© 2026 Foundry Media
No stock footage: filmed by us
Wildlife Videography.
One clip from an ongoing documentary about how difficult rewilding animals really is - filmed on a fifteen-year-old camera with no image stabilisation and no flat colour profile to fall back on.
Why we filmed this
We spent a day at Howletts Wild Animal Park in Kent volunteering to help look after their elephants. That day is what pulled us into this subject.
The fox in this footage was filmed at the British Wildlife Centre in Surrey - a centre focused on educating the public about Britain's native species and supporting conservation work, home to around 40 species from red squirrels to Scottish wildcats.
This clip is one piece of a bigger, ongoing documentary project looking at how hard rewilding actually is in practice, and Howletts is the clearest example of that: in 2021 they announced a widely-publicised plan to fly their elephant herd to Kenya as part of a world-first rewilding project. By 2026, those plans had been shelved in favour of building the herd a new home on-site - largely because moving animals across borders got harder, not easier, in the years after COVID, as the rules governing that kind of transport shifted between jurisdictions.
That gap between the intention to rewild an animal and the practical reality of doing it is what this documentary is about. This is one small piece of it.
There's no release date for it yet, and no fixed shot list. It gets built whenever a centre, a subject, and the right light line up. That's also what makes it honest - nothing here is being staged or rushed to hit a publish date.
Why we filmed it
The Central Goal
Rewilding, returning animals bred or rehabilitated in captivity to a genuinely wild, self-sustaining population, is the stated end goal behind most breeding and conservation programmes run by accredited zoos and wildlife centres. It's rarely the headline visitors see, but it's the reason many of these institutions exist at all.
Why It's So Hard
Howletts' own shelved plan to fly its elephant herd to Kenya is a clear example: a widely publicised, well resourced rewilding project that still ran into the reality of cross-border transport rules, funding, and logistics tightening in the years after COVID. Good intentions rarely survive contact with the practical difficulty of the work.
Why the Mission Still Stands
Even when a specific rewilding plan doesn't go ahead, the underlying mission doesn't disappear. It's what breeding programmes, habitat funding, and conservation partnerships are still built around, and what most accreditation standards hold centres to. That's the mission we wanted this documentary, and this work, to sit alongside.
Filming animals, filming people
Wildlife videography and the corporate and event videography we do for clients share a problem people don't usually expect: unpredictability. Animals don't hit marks or take direction. Neither, really, do people - delegates at a conference, executives in a boardroom, a room full of guests. Both are capable of doing something completely unscripted the moment you stop paying attention.
Following movement is the comparatively easy part. The harder skill - in a fox that's gone still, or in a delegate about to speak - is reading a subject with no movement to read, and knowing what's about to happen next anyway. That only comes from experience.
It's the same instinct behind working a 350-delegate conference as a solo operator - staying positioned near the people making decisions so you're already rolling when something happens, rather than reacting a beat too late. Wildlife filming is simply a very unforgiving way to practise it.
Interested in the documentary, or want something filmed with the same care?
If the approach resonates, let's talk about your project.