21st Century Fox's National Geographic Channel has teamed with Academy Award-nominated director Darren Aronofsky for “One Strange Rock,” an event series exploring the conditions that make Earth the only planet known to sustain life. The project is in preproduction and plans to film for 100 weeks around the world and in outer space, using micro- and macro-photography technology and bringing cameras where they've never been before.
"’One Strange Rock’ explores how intricate, interwoven, and fragile life as we know it is on Earth and how rare it may be in the universe," Aronofsky said. "The more we appreciate how awe-inspiring the development of life on this planet has been, the more likely we are to become inspired stewards of the home that sustains it."
The project brings Aronofsky, Ari Handel and their production company Protozoa Pictures (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan) together with producer Jane Root (America: The Story of Us) and storytellers Arif Nurmohamed (How to Build a Planet) and Peter Lovering (The 90s: The Last Great Decade), of Nutopia Pictures. It seeks to explore how the particularities of Earth's unique history made it ideally suited as a cradle for life and to demonstrate how the planet's biological, chemical, and physical systems form an interdependent equilibrium, sustaining all the wonders of the living world we know.
"We're thrilled to once again partner with National Geographic to tell an incredible story about our strange planet," Root said. "We're going to combine dramatic visual storytelling and real science to tell the story of our planet Earth and focus on the unbelievable 'coincidences,' and the complex, unlikely connections that all had to happen to create complex life."
"With the superbly creative minds and talents of Darren, Jane, Arif, and Peter, we're going to transport viewers on a mind-bending and thrilling visual adventure that will amaze and surprise," said Courteney Monroe, Global CEO of National Geographic Channels.
In 2014, Conservation International rallied the support and voices of a host of celebrities for its Nature Is Speaking campaign, which aimed to raise awareness that people need nature in order to survive – not the other way around. In the series, Nature revealed serious misgivings about the way humans are treating the Earth from the viewpoint of a cast of characters — from Mother Nature (Julia Roberts) to The Ocean (Harrison Ford) to The Rainforest (Kevin Spacey).
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Published Jan 12, 2016 4pm EST / 1pm PST / 9pm GMT / 10pm CET