Editing Review: BBC's Africa

Edited by: James Taggart (4 episodes) and Robin Lewis (2 episodes)

BBCs Documentary series about Animals in their natural habitat around Africa allows us to get an insight into the world of animals we think we know a lot about and others we never even knew existed.
David Attenborough gives a running commentary throughout each episode detailing the struggles, failure, successes and intuitiveness of various animals.
The interesting this is that because each episode is based on a certain area in Africa such as...... and not the individual animal, Attenborough has to dance between talking about them using conjunctive words and phrases such as "But not every animal has it quite so lucky" or "But some animals...." the way the two stories are put together in editing is by showing scenes of various African landscapes with no narration, allowing us to take it in and absorb the information we have just before the narration starts up again over the landscapes with one of the conjunctive sentences mentioned.

David Attenborough only makes a physical appearance at the end of the episode to do a little conclusion. This is effective as it feels like he is coming out from behind his glass wall to talk to us personally about what we can do to save these animals natural habitats, and to also tell us a few words about where the next African Location is going to be. Only in the last episode in the series does Attenbourough make a constant physical appearance, as he talks about the people and does interviews, also interacting and getting up close and personal with the animals, which is overlapped with picture cuts from various episodes in the season, which helps us the audience to feel more connected to the story as we have been following the journey of the various animals for the past six weeks.