I've been working hard on Fentil lately, as it's going to be the subject of my potential 3rd year movie, which is a sort of wildlife documentary focusing on the lives of Fentil creatures.
I'm not the first to do this. In fact, one of the major inspirations for this idea was the successful 94 minute documentary 'Alien Planet', which was released in 2005 and was based on Wayne Barlowe's book Expedition.



_{A climbing daggerwrist, a popular denizen of Darwin IV. Like most creatures on Darwin IV they were originally eyeless. In Alien Planet, however, they were given eyes.}


Lucky you, I managed to find the entire thing on YouTube.
The chase at about 01:01:05 is part of the inspiration for the chase scene in the Fentil documentary (I'll explain below). I just love the energy and the initial flight of the gyrosprinter.

National Geographic released a similar feature called 'Aurelia and Blue Moon' Which focuses on two fictional planets.




The only video I could find was this one of Aurelia to some cheesy music.


While I don't like the creature designs on Aurelia and Blue Moon, that is the minimum CG quality is what I'm aiming for, but hopefully I can exceed that of Alien Planet.
Ultimately it all depends on who I get to work for me.

The actual 'story' of the documentary follows the universal struggle of predator and prey, divided into four main 'beats'.

It will begin with perhaps a zoom-in of the planet, with maybe a short spoken introduction as the camera zooms in.


The camera settles in on a tailfeeder grazing. The hunter begins to creep up on its quarry.


We then follow the chase as the hunter runs down the fearful tailfeeder. With the prey pinned on the ground, the predator begins feeding as the tailfeeder dies.


It begins to rain, and the hunter finishes eating and runs back to its calf, who is hiding under a 'tree'. When it arrives, the parent begins feeding the baby regurgitated meat. I see this a lot in nature documentaries - and I think it's important to show that while predators are indeed ruthless killing machines, they also have babies to feed.

And here it is all as one.




Also I'm working on a new blog/website to cover the development of Fentil and this documentary, which will be up in the near future.