Exciting view from the top

Filming crews set off for a shooting plan for Aerial China. The six episodes of the series' season 1 will be aired from Friday on CCTV's Documentary Channel at 8 pm. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Each episode is 50 minutes, and covers one province-level administrative region in China, showing its natural and cultural landscape.

The tropical islands in southern Hainan province; the historical relics in western Shaanxi province; the breathtaking lakes, mountains and prairies in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region; the ice and snow in the northeastern Heilongjiang province; old villages in the eastern Jiangxi province and the hustle and bustle of Shanghai are among the things featured in the first season of this documentary series.

"We are like tour guides ushering people to see these places with interesting stories, so we do not take a philosophical and pedagogical tone in the narration, which are sometimes used by similar works made overseas," Yu says.

Nevertheless, the preparing of the voice-overs needed a lot of interaction with scientists, historians and other scholars.