(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Welcome to the age of humans.

(upbeat music continues) (funky music) - "Human Footprint" has, I can easily say has been the single hardest thing I've ever tried to do in my entire life.

(funky music continues) - We never worked on a big broadcast series before.

If somebody told me that like when these big series take off the ground, it's kind of like Indiana Jones running away from the boulder and you're just like, you got the deadlines coming, you gotta finish, and it's just like nonstop.

All you're doing is going out, having a once in a lifetime experience doing this crazy thing, telling this crazy story, challenging all your beliefs about the world, and then quickly getting ready for the next one, doing the next one, you just do that over and over again for a year and a half.

- There are things that I have seen that I cannot unsee.

- Right.

- And I will be having a whole different kind of nightmare from now on.

(guests laughing) - I think I'm lucky.

I think I was prepared for the grind.

I love grind.

This was the most I've ever ground in my life.

(upbeat music) - We did a sequence in our episode about invasive species, "Strangers in Paradise", about the Burmese python in the Everglades.

Right off the bat, as soon as we got to Miami, we were out the first night with Donna Kalil, who is a professional python hunter.

- [Shane] It was a thing.

(upbeat music) It started off great, great conversations.

- [Nate] We were out with her into the wee hours of the morning.

It's like two in the morning.

- 2:12.

- [Nate] We hadn't actually seen any pythons with Donna, so we went back a second night to try to find pythons with her again, and did the same thing again until like three in the morning.

(upbeat music continues) - And then at some point, everything kind of started mixing together.

- And we'd kind of just be like searching.

And at a certain point everything starts looking like a snake and it just feels like you're kind of hallucinating, kind of losing your mind.

- I just remember at one point like, on the back of a truck, just holding on, and just telling myself like, you could just go to sleep for like five minutes, it's fine, you're not gonna fall off.

- Shane's literally sitting on the back of the truck with (chuckling) his eyes closed, so I call Neil.

"I think you need to like make sure that those guys are awake."

And Rick (chuckling) has been staring straightforward for an hour, hasn't moved.

- I definitely thought I saw a python.

No, I'm positive I saw a python.

I think it's the exact phrase that was in a cut for a while.

Like me in the background going, "I'm positive."

(record scratching) - [Donna] You definitely saw a python, though?

- I'm positive.

In hindsight, it definitely could have been a very wiggly looking stick.

Natha Pajorica lives on in our hearts.

(laughing) (upbeat music) ♪ Hey ♪ - Nate and Neil have this approach to the world where it's like, if we can't get it done in the time where we're given, we're just gonna have to spend more time doing it.

And Nate and Neil are great pushers.

That's their like happy place.

(upbeat music) And there was a couple times where I was like, think we could have done this over two days.

(Rick laughing) But there's some sleeping in between, but.

- I love Rick.

Rick is a dude that like stays more or less right around neutral.

- God, Rick, I don't know what I would've done without Rick over the last year and a half.

Rick Smith, aka Ricky Bobby.

Rick Smith is the DP of "Human Footprint", sort of the visual mastermind of a lot of what you see on screen in the series.

He is an artist.

He takes lenses and he takes cameras, and he turns light into pieces of art, and he did that over and over and over again.

And over grueling schedule.

whatever magic sauce, whatever gene there is for grind, Rick Smith has got it.

The guy is an absolute beast.

(upbeat music) - You know, I saw him like sling three cameras and like eight tripods over his shoulder, and be like, "All right, don't worry about it, I got this one."

Just kind of walk off into the woods.

- He's just like always chill.

It was like, Rick always seemed like he just came from getting a massage, is what it is.

(chuckling) - [Georgia] Rick held the team together.

- I have legitimately never seen and definitely never heard anything like this before.

(dogs howling) - [Nate] One of the episodes is about dogs.

And we found this guy, this Inuit hunter, up in, like so far north in a place called Resolute Bay.

- It's hard to wrap your head around how far away Resolute is from everything.

You know, it's a multi-day adventure just to get there.

- What is it like, 74 degrees north of the Arctic Circle, it's summertime.

There's no nighttime, it's 24 hours of sunlight.

- [Rick] There's a level of danger that you have to be aware of.

- I don't know what happened to me psychologically, (Shane chuckling) but something in me broke.

I wasn't quite sure what it was, but I thought I was going crazy.

Luckily Rick was there.

He's like, "Hey bud, it's three o'clock in the morning, it's really late and we're gonna get you some food, and we're gonna put you to bed."

- [Rick] You don't even realize like how close you are to a shut down.

(slow paced music) For Shane to get to experience something like that, it's like a once in a lifetime experience.

And watching him see a polar bear for the first time, it's amazing.

- [Man Off Screen] Good television.

- Good television.

- I wish I could go back and like talk to 13 year old me and tell myself what was coming.

I'd flip out.

I'm flipping out now.

(slow paced music continues) - When I look back at the past year, I don't really think about what my life in San Diego was like.

I think about like airports, and camaraderie, and beer, and weird animals, and sleep deprivation.

(chuckling) - What day is it?

What month is it?

What year is it?

(chuckling) - Every new experience kind of washes over you in this way that's like both, it's impactful, but also, you can't even remember it.

Did I go to Singapore?

Was I at that wild horse roundup?

Was I in the Arctic?

- We went to 44 different cities, interviewed well over a hundred people, slept in, I don't know, like 80 different Airbnbs.

I slept on the floor, I shared a bed with Neil, shared a bed with Rick, you know, slept in tents.

- When everything is said and done and we have six hours of television that's gonna air to a massive audience around the country through PBS, that's gonna be incredibly gratifying.

I'm gonna be very proud of our whole team.

Everybody is working and going above and beyond to make this series everything it could be.

And I think it's gonna be something really special.

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