Aerial image of Tepuis, Venezuela South America: Mount Roraima (

Aerial image of Tepuis, Venezuela South America: Mount Roraima (Cerro Roraima) from the north.
When British photographer, Adrian Warren, made a documentary film about the rainforest mountains of Venezuela, surrounded by oceans of puffy white clouds and almost unexplored, he never imagined it would be turned into Disney Pixars latest animated film, UP.
Then, in 2005, he got a call from the movies director Pete Docter, who had seen his documentary and wanted the mystical mountains he saw in it to be the setting for UP, a 3D epic about an old man named Carl, who ties thousands of balloons to his house and floats away to a mystical land of beauty and adventure.
Warren, 60, an Indiana Jones type character who has been back and forth to Venezuela since the sixties, had unwittingly found the real life setting for Carl to land his balloon house.
He took UPs production team on a ten day adventure to the luxuriant rainforest of Venezuela to see the highest waterfall in the world, ride endless rapids and climb towering summits in a hidden world of cloud islands.
Where I took them, more people had landed on the moon than had been to this place, Warren said, referring to a place on Kukenan, a remote 2622 metre high summit he took the film-makers to.
Its one of the last pristine unexplored areas of the world, in fact the plants and the animals are known no-where else. Its a real living laboratory as far as natural history is concerned.
Director Pete Docter was amazed by what he saw, first in Warrens film, The Lost World, and then first hand with Warren as his guide. This was the land where Conan Doyle set his 1912 novel about prehistoric animals, also called The Lost World.
As soon as I popped in the DVD [of Warrens film] my hair stood on end because I knew this was where we should set the movie, Docter said in the production notes.
One of the biggest challenges on this film was to design a place that looked otherworldly and yet was still believable enough tha