Produced by renowned fungi hunters, photographer Stephen Axford and filmmaker Catherine Marciniak, Follow the Rain offers a mesmerising exploration of the world of fungi like never before. With breath-taking time-lapses and footage, Follow the Rain takes us on an extraordinary journey through the oldest landscapes in Australia. It showcases the critical role fungi play on earth and how they can help humans fight climate change.
The film includes a journey into the world of zombie fungus hunting, a dig into the hidden trading deals between fungi and trees, a 10-year investigation to name a new species and an exposé of the rain-making fungal life of a desert. The audience also goes behind the scenes into Stephen and Catherine’s world of fungi photography and time-lapse, sharing in their discoveries along the way. It’s a pioneering fungi safari with breath-taking imagery that unearths the foundation of life down under.
With Follow the Rain premiering on Netflix from September 1, Nick L’Barrow spoke with Stephen Axford and Catherine Marciniak about how their love for discovery led to creating a documentary about fungi, and the incredible moment David Attenborough used their footage on his Planet Earth 2 series!
Nick: Catherine and Stephen, I really appreciate you both taking the time to chat today! I love the behind-the-scenes aspect of filmmaking, and this documentary does something fascinating by showing what goes on behind the scenes in order to capture these incredible pictures and time lapses of the fungi. I’m curious to know when the idea came to you both about showing the techniques and process behind capturing these images.
Stephen Axford: Well, it developed over a long time, I guess. I started taking fungi photography back in the early 2000s. So, over 20 years ago. And that was just a hobby for a long time.
And I was gradually developed more into that, people became interested in it. Then people started paying for the photographs and for the time lapses. So, we thought, if people are interested, we might do a film. We first came up with the idea for the film in 2014…
Catherine Marciniak: Yeah, I think that’s right.
Stephen Axford: Other people have made films using time lapse, and it was difficult to get anything going ourselves. We just continued on selling the time lapses. Then in 2020, we decided it was time to make our own film, because no one else could make it in quite the same way.
Catherine Marciniak: I’m a filmmaker, so I can’t help myself if there’s a great story to follow! In all of our films that we’ve done, we’ve had Steve as a character, as the photographer. So, I suppose it’s always been a natural progression.
We show how he takes the photos, and how he uses focus bracketing. His photos are just amazing. Since focus bracketing became a technology that was accessible to people, Steve’s been a master at it, and that really lights people’s fire!
It’s always been a part of our filmmaking journey to highlight him as a photographer. Then we started doing the time lapses, and it just made sense to take people into our time lapse fung-ariam. Which is just a shipping container, really! But we have four studios set up in there, and it’s incredible how the time lapses bring the fungi alive.
Nick: When was the moment you both realised that the life of a fungi had this beautiful cinematic quality to it?
Stephen Axford: Well, I guess when we first started taking the time lapse. Because you can only go so far with still pictures in movies. You show a picture, then another picture. It’s a bit flat. But as soon as we started taking the time lapse, we realised how much variety and how many interesting things we could see.
Then the film idea followed pretty quickly after that. When we first started doing time lapse in 2013, not long after, the BBC contacted me mainly because I took photos of luminous fungi, and they were interested in showing this on Planet Earth 2. But I started talking to them about the time lapse and asked them if they were interested! And they were very much interested.
Catherine Marciniak: It was such a buzz when we saw them in Planet Earth 2. I cried actually when I heard David’s [Attenborough] voice behind the time lapses – shots that were done in our spare shower!
Nick: With the amount of time that it takes for fungi to grow, and the amount of incredible footage you’ve shot, I can only imagine there’s hours and hours of footage out there…
Stephen Axford: I’ve had a bit of a pause with the time lapse over the last year. We’ve been doing too much! But before that, for about eight to ten years, we were running the time lapses virtually 24/7, with up to six cameras at a time.
Catherine Marciniak: Yeah, 100s of 1000s of images.
Stephen Axford: There’s a high failure rate. You know, you point the camera at one thing and you expect the fungi to grow into it, and it grows somewhere else, or does something different and moves.
Catherine Marciniak: A frog might jump into frame, or the lens fogs up if it gets too humid. There’s lots of things that can go wrong.
I think in our catalogue, we have about 350 time lapses at various lengths. So, it’s a bit hard to estimate how long it all is together.
Nick: You mentioned the potential failures of trying to capture these images, and there’s a moment in this documentary where you endeavour to find a very rare, blue fungi, but you’re also aware that you may not find it at all. What drives you to start that journey, even though you might not get the desired result?
Stephen Axford: I mean, you’ve got to be slightly crazy! You go down the rabbit hole and find one thing and you investigate that. Then that leads to another thing, which takes you off on a totally separate sidetrack. Like, the entomopathogenic fungi…
Catherine Marciniak: The one that consumes insects. The zombie one!
Stephen Axford: We’d see quite a bit of this in China, and some in Australian before, but fairly rarely. But we were contacted be Donovan Teal, who was finding these tiny fungi underneath the leaves. And when we came back home, we searched for them under leaves. We don’t quite have the profusion that Donovan has, but we can find these, you know, five millimetre—you need a magnifying glass for them! I haven’t done time lapses of them, but the photographs of them are stunning.
Catherine Marciniak: I definitely think it’s party the thrill of discovery. We know so little about fungi, yet it’s the second largest kingdom of life on the planet. There’s more fungi than plants, and yet we know so little about them. So, your chances of discovering something new are pretty high at the moment!
We’ve got another four fungal organisms that were found on our property, under investigation as new species. And we know that one of them is a new genus for Australia already. In the 1900s, they had sketchbooks. We have cameras. It’s so easy for citizen scientists to find a new species.
I think the second thing is that once you start going down the rabbit hole and realise how important and fascinating and diverse fungal organisms are, it just feeds our curiosity, but it’s also more than that. It’s just such a fascinating world that we can’t let go of!
Nick: The score of this documentary feels so magical and whimsical. It really opens up the magical world of fungi. What was the process of bringing the music to life for Follow the Rain?
Catherine Marciniak: So originally, we were just going to make a small documentary and put it on our YouTube channel there. And as it progressed, and started coming together, we just felt it deserved something more.
I kind of fell in love with the idea of making this an ode to fungi! And an ode needs a good soundtrack. So, we met these local composers, Romano Crivici and Carla Thackrah, who are composers. They’re not necessarily film composers. And as I was listening to it, I could hear those strings behind the shots of the time lapses.
It’s been such a beautiful collaboration where they have just brought this incredibly sensual and primal soundscape to the fungi. Everything I listen to it, I’m totally in love with the score. It adds an extra layer to the film.
Nick: I think what you’ve both done with Follow The Rain is manage to balance a truly fascinating look into the world of fungi, but also letting audiences know how impactful fungi is on the environment and climate change. Was that balance always important to you both as you were making the film?
Stephen Axford: Yeah, our initial exploration of the fungi was all “wow” and discovery, you know? And over time, we realised the importance of fungi in the overall ecosystems around us. When we started to gain that knowledge, it wasn’t an afterthought, but it did come after the discovery.
Catherine Marciniak: I do not want to preach to people about climate change, but I think we’ve come to the realisation of how important fungi is in capturing carbon and making rain, both things incredibly important to the global climate story.
I suppose the way we approached that was by showing that Steve is an ordinary bloke, right? And this is what we’ve discovered. So, if we take you on our journey, and see it through our eyes, and just allow the information to come as you get more and more of an understanding, just as we did, then it becomes a human journey, rather than a didactic journey.
Thank you so much to Stephan and Catherine for their time, and to TM Publicity for organising the interview! Follow the Rain is now streaming on Netflix, and Catherine has asked readers of this article to head to Fungi Map, where during the month of October, there will be a national bio-blitz on Fungi, where people can document fungi near them for the entire month! You can also find more information and videos from Stephen and Catherine at their YouTube channel, Planet Fungi.
