A Real Bug’s Life season 2 continues to turn its Pixar movie inspiration into a detailed look at some of the world’s smallest and most interesting creatures. With five new episodes, including one fascinating look behind the scenes, A Real Bug’s Life season 2 explores how insects and other small creatures survive across the world’s various biomes. The new season is once again narrated by Crazy Rich Asians, Jumanji: The Next Level, and Kung Fu Panda 4 star Awkwafina.

While it was inspired by the Pixar classic, A Real Bug’s Life studies insects rarer than the insects in A Bug’s Life, even documenting a number of behaviors for the first time. This was shepherded by an expert crew of filmmakers including Executive Producer Martha Holmes and Producer Bill Markham. Both have produced a number of films and series about the natural world, with Holmes having worked on Big Beasts, A Year on Planet Earth, and Patagonia, and Markham on Night on Earth, Earth Odyssey with Dylan Dreyer, and Big Beasts.

ScreenRant spoke with A Real Bug’s Life season 2 Executive Producer Martha Holmes and Producer Bill Markham. The pair discussed the creation of the nature documentary, revealing how many people were involved in bringing these small-scale stories to life and the kinds of surprises they encountered along the way. They also spoke to why they decided to devote a whole episode of A Real Bug’s Life season 2 to showing how the series was made. Note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Martha Holmes & Bill Markham Discuss The Huge Endeavor Of Making A Real Bug’s Life Season 2

It Took A 450-Person Team And Tons Of Pre-Production

ScreenRant: I’d like to start with talking about your collaboration. Are each of you taking on different aspects of this project, or are you more so working together and overseeing the whole thing?

Bill Markham: It's a massive team, I have to say. There were 450 people who worked on this series and 130 different species of bug, so it was a huge undertaking. The role is multifaceted—I'm a series producer, which means I'm doing everything from employing people to sitting in the edit and working with the producers to working with people who are on location. Martha is overseeing the whole thing and also acting as a conduit with National Geographic and Disney.

Martha Holmes: I’m a light touch overall. Bill’s really crafting sweat-and-tears lattes for me.

You mentioned there was a team of 450, and you’re getting footage from all over the world. What kind of prep goes into figuring out where to shoot and which bugs to film?

Bill Markham: A huge amount. There was a long pre-production period of research, finding the best stories, and finding the way that we wanted to tell those stories. It took months, and this wasn’t one of those series where people would go to Africa and see what they could find. As you can probably tell, it’s very specifically filmed. It’s about finding the certain bug species, finding the really incredible story of what they can do, and portraying that with the best possible shots.

Martha Holmes: One of the key things that we do is work really closely with scientists. They have a broad understanding, but also, in some cases, each scientist has spent years on a particular insect. You can tap those people for what’s going to happen, what you’re going to see, and how reliable it is. The researchers go so deep into the science, because what you can’t do is throw money at a shoot that isn’t going to deliver. You absolutely need to come back with a story in the footage.

Bill Markham: And there was an extra twist to this series as well. We wanted real, engaging, relatable characters, so we were choosing based on that. There could be some bugs that do incredible things, but if they didn’t look incredible or you didn’t feel the audience was going to engage… you might notice that a lot of the bugs we go with have got big eyes, they’ve got necks, and we can appreciate that they’re having human-like reactions to events. If it’s got small eyes and it’s pretty static, it didn’t really make the cut.

There was a lot of back-and-forth about which bugs we were going to feature, and what stories we could tell. As you probably noticed, each episode has a slightly different aspect of bug life history to it. Some are about breeding, some are about survival, some are about metamorphosis, and it’s a little bit hidden but that’s what those episodes are about. So, there were many different reasons to pick different stories.

Outside of insect selection and physically getting the cameras to be able to film these creatures in this way, what is the biggest challenge in making them feel relatable?

Martha Holmes: If you think about every animal, they’ve got basic needs. They've got to grow up and get away from mom and dad, usually. They’ve got to find food, find a mate ,and raise children of their own. Once that's done, they're sort of done, as we are. As long as their children make it, their role, really, is done.

The forest story is all about finding love, be it chemically with the fireflies, or with the stag beetles having a big fight. However you win a mate, there are so many different ways of doing it in the insect world. The pond story is about changing form to live between an underwater world and the topside world, so it’s about how animals adapt underwater and topside in the air. The beach is about finding a new home.

All these things are totally relatable, apart from maybe the transforming one. You’ve got to move out of your parents’ home. You're going to find your first flat, apartment, house, whatever it is. It's so relatable—it’s what happens in the bug world too.

it's more what happens in the above world too.

Bill Markham: What’s crazy is that I think 90 percent of the animals on Earth are insects, and each one has a very different way of getting through the trials of life. Each species does something different, so it is a great resource to find these amazing stories. In the past, people have said, “You've got to have fur and big eyes and twitchy noses,” but actually, there's so much diversity within the bug world. There are some real characters to unearth.

Markham & Holmes On Working With Bug Wranglers To Capture Behavior & Being Surprised Anyway

The Process Allowed Them To Film Certain Bugs For The First Time

The last episode showed the making of this series, and it was amazing to me to see how people worked with bugs to capture their behavior. When you’re doing things like catching the tiger beetle to film it, was that because it felt like the only way to get those behaviors? How important was it to do things like that as opposed to trying to find those behaviors in the wild?

Bill Markham: Large parts of the series were filmed out in the world with animals doing what they do best, like the army ants. But, really, to follow an individual story with a bug is really, really difficult. They're small and they disappear, so we had to work with bug wranglers who would get the bugs on set. We wanted to represent real stories with real animals, but the way to do it when you've got a crew that's costing a lot of money every day is that you have to be quite choreographed. You have to be very careful how you do everything.

Also, there's an animal welfare issue. You can't just spend a lot of time chasing after the same bug with big lights and big cameras. You need to be able to do everything very efficiently. So, I think it is the only way, really, unless you sat and just waited and watched, in which case you probably couldn't see very much and it would probably be quite boring.

Martha Holmes: I think when you're talking about insects en masse, you can do it. With the army ants and the fireflies—obviously that was just a forest full of fireflies. But if you are filming something like a tiger beetle, you couldn't just turn up, sit around, and wait for one to run in front of you—you saw how difficult it was to make in the making-of episode. It was ridiculous.

Almost in every case, the bug wranglers are the scientists who are studying it because they know how to find them, where to find them, how to track them, and when to release them. In our profession, animal welfare is people welfare first. We have to keep our crew safe, and animal welfare is absolutely critical. We all believe very, very deeply that we can't hurt the animals, even with little bugs.

Were there any moments in the field where, despite all the planning, you captured behavior that surprised you?

Bill Markham: There were surprises. The fireflies, for me, in “Love in the Forest” are full of surprises. I think there are something like 2,000 species of fireflies in the world. I think there are 35 in the Smoky Mountains alone, and they all have different techniques of meeting of the opposite sex. They flash at different rates.

It turns out that one of them mimics other firefly species to attract them to herself, and then, rather than mate with them, she eats them. To see that in reality was absolutely shocking. Furthermore, to see one going and eating a firefly that a spider had caught—so stealing from a spider's web—that’s high risk.

Martha Holmes: That wasn’t planned.

Bill Markham: Yeah. That was really, really exciting. That species of tiger beetle had never been filmed before as well, so that was pretty exciting too. I think they went to the beach to tell a story about the hermit crabs and all the other things there, but they ended up filming that tiger beetle, which is the fastest animal for its size on the planet, and that species had never been filmed.

Martha Holmes: It's so fast. There's this unbelievable fact, which I can't get out of my head, that if a man ran at the speed of the beetle, he’d be running at 720 miles an hour.

Bill Markham: Also, they run so fast that their eyes and brains can't keep up with it, so they actually go blind. As they go faster and faster, they lose their vision. They have to stop, look around, see where they are, and then go again.

Bill Markham Talks The Real Message Of A Real Bug’s Life Season 2

“We’re Losing Bugs At A Huge Rate”, So Raising Interest Is Crucial

When I was a kid, two of my favorite animals were hermit crabs and fireflies, so I did very much appreciate those being in here.

Bill Markham: Fantastic. Lynn Faust, who's the firefly queen, described them as a gateway bug. They don't do anything wrong, they're absolutely lovely, they're charming and magical, and people fall in love with them. Once people get into their world, they start realizing, “Oh, bugs really are fascinating.” I suppose that's what we’re really trying to do with this series: use these engaging characters and these fun stories to get people really interested in this incredible group of animals. And it's important that they do, because at the moment, we're losing bugs at such a rate. I think in Britain, flying bugs have declined by 60 percent in the last 20 years, and they weren't at a great level 20 years ago.

When I was a kid—it's a classic story—you’d go on a drive at night, you'd come back, and your windscreen would be covered in bugs. That doesn't happen anymore. My kid, who's 10 years old, has never seen that because bugs are disappearing eight times faster than mammals and eight times faster than reptiles. That's extinction. We're losing bugs at a huge rate all over the world, so it's really, really important that people engage. That's the serious message in this fun series.

Markham & Holmes Share How Technological Advancements Helped Capture Stunning Scenes

They Used Tech So Sensitive That “Your Heartbeat Bumps The Camera”

I want to also touch on the technology you used because it's amazing what you're able to capture. What were the most crucial developments or pieces of tech that you were able to use for this?

Martha Holmes: There are three big things. There are probe lenses, so you can get really, really deep into an insect’s world without disturbing them with having a massive camera in there. Another big thing is stabilizing the cameras, and the other really big one was using LED lights. Surgeons, when they're operating on humans, use cold tube lights to go in and see what they're doing. For us, because they're cold, they don't fry the insects. The whole set can remain. You can get lights in everywhere, so you can light up the background and create a fantastic scene, but with minimal impact.

Bill Markham: I had a very personal experience with that. My very, very first day filming ever was filming woodlice, or pill bugs. This was in the 1990s, so technology has moved on a bit since then. We had these massive lights because the cameras weren't very light-sensitive—you need to have a lot of light for these macro lenses. We filmed these bugs and the ground started steaming, and I was this 20-year-old green individual. I was like, “What is going on?” And this woodlouse was running through this steaming ground, and we had to turn all the lights off and stop filming.

Now, as Martha says, with minimal light—and therefore not changing the bug's behavior at all—we can get right down with them. We used these incredible programs that not only allow you to get close, but also to get close and wide, and see the background almost in focus. In the olden days, if you had your bug in focus, you couldn't see what the hell else was going on. The combination of this means that we can get these beautiful images and we can get the bugs doing what they do naturally without being affected by blasts of light at high temperatures.

Martha Holmes: Also, you can stabilize it because we're using computer-stabilized cameras that can move in three dimensions and all that sort of stuff.

Bill Markham: It's like using a PlayStation or a gaming console. You actually move the cameras like that because if you're moving them with your hands, any vibration will get transmitted.

Martha Holmes: Your heartbeat bumps the camera because you're filming in such macro that, literally, your pulse makes the camera shake.

About A Real Bug’s Life Season 2

Inspired by the Disney Pixar classic film, A Real Bug’s Life season 2 reveals the lives of even more of the world’s smallest creatures. Told across five episodes, including a “Bee-hind The Camera” making-of, A Real Bug’s Life season 2 highlights the daily drama that plays out on operatic levels, even at a small scale.

A Real Bug’s Life season 2 is streaming now on Disney+.