This BBC documentary is one of several that use the same idea in order to get close to animals in the wild without, hopefully, disturbing them or getting the camera people killed! I've also seen similar films where mobile and hidden cameras are disguised and surreptitiously film elephants, lions and penguins (though penguins RARELY savage film crews...they're much more likely to want to interact with them). In this particular case, a wide variety of methods are used to hide the cameras--putting them inside fake logs, in giant fake snowballs and disguised by mirrors. As I said, this GENERALLY worked, but in the case of black bears, these particular bears seemed to delight in discovering and destroying the cameras-- the first time any of the animals in all these films behaved this way. I thought it was funny and made the film a lot more interesting.
One other way that the documentary differed from the lion and elephant ones is that instead of focusing on one species, it followed a wide variety of bears--grizzlies, pandas, spectacle bears, black bears and polar bears. Because there were so many different ones, I really think the film should have been longer in order to allow a better exploration of each type of bear. Still, it's an enjoyable and fun nature documentary.
