'Planet Earth III' Producers Say They're Ending the Use of Shark Cages for Film Crew

Planet Earth III, like its predecessor nature documentary series, takes viewers to some of the world's most breathtaking places to take in incredible sights and sounds. The first episode of the new series is centered around coasts, and one segment involving seals and sharks highlights the camera crew's new approach to photography.

Filmed on South Africa’s Robberg Peninsula, the segment shows Cape fur seals teaming up to try to scare off great white sharks. Rather than have videographers submerged in cages to film the notorious ocean predators, they decided to forego them, instead suspending the crew deeper in the water to capture the action from below.

Producer and director Nick Easton told The Telegraph that the team "took the decision that it was more dangerous to be in a cage" while filming the sharks chowing down on the seals. Filming from a cage makes camera operators "less flexible," he said, and the hunk of metal would have likely meant the sharks wouldn't have come near it.

"They were back-to-back two cameramen working together and their defense was actually the camera, which is a huge thing, and just being very observant," he explained. As a result, they were able to capture unprecedented dramatic footage of a seal pup barely escaping a shark's grasp.

Related: Great white attacks leave Gold Coast surfers calling for shark cull

Executive producer Mike Gunton stated plainly that filming sharks from cages is an outdated practice. "Those days are really over," he said. "I don’t think anybody does that anymore."

That doesn't mean production crews are throwing camera operators into shark-infested waters willy-nilly. Assistant producer Georgie Ward noted the episode was filmed with "rigorous health and safety" standards. "You see sharks and you think they are these big ferocious predators, but actually it was incredibly hard to film them," she said. "They were very aware of where we were... So it was a lot of cat and mouse and positioning of our team."

Gunton echoed a similar sentiment regarding on-set protocols. "Field craft isn’t just getting the shot, it’s actually keeping them safe and knowing how to be with those animals," he said. "There are certain signals and behaviors that you can pick up on if you’re experienced about what sharks are doing and what they’re likely to do, so you have to have someone who’s done that for a long time."

Would you go cage-free with some great whites?