The BEST episodes directed by Gary Johnstone
#1 - Einstein's Big Idea
NOVA - Season 32 - Episode 10
Exactly 100 years ago, Albert Einstein grappled with the implications of his revolutionary Special Theory of Relativity and came to a startling conclusion: mass and energy are one, related by the formula E = mc2. Among Einstein's ideas, E = mc2 is by far the most famous. Yet how many people know what it really means? In a thought-provoking and engrossing documentary, Einstein's Big Idea illuminates this deceptively simple formula by unrevealing the story of how it came to be.
#2 - Judgment Day: Intelligent Design On Trial
NOVA - Season 34 - Episode 13
In this two-hour special, NOVA captures the turmoil that tore apart the community of Dover, Pennsylvania in one of the latest battles over teaching evolution in public schools. Featuring trial reenactments based on court transcripts and interviews with key participants, including expert scientists and Dover parents, teachers, and town officials, "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" follows the celebrated federal case of Kitzmiller v. Dover School District. This program was coproduced with Paul G. Allen's Vulcan Productions, Inc. In 2004, the Dover school board ordered science teachers to read a statement to high school biology students suggesting that there is an alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution called intelligent design–the idea that life is too complex to have evolved naturally and therefore must have been designed by an intelligent agent. The teachers refused to comply. Later, parents opposed to intelligent design filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing the school board of violating the constitutional separation of church and state. "There was a blow-up like you couldn't believe," Bill Buckingham, head of the school board's curriculum committee, tells NOVA. Buckingham helped formulate the intelligent-design policy when he noticed that the biology textbook chosen by teachers for classroom use was, in his words, "laced with Darwinism." NOVA presents the arguments by lawyers and expert witnesses in riveting detail and provides an eye-opening crash course on questions such as "What is evolution?" and "Is intelligent design a scientifically valid alternative?" Kitzmiller v. Dover was the first legal test of intelligent design as a scientific theory, with the plaintiffs arguing that it is a thinly veiled form of creationism, the view that a literal interpretation of the Bible accounts for all observed facts about nature. During the trial, lawyers for the plaintiffs showed that evolution is one of the best-tested and most thoroughly con
#3 - James Cameron's Expedition - Bismarck
Discovery Channel Documentaries - Season 2002 - Episode 19
Expedition: Bismarck is a 2002 documentary film produced for the Discovery Channel by Andrew Wight and James Cameron, directed by James Cameron and Gary Johnstone, and narrated by Lance Henriksen. The film follows an underwater expedition to the German battleship Bismarck and digitally reconstructs events that led up to the ship's sinking during World War II. In 2003 the film was honored with an Emmy award for Outstanding Sound Editing for Non-Fiction Programming.
#4 - The Mighty Hood
Channel 4 (UK) Documentaries - Season 2001 - Episode 5
The first hour follows the last remaining "Hood" survivor, Ted Briggs, as he joins the expedition and returns to the site of the sinking. Using archival film, dramatic reconstruction, computer effects and interviews with the men involved, the program brings "HMS Hood" back to life and follows the expedition members as they solve a 60-year-old mystery: why did the biggest and best ship in the British fleet sink so quickly?
#5 - Sink the Bismarck
Channel 4 (UK) Documentaries - Season 2001 - Episode 6
The second hour brings to life the pursuit and destruction of the legendary warship and attempts to solve another mystery: did the British sink the "Bismarck" or did her own crew scuttle the ship to prevent her capture?