We’ve Got 99 Left: A Mastery Hour with Producer Olly Scholey.

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I sat down recently with Producer Olly Scholey for a Mastery Hour session. Olly’s one of those names you’ve absorbed even if you’ve never clocked it: two summers camera-assisting on Disneynature’s Bears, years as a researcher and assitant producer on Our Planet, and more recently the producer on the ocean strand of the BBC’s Parenthood. We’d worked together a little before, though never side by side in the field, which is something we agreed we still need to fix.

We talked for the best part of an hour, and the conversation kept circling back to one idea from a dozen different directions: that the gap between a good wildlife shoot and a great one almost never comes down to the hero shot. It comes down to knowing when to stop chasing it.

What follows isn’t a transcript. It’s the throughline I took away from the interview. You can also watch the interview video on my YouTube channel by clicking here.

Olly didn’t come up through the ocean at all. He spent the first five years of his career as a topside camera assistant and didn’t go near the water. Like many people in this industry, his origin story is a childhood soaked in David Attenborough. He told me about a picture of a whale shark, torn out of a magazine, pinned to his bedroom wall, swimming straight at the camera. He studied zoology at university with wildlife filmmaking as the explicit goal, and then, in his words, “completely landed on my feet.”

The luck was pure timing. He graduated in 2012, right as Disneynature’s franchise was at its peak, deep into production on Bears, the grizzly bear film that needed two full summers in Alaska and Canada to shoot. The plan was blunt: put every long-lens camera operator in the industry into the field on rotation and back them with heavy camera-assistance support. Olly got taken on as one of those assistants, and what he describes from those two summers sounds less like a job than an accelerated apprenticeship: daily proximity to Sophie Darlington, Gavin Thurston and Warwick Sloss, “tons and tons of time” with people he calls, without qualification, some of the best in the business. Grizzlies on a salmon river let you sit close in a way a subject at long-lens distance never does, and an 86-minute feature needed a lot of scenes to fill it, which meant a lot of reps, up close, for a young assistant still working out what he was watching.

I asked him to map the producer track the way you’d map the camera path: assistant, to second, to lead. He told me there isn’t a single clean ladder and used his own failure to make the point. By the time he’d done around twenty international shoots as a camera assistant, he wanted to move into production and applied for a job on Blue Planet 2. He didn’t get past the interview.

The reason, as he understands it now, wasn’t a lack of experience. The production team was screening for something else entirely: “more rounded storytellers, better researchers,” people good at finding a story rather than people who were simply good with a camera, which he admits was essentially all he was on paper at the time. What the industry actually wants from a producer, in his view, is the ability to find something academically interesting and convert it into something that works on screen, paired with just enough field knowledge to know which stories are actually filmable.

Where the two tracks converge, in his telling, is that both are apprenticeships in the fullest sense. A camera assistant spends years standing next to someone experienced, absorbing by proximity, a role he says he genuinely loved, pressure and all, because “you’re just in this seat where you’re just learning and you’re just absorbing.” On the production side, a researcher apprentices to a producer in the same way. Olly’s version of that was four years under Hugh Pearson on Our Planet, sitting in an office watching every conversation, seeing how Pearson managed a team through both the sequences that worked and the stretches where “things didn’t go to plan.” Alongside that, he credits Sophie Lanfear, who directed Our Planet‘s Frozen Worlds episode, for an equally formative education in converting Arctic and Antarctic imagery into story, praising her “incredible attention to detail with story and craft.”

I told him the thing I try to say to people directly: don’t rush the apprenticeship, because once you cross into the DP or producer seat, the support disappears and it doesn’t come back. He agreed completely, and sharpened it into something close to a law of the industry: as a camera operator, you’re “the top of the tree” with nobody left to catch you; as a producer, the expectation is “solely on you,” and a series producer might help, but they’re stretched too thin to really carry you. Both roles strip away the safety net that the apprenticeship years exist to build.

The best anecdote of the conversation is also the clearest explanation I’ve heard for what a sequence actually is. On Our Planet, in South Georgia with Sophie Lanfear and cinematographer Jamie McPherson, the crew was filming something nobody had properly documented before: leopard seals charging out of the water to grab king penguins directly off the beach. After two or three days out on the rib, they came back one evening to look at rushes. McPherson had a shot: leopard seal exploding out of the surf, penguins scattering everywhere. Olly’s reaction was immediate: “Great, that’s it. Like, wow, we’re done.” McPherson’s reply fundamentally reshaped his understanding of coverage. “No, we’re not,” he said. One shot wasn’t a sequence. “We got 99 left. Come on, let’s go.”

Out of that moment, Olly built the framework he still uses: identify the five things that need to happen, the setup, the characters, what each is doing, the buildup, the central behaviour, and the resolution, then work out how each maps to actual screen time. The trap is over-indexing on the hunt itself at the expense of everything that has to surround it for the sequence to hold together. On the production side, the same logic becomes a budgeting exercise: weighing shoot cost against the screen time it’s likely to deliver, which only works once the research has already found where a sequence’s edges actually sit.

I put the spectrum I see across the “Bristol style” to him directly: pure montage with no character arc, the kind of opening and closing material Hugh Pearson built for Our Planet; tightly character-driven “mini epics” with a clear protagonist and a problem; and fully objective behavioural sequences in the Planet Earth mould. Where does he sit on the anthropomorphism-versus-objectivity divide? He told me he doesn’t have a fixed preference. It depends entirely on where the film needs the audience to land.

He drew the contrast from his own recent work. Parenthood's gannet strand follows two gannet parents through what he calls an “epic” eleven-minute saga, full of character and arc. Ocean, which he was working on at the same time, has no character in it at all. It’s built around the health of the ocean as a place, without a single “here’s this animal doing this” moment across the whole film. Neither is better. Our Planet existed to inspire, to raise the bar with astonishing individual-animal stories before layering in the bigger conservation message; Ocean is a story about a landscape that needs help. His view is that the industry has a responsibility to keep pushing both ends of that spectrum, or streaming ends up saturated with one story shape.

Storyboarding has become far more standard at the high-budget end than it was when I started out in 2008, and I asked Olly what he actually thinks they’re for. His answer: they cut both ways. Where a sequence’s five beats are largely knowable, a storyboard is genuinely useful: a shared, visualised plan for editorial and camera teams. But the entire value of natural history is that nobody knows what’s going to happen. Crews come home surprised because a cinematographer caught an angle nobody planned for, or a local collaborator suggested something the storyboard never accounted for. Treat it as a checklist rather than a guide, he warned, and you strip out what makes the footage worth having.

Some shoots make the whole question moot. Filming killer whales in Bremer Bay, Western Australia, for Parenthood, the storyboard amounted to “try as hard as you can”: there was no controlling what the animals would do, and the team simply covered what happened and hoped they hit record.

I asked what he looks for in a DP, and what’s at stake if he gets that choice wrong, given that in this industry the producer is direclty responsible for the episode. He sidestepped the obvious answer, track record and experience, to focus on what separates people who already have both. The best camera people, in his account, are storytellers first. They don’t open a conversation asking what shots the producer wants, because if the story’s right, that conversation barely needs to happen. What they talk about instead is technique, equipment, visual style: craft in service of a story everyone’s already agreed on.

His advice to anyone trying to break in or move up is to engage at that story level from the start: not just narrative, but visual storytelling, how the tools available can better serve an animal’s story. He also flagged something that sets people apart: a willingness to break visual rules, and a genuine drive to engage with the subject rather than simply photograph it well. His illustration was a showreel full of beautiful but generic coral-reef imagery, set against someone who filmed a snail in a rock pool and gave it an actual journey. The second, he said, is harder to fake and far more attainable. It can be done with any animal, in a garden or a local coastline, without a boat or a permit to a reef.

Olly’s route into ocean work wasn’t a plan either. On Our Planet, he split his time between Hugh Pearson’s ocean films and the polar film, which gave him a couple of small underwater shoots as exposure, but he was, by his own account, thoroughly intimidated by the diving itself. Rebreather work felt out of reach; he doubted he’d ever bank the hours to make it viable, and assumed the door had been easier to walk through a decade earlier.

The person who reframed it for him was Doug Anderson, a frequent collaborator, who talked him through rebreather training with a simple, practical case: do the course, get it sponsored through Silverback, who already own rebreathers, bank some hours on an actual shoot, and the rest follows. Olly did the course after Our Planet and worked as an assistant producer on BBC One’s The Mating Game, whose ocean film included humpback whale competition pods and manta rays on rebreather. His verdict, looking back, is that the industry maintains a kind of facade around technical diving (scary, exclusive, unattainable) that doesn’t match reality. “Not a walk in the park,” he said, “but definitely sort of doable.”

What kept him there was the material. He contrasts the ocean with the Serengeti, where the existing body of footage is so deep that finding 10 genuinely new ideas feels close to impossible. Point him at any ocean in the world, by contrast, and he’s close to certain the stories are down there, waiting to be found. He’s drawn to it as a visual medium too: the ability to put the smallest animal in frame beside the largest that has ever existed, with entire sequences playing out within roughly a 16-to-100mm range, without the “long-lens fatigue” that can creep into terrestrial telephoto work. And he considers ocean conservation storytelling an unusually easy win, with so much of it still untold that it could, in his words, “fill an entire life’s work” without coming close to exhausting it.

I put a specific scenario to him: a talented but relatively inexperienced camera person is about to go on their first solo shoot, and Olly, who is meant to be there to guide them, breaks a leg and can’t go. What’s the five-minute brief?

His answer collapsed everything above into one instruction. Give them the story clearly: the five things the sequence needs to achieve. Then stress the one skill he says his own teams still don’t reliably get right: knowing when to move on. The most common failure is over-polishing one beat instead of collecting the breadth of images a sequence actually needs, and the ability to know when to move on depends entirely on how diligently you review your own footage: watching and critically assessing the day’s material every single day, distilling what might be an hour of footage down to the three minutes that are genuinely usable. It’s a discipline he and I applied directly on the gannet shoot for Parenthood, crunching the day’s material down together to work out what we actually had. His instruction for anyone tempted to skip that review because the day ran long: find the time anyway, dive less if you have to, but always know what you’ve got before deciding whether to push on or stop.

It’s the same lesson as the leopard seals, from a different angle. One extraordinary shot without coverage around it doesn’t cut into anything.

I asked for his read on the industry’s move toward “the small screen”: more viewing time migrating to YouTube, even as the big epic series keeps a permanent, unique place. He called it a genuine opportunity, not a threat, and cited something a colleague had told him: among major platforms, YouTube is reportedly the only one still growing while streaming plateaus or declines.

His bigger point is about the collapsing gap between blue-chip and consumer-grade image quality. The old gulf between a series like Planet Earth and everything else was mostly a gulf in equipment cost: a housing running tens of thousands of pounds, against a stills camera with a basic video mode. That gap, he said, “has never been lower really in relative terms.” His evidence: a meaningful amount of David Attenborough’s Ocean was shot on a DJI Osmo 4, a small consumer action camera. He watched it at the premiere next to Doug Anderson, on what someone told them was one of the biggest screens in Europe, cut directly against Red-camera footage, and you genuinely couldn’t tell which was which.

The consequence isn’t just technical, it’s economic. A project shot on cheap gear doesn’t need blockbuster viewership to be viable, because the economics scale down with the budget: you don’t need “144 million people” watching for a one-person production to turn a profit. What hasn’t gotten any cheaper is the skill set itself, the apprenticeship-built craft he’d spent the whole hour describing. But he doesn’t think you need the whole set to make something genuinely good. Enough of it, paired with gear that’s now affordable, is enough to make content that stands out on YouTube even if it never sits inside a Netflix or Disney+ slate, helped along by the fact that YouTube itself hosts the free tutorials for everything else, editing, sound design, colour, that used to require a big production’s infrastructure to access.

None of that removes the story as the actual bottleneck, and Olly agreed without qualification. Better tools and AI remove excuses, but the job is still to make someone feel something specific enough that they care and want to act on it. His parting line doubled as his advice to anyone starting out today: don’t aim to be the thousandth person with a nice shot of an animal. Aim to be the person whose story people actually want to watch, because it’s genuinely fascinating, or important, or strange.

Fittingly, as we wrapped up, Olly told me he’s about to go filming again in a couple of weeks: the first time in close to a year, after a long stretch mostly behind the production side of the business. After an hour spent telling me why knowing when to stop chasing the shot is the real skill, it felt like the right note to end on: back behind the camera, presumably counting down exactly how many he’s still got left.

This kind of insight, the frameworks, the field-tested instincts, the decisions that only come from decades behind the camera, is exactly what the Ocean Footage Mastery Programme is built to teach. If you're serious about mastering ocean and wildlife cinematography, find out more here.