GV ants headed for National Geographic TV

Our ants are going to be famous.

A British film crew spent part of the week in Green Valley shooting scenes for a National Geographic Television film tentatively titled “Planet of the Ants.”

Martin Dohrn, a producer with Ammonite Ltd. in Bristol, England, led a crew that is one week into a 10-week shoot that will also take them to Europe and Costa Rica.

But why here?

“Stunning desert, bright sunlight and big, glorious ants,” Dohrn said Friday. “It’s a gift for filmmakers, really.”

The crew filmed in Sycamore Canyon and central Green Valley, near Esperanza Boulevard and La Canada Drive. Their target: red Harvester Ants and their close cousins, Long-Legged Ants.

“Desert ants are quite easy to find because they always make obvious holes and piles,” Dohrn said, adding that Arizona is known worldwide for ant research.

Likewise, Dohrn is an internationally known natural-history cameraman and producer. His work has involved everything from lions to flies, including the Emmy-nominated “Terminal Velocity,” about skydiving with peregrine falcons. In 1990, he worked on “The Ghosts of Ruby” for the BBC, about wildlife near the Arizona-Mexico border.

“Planet of the Ants,” scheduled to be released in September 2010, answers the question, “What is it that makes an ant an ant?” Dohrn said.

“They have quite a bit of a society, quite a bit of a division of labor,” he said. On Saturday, he was scheduled to be in Phoenix to film a colony of ants that has set up a police force of sorts in a lab setting. Trouble-making ants are roughed up and tossed out, he said.

The 10 weeks of shooting will stretch over the next eight months, with the editing process taking another four months, he said.

So how do they get those great camera shots down those tiny ant holes?

“With great difficulty,” Dohrn said dryly.

The good news is that desert ants “make nice, big holes.” That, coupled with camera lenses as small as two to three millimeters, helps get the shot.

Detailed footage of ant behavior is captured using cut-aways of colonies in controlled settings. Getting those shots in the wild, Dohrn said, would be virtually impossible.