David Attenborough in "The Life of Mammals" Image: BBC Worldwide

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on scienceofthetimes.com

It’s 2011 and one of this year’s goals  is to relaunch this blog. When I started ScienceoftheTimes.com back in ’09 my goal was to build and grow a “portal” website that would cover a lot of different areas of science. But this is a fool’s errand unless you have limitless time and resources to play with.

So ScienceoftheTimes.com is back with a more personal bent and  a new focus, which is to explore the intersection of science, journalism and multimedia. Or in other words, I’ll  mostly be writing about how we tell true stories about the natural world using all of the modalities of multimedia available to us in the 21st century…whew! Don’t worry–I promise it will be fun.

So with that, let me start by sharing with you some of the science and nature documentaries that have made an impression on me over the years and continue to be a source of inspiration as I create my own body of work.  If you think I’ve missed an awesome movie or three let me know in the comments.

Death by Design:Where Parallel Worlds Meet (Friedman/sBrunet, 1995)

This is a documentary about apoptosis–a.k.a. programmed cell death; a topic most documentary producers wouldn’t touch with a very long stick.  But it’s  artfully pulled off  by Jean-Francois Brunet and Peter Friedman (a microbiologist and film director, respectively) by blending archival footage of Hollywood musicals with microcinematography of cells committing suicide.

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