Dr Mike Leahy and a tarantula in Brazil.
If you were going to set up a world-class television production house to provide top-rating documentaries for the United States, Europe and Asian markets, then Dunedin is the most unlikely place on Earth you would choose.
It's virtually the last major city before the Antarctic and at the other end of the country from New Zealand's major television broadcasters.
Yet NHNZ has managed to compete in the international television market so successfully that it has become one of the best-known and internationally respected brands.
Its head office and production facilities are still located in Dunedin but NHNZ Ltd has come a long way from the original Natural History Unit set up by New Zealand's state broadcaster 30 years ago to film (literally - everything was shot on 16mm stock back in those days) one or two hours a year of New Zealand wildlife and wild places.
In 1997, Natural History New Zealand was bought by Los Angeles-based company Fox Television Studios and in 2002 it was rebranded NHNZ, to reflect a deliberate expansion into different filmmaking genres and categories.
In its 30-year history, NHNZ has made more than 560 hours of award-winning documentaries, which have screened in 229 countries.
Today, NHNZ boasts offices in Beijing, Washington and Singapore, has 45 hours of programming on the books for the coming year, and has crews filming around the world in HD (high definition).
It post-produces and masters all its shows in Dunedin.
You could be excused for thinking the status and prospects of NHNZ never looked better, but 12 months ago it was a very different story.
Production houses around the globe were closing, merging or being bought by media conglomerates and venture capitalists after the fallout from the US dollar slump.
NHNZ was heading down the same path.
"It was catastrophic," managing director Michael Stedman said.
"We trade almost exclusively in US dollars and when the kiwi climbed from 50, 60, 70 and up to 80c against the US dollar, it reduced our income by 20% to 30%, yet we were expected to deliver the same outputs. We were losing millions and it took us to the brink," he said.
NHNZ underwent a major restructuring to cope with both the impact of the high NZ dollar and reduced international budgets.
"The slices of the pie have become thinner and thinner and thinner. On a per-film basis, the amount of money available in the international market is much smaller than it was five years ago," Mr Stedman said.
"Technology has been a big help in dealing with smaller budgets and where we used to use a crew of three or four, we may now use a crew of two. We emerged from that restructuring a leaner, smarter, more adaptable company.
"I think any company that isn't adaptable is going to go the way of some of our native species - extinct," he said.
If you look at what has happened to other specialist blue-chip natural history production houses, Michael Stedman's dire warnings of extinction are well founded.
Companies such as Survival and Partridge Films, once prestigious world-leaders, have been closed down or gobbled up by large corporations, a fate Mr Stedman has been determined to prevent happening to NHNZ.
"The company grew out of making wildlife documentaries and years ago we looked out ahead and said, 'Well, if you've got a company based on a single genre, then you are in a very vulnerable position.'
"So we expanded out the areas that we work in, based on our skill set, and that is the ability to tell stories, the ability to film in very specialised ways and interpret science; so that naturally included documentaries to do with history, with medicine, with science," Mr Stedman said.
Broadening the company's output and becoming 100% owned by Fox have been key to NHNZ's survival, allowing it to ride the unpredictable waves of the changing market and the rising New Zealand dollar.
Development manager Craig Meade said the market determined what shows the company pitched and made.
"The best programme pitches, in my experience, are when the broadcaster calls me and says, 'Craig, will you pitch us a show about tiger births.'
"That's the best kind of pitch and that happens a lot. Probably half of what we've got going now has been the broadcaster just called us and asked for it."
Being client-focused and responsive to what the market wants is part of NHNZ's recipe for success, but the other factor is being alert to changes in the media world.
Eight months ago, NHNZ appointed Caroline Cook to head a new media division and develop new business opportunities.
Video gaming is one area Ms Cook is exploring.
"It's very new in the broadcast industry. The BBC is doing it; National Geographic has just launched a site.
"But new media isn't just about video games. The challenge for everyone is to develop content which is able to be used in a 'cross-platform' way.
"That could be 're-purposing' our footage for the cinema to mobile clips for the Internet to short films for corporations to use on their websites. NHNZ was one of the first companies to film in HD, which is in high demand, and we can sell that footage through our library," she said.
Mr Meade said the worldwide demand for HD programmes had also had a huge impact on the type of shows NHNZ made.
"Once upon a time, if we were pitching a wildlife show about tigers, we could use shots from our library. We've got tens and tens of hours of tigers but it's all standard definition.
"Now, we'd have to go and shoot the whole thing in HD and immediately it becomes apparent we can't make it for the money. No-one's going to pay you to sit in a jungle for years to get what you need from a wild tiger.
"But, in saying that, we've just made this programme about a great white shark and all the HD footage we shot on those sharks will go into the National Geographic library, which we'll be able to access in the future for other Nat Geo shows.
"It's just it's going to take time before we can re-acquire as an industry enough HD wildlife footage that will allow us to go back to making shows that are archive-based," he said.
Another way NHNZ keeps ahead of the competition is to meet overseas network executives face to face.
Director of marketing and development Neil Harraway travels to the US and Europe at least three times a year and tries to meet as many of the company's major clients as possible.
They include Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, National Geographic Channels, A & E (Arts and Entertainment), Travel Channel as well as France 5, ZDF (Germany) and the United Kingdom broadcasters.
Mr Meade also goes to the US twice a year.
"We have a lot of talks with the various channels about what they want. We try to be very co-operative with them. We're making a show with them, not just for them, and we enter into team spirit.
"We're not big on sitting around telling everybody how great we are, whereas the English, in particular, will bore you to death telling you how great they are - they're great all the time.
"We don't do that. New Zealanders are polite, easy-going. We quietly do a whole lot of hard work and come back with something that's good, sometimes ingenious. Everybody recognises that spirit in the New Zealand culture and that translates well in the market," Mr Meade said.
"Recently, a lot of the networks have been wanting blue-collar programmes and we did a big two-hour special Tuna Cowboys about a bunch of guys who dive with tuna in big nets and transport them from the subantarctic ocean up to South Australia.
"That was very much in that vein, but the market is very cyclical. Up until March of the Penguins everyone said 'animals don't rate', then bang, wildlife is back in demand," he said.
The second series of NHNZ's Orang-utan Island is in production.
It follows the lives of a group of orphaned orang-utans living together on their island sanctuary and was the top-rating show on the Animal Planet network when it screened last year.
Such success often meant return orders on shows, Mr Stedman said.
"Another example is a series we made for the Biography channel in the US called I Survived. That was their highest-rating show ever and when you hit that sort of position in the market, you are going to get return orders."
For the past 15 years, NHNZ has also been developing relationships in Asia and is now the largest Western producer of television documentaries operating in China.
"We're the largest co-producer in the world with NHK of Japan. We've had an office in Beijing for seven years, been operating there for 10 years and a production company in Singapore was a recent acquisition.
"Asia is an extraordinarily important part of the world and we will continue to grow our presence in Asia. We're looking at Korea and Taiwan as possible areas that we have an interest in," Mr Stedman said.
The company's slate of Chinese productions now boasts a range of programmes about Chinese archaeology, wildlife and engineering marvels.
"The shows we're making in China are selling unbelievably well around the world," Mr Stedman said.
They include Man Made Marvels, a series for Discovery Networks Asia featuring the construction of Hangzhou Bay bridge, the world's longest sea-crossing bridge; and Megastructures for National Geographic Channel, which profiled Shanghai's World Financial Centre, the Beijing Watercube (the Olympics aquatic centre) and Yangshan's deepwater port.
One way NHNZ has survived the tyranny of distance in a highly competitive market is by embracing - and sometimes leading - technological change.
One example was the five years technical and IT systems manager Wayne Poll spent in the mid-1990s developing a system with Discovery Channel in the US for electronic transfer of shows to clients.
This meant NHNZ could "post" cuts digitally to websites that clients could access immediately - saving days, sometimes weeks in delivery time.
NHNZ has turned adversity to advantage, becoming master of all aspects of production from research through to state-of-the-art computer graphics, colour grading, audio post-production and online editing.
It's a unique aspect to the company and attracts people from all over the world to work at the company.
Travel Bug (working title) director/cameraman and sound recordist Giles Pike was hired from Wellington.
"We have a crew of two to film eight-by-one-hour programmes - my colleague, Sina Walker, does assistant producing, researching and some producing and I'm the director, cameraman and sound recordist, and anything else, we split between us.
"It's very physically demanding, because the HD cameras we use are very big and they're technically quite tricky to use in a hand-held situation, and there's no backup.
"You can't turn to your crew of 15 and go, 'OK, guys, let's take a break and let's figure out what we're going to do here.' You also have to carry everything wherever you go so you end up looking like these little leaf-cutting ants carrying these huge cases through the jungle," he said.
A co-production for National Geographic Channel International and for Travel Channel in the US, Travel Bug is a new type of show combining a host, wildlife and travel.
"It sort of falls in between the Steve Irwin-type show and David Attenborough and has bugs biting and living in the presenter on many occasions," Mr Pike said.
"It's been a difficult shoot at times, because we have to get really up close and personal with many of these creatures, and each one of us, me, Sina and the presenter Dr Mike Leahy have our own personal fears.
"Sina doesn't like worms, I'm not great with snakes, and Mike hates fish and bats. Of course, what do we film in the first show but piranha fish and vampire bats?
"I think at some stage in every show there's always one of us going, 'Actually, I'm not sure I can do this because that's really big and I'm really scared.' We all have our moments of clarity: 'Did I really sign for this?'"
But despite those "moments" Mr Pike and many like him see NHNZ for what it is - a world-class outfit based in one of New Zealand's most beautiful cities.
This year, NHNZ celebrates its 30th birthday - a remarkable achievement for any media company but especially for one based in Dunedin.
Kerrie Waterworth is a Dunedin-based writer and journalist.
