Martyn Colbeck is an award-winning film-maker and photographer who has been filming wildlife all over the world for more than 20 years, working mainly in association with the BBC’s world-renowned Natural History Unit in Bristol. Martyn has filmed many sequences for BBC landmark series including “The Trials of Life”, “The Life of Mammals”, “Planet Earth” and more recently “Nature’s Great Events”. He has also made award-winning films on a variety of animals including orang-utans, gelada baboons, pygmy chimpanzees and desert elephants.
Martyn has won Best Cinematography awards at the two most prestigious wildlife film festivals of the world – The Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival for his film “Wild Africa: Mountains” and The Wildscreen International and Environmental Film Festival for his film “Elephants of the Sand River”. In addition to these awards Martyn won an Emmy as part of the camera team on the BBC series “Planet Earth” and has enjoyed three BAFTA nominations as a member of the camera teams of “Wild Africa”, “The Life of Mammals” and “Planet Earth”.
Martyn is well known for his work with African elephants. Of the five award-winning elephant films he has made, three have been in association with Cynthia Moss of the Amboseli Trust for Elephants in Kenya. Together they have uniquely chronicled the life of a matriarch known as Echo and her family over a period of 15 years (the “Echo of the Elephants” trilogy).
In November 2006 the BBC2 Natural World film “Eye for an Elephant” was shown as “Unforgettable Elephants” on PBS in the USA. Filmed and presented by Martyn, it is a retrospective of his work with elephants and includes favourite moments from 15 years spent filming and photographing them throughout Kenya, Namibia and the Congo.
In 2007 The Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain awarded Martyn the Lumiere Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Cinematography.
Martyn is currently in Ivory Coast, West Africa filming “Chimpanzee” for DisneyNature.
