After becoming a freelance broadcaster, he started on his next project Eastwards with Attenborough (1973) involving an expedition to Indonesia with the BBC Natural History Unit. When he returned, he began to work on Life on Earth (1979), which was a massive project that involved the partnership with Warner Brothers. As the first of Sir David’s signature Life series, it showed many never-before seen wildlife footages through the use of special filming techniques. An important factor that contributed to his success in this series was the acceptance by the scientific community, which allowed Sir David to film the subjects due to Sir David’s reputation as a serious naturalist.
Also, one of the most memorable scenes on television was that of his encounter with the mountain gorilla in Rwanda.
“There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than with any other animal I know. Their sight, their hearing, their sense of smell are so similar to ours that they see the world in much the same way as we do. We live in the same sort of social groups with largely permanent family relationships. They walk around on the ground as we do, though they are immensely more powerful than we are… So it seems really very unfair that man should have chosen the gorilla to symbolise everything that is aggressive and violent, when that is the one thing that the gorilla is not — and that we are.”
– Sir David Attenborough, during his encounter with the mountain gorillas.
Following universal critical acclaim to this series, The Living Planet (1984) and The Trials of Life (1990) were produced to complete the original trilogy of the Life series. The Living Planet discussed the theme of ecology and how living things adapt to their environments. Sir David and his crew went to many different places, from the volcanoes of Iceland to the oceans of the Canadian Arctic. Sir David even presented one of the episodes in his scuba diving suit. The following scene is the conclusion of the series to encourage sustainable behaviour for viewers.
“Immensely powerful though we are today, it’s equally clear that we’re going to be even more powerful tomorrow. And what’s more there will be greater compulsion upon us to use our power as the number of human beings on Earth increases still further. Clearly we could devastate the world. If we not do so, we must have a plan… One, that we shouldn’t so exploit natural resources that we destroy them… Two, that we shouldn’t interfere with the basic processes of the earth on which all life depends… And third we should preserve the diversity of life… As far as we know, the Earth is the only place in the universe where there is life. Its continued survival now rests in our hands.”
– Sir David Attenborough, in concluding The Living Planet.
The Trials of Life showed animal behaviours in their different stages of life. This included animals hunting and reproducing to ensure the continuity of life. Again, Sir David and his crew travelled to many places during the three-and-a-half-year production, capturing rare footages such as the killer whales pouncing on a colony of seals on a Patagonian beach and the flight of 60,000 waders over Sir David’s head. The following scene shows how killer whales hunt seals on the beach.
“If you watch animals objectively for any length of time, you’re driven to the conclusion that their main aim in life is to pass on their genes to the next generation. Most do so directly, by breeding. In the few examples that don’t do so by design, they do it indirectly, by helping a relative with whom they share a great number of their genes. And in as much as the legacy that human beings pass on to the next generation is not only genetic but to a unique degree cultural, we do the same. So animals and ourselves, to continue the line, will endure all kinds of hardship, overcome all kinds of difficulties, and eventually the next generation appears.”
— Sir David Attenborough, in concluding The Trials of Life