National Geographic’s ‘One Strange Rock’ series to air on CWS TV offering |28 March 2018

Starting today, the Cable & Wireless Seychelles TV will be airing the National Geographic’s ‘One Strange Rock’ series, hosted by two-time Academy Award nominee, Will Smith.

The 10-part series is conveyed by acclaimed filmmaker Darren Aronofsky (‘Mother!’, ‘Black Swan’, ‘Requiem for a Dream’) alongside award-winning Producer, Jane Root.

The programme aims to unearth the extraordinary story of our planet exploring its fragility and wonder as a curiously calibrated speck of a planet in the harsh universe.

Integrating Aronofsky’s distinctive style with Root’s iconic storytelling, ‘One Strange Rock’ is a visual journey that alternates from the microscopic to the cosmic and reveals our planet through an alien lens.

The series explores some of the questions many of us take for granted: Why is Earth the only planet (that we know) to support life? How fragile are the perfectly tuned systems that sustain this living planet? What are the greatest threats to the environment and human existence on Earth? Are we alone, and where did we come from? Is there really no place like home?

Smith contemplates these questions and guides viewers on a full-sensory, unprecedented exploration, bolstered by an elite group of astronauts who provide their unique perspectives and relate personal memoirs of the planet seen from a distance.

According to Aronofsky, who personally collaborated with European Space Agency (ESA), the 10-part series is a visual bible blending everything – astronomy, anthropology, biology, chemistry and physics – to reveal Earth from space as an incredible myriad of working systems.

“The series is nothing short of epic with filming across six continents and 45 countries and with remarkable access on the ISS,” says Jane Root.

“To get the ultimate big picture, both the narrative and our innovative camera technology transport viewers across little-known locations rife with cosmic and macro imagery and astonishing, extreme paradoxes,” she adds.

Earth is a teeming bubble of life in the blackness of space made possible by the dynamic forces and twists of fate uncovered throughout the series. Each episode unpacks fascinating facts with themes that make us rethink what we know about the planet; for example, half of the world’s life-supporting oxygen comes from single-celled phytoplankton, a hundred of which could fit on a pin head. ‘One Strange Rock’s title itself derives from the intricate, finely tuned, perfectly adjusting abilities of our planet to sustain life.

In order to tell this definitive story of our planet, the series has been in production for more than two years in 195 locations with 139 shoots, capturing footage equivalent to a 22-year movie marathon. This was made possible with camera crews using first filming opportunities, special access to otherwise forbidden sites and high-speed filming capturing plunging depths and ascending to great heights recording smallest to largest life forms in extreme locations.

Each hour-long episode, airing weekly at 10pm on CWS TV’s National Geographic Channel (154), explores monumental events: genesis, cosmic violence, the cycle of life/death, human intelligence and alien life, sacrifice, oxygen, survival versus destruction and how the planet has shaped life and life has shaped the planet.