TRANSCRIPT

– About twelve years ago my wife took a week-long trip to film the bears of Transylvania. She returned to Ireland impressed by her experience in Transylvania.

She just couldn’t get over how wild, beautiful and wonderful it was.

Finally we decided, “Okay, we have to do this.”

And so we managed to get partners on board and we’re now going to spend two years in Transylvania, trying to capture its wild wonders.

Now Transylvania is part of Romania.

It’s in South East Europe, and it’s quite a distance from where we are in Ireland.

So there’s little logistics involved to get there, and it’s a great place.

It’s this historic region with mountains, big forests and wonderful people of all kinds.

Romanians, Hungarians, people of German descent all live there.

Transylvania’s main treasures are its wild forests.

It has some of the last intact primeval forests in Europe.

And in there you will find the top predators, the wolves, the lynx, and we hope to be able to catch them in the near future.

There are many bears in Transylvania, perhaps half of the remaining bears in Europe.

So there are several places where they come out of clearings and openings and we hope to be able to film them.

The lynx is probably the most elusive of them all.

They are very wary, and even locals who have lived and worked close to the forest for decades rarely, if ever, get a glimpse of a lynx.

They are so careful that they are not noticed.

There are many wolves in Transylvania.

The forests are vast and the wolves find plenty of space to roam and find prey.

A big advantage for us is that during our research we met some local nature filmmakers from Transylvania who are world class and have made films that have been seen all over the world.

So we got along very well with them.

And so we work together, with Dan Dinu as one of them, and Cosmin Dumitrache as the other, and so they help us as a team to make this film in the near future.

And their expertise in knowing the terrain, knowing the forests and knowing the mountains will be absolutely invaluable.

– Filming animals in Romania is not easy at all because the wild places we have here are still big.

The forests are still complicated to travel in, and sometimes require a lot of work.

There is also still hunting and, unfortunately, poaching in some areas, so that means that animals are afraid of people.

Sometimes it’s complicated just to find songs, and when you actually want to film them, it’s quite tricky.

– Dan and Remus will mainly work on the camera traps.

These are high-quality cameras that we leave in boxes in the wild for months, hoping to capture animals that are otherwise impossible to film.

So Dan and Remus, with their knowledge of the mountains and the paths these animals take, go out and place the cameras in different places, on tracks, in trees, places they know the animals have visited in the past. and hopefully we will see the results in the near future.

(bright music) – I’ve been doing this for more than 10 years in Romania, working on projects related to wild animals and mainly trying to photograph them, and I only got one chance to see one wolf and one lynx.

So the camera traps are the only thing you can actually do.

The technical part of camera trapping was also quite complicated, and Remus was the best guy to have around because he’s an engineer.

Firstly, it was complicated to find good areas, and secondly, it was a lot of work with the camera traps.

Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn’t work.

Many of the animals came at night, so we did almost everything we could do to catch those animals on camera.

(bright music) – (John) Camera traps are challenging in the sense that they always go wrong, so you really have to be careful and know what you’re doing to make them valuable to the production.

Every time you set ten traps, six of them don’t work.

And you just have to be incredibly picky about preparing the cameras and making sure everything is set up properly before you leave for weeks.

– (Dan) Peter, this is the photo.

And all the time we had problems, or we had, I don’t know, surprises, some areas were quite remote, so we then had to take a lot of batteries with us to keep the cameras running for two, three weeks.

And sometimes it might just be one little cable that broke or it wasn’t good enough and we ruined two or three weeks of filming.

So it is always a dynamic job to make this kind of film footage.

(soft music) You have to love technical parts to be able to do this kind of work, and I hope that at the end we get the images that we wanted, let’s say we have the images with the animals that wanted to be there in the film .

– (John) One of the most striking things about Transylvania is its extraordinary flower meadows.

Europe is said to have once been covered in these traditional pastures.

Ireland used to be, isn’t anymore, and the colour, diversity and insect life there in spring and summer is simply stunning.

And you walk in and say, “Oh, this is what traditional pastures and traditional grasslands should look like.”

Transylvania, like most of Europe, is losing these as agriculture advances and modernizes, but there are still parts of Transylvania where the flower meadows are beautiful.

And we hope to film there and show the different species of plants and insects that make their home there, and show how rich and remarkable they are.

(bright music) We wanted to not only cover the nature of Transylvania, but also add some of its culture and history, and so we intend to do that.

There are wonderful festivals in the spring, when the local village girls and women go out into the flower meadows and collect the flowers as a kind of celebration of fertility and life.

(chewing birds) (dramatic music) Another aspect we would like to highlight is the amazing castles and ruins and fortresses and churches that are all over Transylvania, extraordinary buildings that have stood there for five and six hundred years and an amazing history have experienced.

I recently discovered Transylvania, and I am simply blown away by the richness and diversity of the place.

To see mountain after mountain after mountain, draped in ancient forest, to see clear, crystal clear rivers that are clearly completely clean, to feel like this is how the world once was, is such a privilege.

I’m so looking forward to spending the next year and a half here, getting to know it better, getting to know the people better, getting to know the wildlife better.

(bright music)