Why I Became a Rhino for My Rhino Film – Elliot Connor
“I’ve been to all four corners of the world and generally made an oyster of it. I’ve played housemaid for hedgehogs and picnicked with parrots; I’ve doted on ducklings, baited bandicoots, hidden from hyenas and mopped (not vacuumed) vulture vomit. Nowadays, my modus operandi is using comedy, livestream formats and international networks to reshape our human-nature relationship.”
Elliot Connor is one of the newest members of the Wild Lens Collective, and we’re so excited to have him on board. Elliot is an ‘Author-Filmmaker-Podcaster-Naturalist’, whose motivation to tell nature stories started when he hunted by a leopard aged 10.
Elliot recently completed his MA Wildlife Filmmaking from the University of the West of England in Bristol, for which he had to create his own film, and we were intrigued to hear about the inspiration behind the film itself, and his approach to nature storytelling. We’ll hand over to Elliot…
Now I learnt special effects makeup and prosthetics from the folks that made the xenomorphs for Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant. I once convinced my mates at high school I’d been mauled by a koala with a fake triple gash in my arm. But had the Alien team seen this particular get-up of mine, they would have been sick in their mouths. And not in a good way. I donned a greenscreen morphsuit, folded a tinfoil hat and set off across town.
The looks I got. I mean, it was the stupidest of stupid costumes but somehow that made it better. See, our brains are like spelllcheck. Spekchel. Spollchuck. Damn it. Make something bad, wrong, different, and people notice. Where normally we walk the streets with an unspoken “I’ll ignore you if you ignore me” pact, not one person I walked past failed to give me an embarrassed nod or wry smile. I drew honks and waves from cars and heckles from across the road. I was laughing the whole way.
It got me thinking: conservation messaging is stuck in an echo chamber cos’ any new audiences we might reach have been beaten senseless by doom and gloom say-it-straight comms from charities. “Polar bears are drowning. Now give us your money.” Cynical perhaps, but I ran my own environmental charity across a hundred countries for four years. I’ve been on their side, been guilty of it myself and seen it, well… more times than I can count. The ‘Is that meant to be an alien?!’ costume opened people up. So I made an equally ridiculous rhino outfit. Figured it might break the ‘fed up with the world ending’ wall keeping folks well clear of conservation talk, crushing the people who make a life of it. I picked a single rule: “At no point can the audience think they’ve seen or heard that before,” and I played by it. All-out originality.
It took me the better part of six months to make I’m a Rhino. And like the alien costume that started it, it’s lo-fi, improvised on a piddly £2000 budget, even deliciously bad at times. But it’s different. And amidst the deafening noise of 130 new nature series airing each year, I think that counts.
Give it a watch and you tell me if it has impact. Because with the TV industry in turmoil, the shows we make are going to change drastically: escapism is being switched out for social dialogue as wildlife filmmaking’s USP and it’s going to take all the radical conversations and failed experiments we can muster to make sure we do it right.
Thanks!
Elliot Connor