just like a documentary on something scientific. It’s about the humanity and the characters and not just the science of it all,” Ratner adds.

Sayenga says his overall objective was to try to humanise science. “The team I assembled... had a lot of documentary experience as well as narrative film experience. One thing also is that we’re based in Hollywood as opposed to a lot of documentary film production, which tends to be in the East Coast [of the U.S.], and it’s coming from a different place. It’s basically trying to walk the line between the hard-core science and the personal stories again, and trying to play up the human drama.”

A high-end aesthetic is perhaps inevitable given the Hollywood clout behind the series. “It’s not just the photography and the way you light it,” Ratner says. His big-budget motion-picture colorist, for instance, was part of his post-production team. “So it’s going to look great as well,” he says, adding: “It’s going to feel like it has high-production value and is not going to look like just a regular television show.”

This article first appeared in ContentAsia Issue 3, 2015, published in August 2015