Executive Producer Mike Gunton and Showrunner Tim Walker discuss how they went back in time again, using VFX from MPC, to showcase the lives of new dinosaurs, new habitats, and new scientific discoveries, taking viewers around the world on an epic adventure, now streaming on Apple TV+.
Breaking out of the Jurassic Park mold and into one constructure by the BBC Studios Natural History Unit is the Apple TV+ series Prehistoric Planet Season 2, which combines CG dinosaurs animated by MPC with plate photography to create naturalistic performances and habitats. Among the new additions is the one of the largest ankylosaurs, known as the Tarchia, while the Tyrannosaurus rex makes a reappearance.
The five new episodes are divided into ‘Islands,’ where the duck-billed Hadrosaurs are preyed upon by snakes and aerial predators; ‘Badlands,’ which takes place in an extremely harsh and toxic volcanic environment that the Titanosaurs travel through to lay their eggs; ‘Swamps,’ which depicts Austroraptors fighting over the best fishing spot; ‘Oceans,’ which dives into the abundant marine life that covers 70 percent of the planet surface; and ‘North America,’ which takes a continental view of the Tyrannosaurus rex, Pterosaur, and Pectinodon.
A lot was learned from making Prehistoric Planet that could be leveraged for Prehistoric Planet Season 2, which began production a year and a half into the making of the series’ debut season. “One of the main things was the ethos of what we were trying to do, which is a sense of creating a natural history series about dinosaurs rather than a dinosaur show,” explains Mike Gunton, Executive Producer, who is also the Creative Director and Executive Producer at BBC Studios Natural History Unit. “We decided to take everybody back 66 million years ago in a time machine and filmed it for real with all the rules and challenges that faces. That was a step and journey for the visual effects team because they’re used to working where you can place a camera anywhere and make a character do anything. But our watch word for that was ‘authenticity’ so we had to create restraints on the artists and get them to understand our modus operandi. Why you must shoot on a long lens for this sequence. Why you can’t get a camera close. Why you would only get one camera position for this. Why you have to cutaway to a drone. All those rules that we know in our trajectory film had to be learned by the visual effects artists. They learned quickly but there is no doubt by the time we got to Season 2 we were all in the groove. And the other thing is confidence. Having done Season 1 and knowing that it was working. Certainly, when Season 1 went out, we were anxious because no one had done this before. Would the scientific and natural history communities approve? They all did. We also learned what they particularly did not like and what worked.”
Everything on the show begins with the fossil records. “We’re working in a small window of geological time where we’re based in Maastrichtian, which is the last five to six million years of the Late Cretaceous,” states Tim Walker, Showrunner. “We know a lot about what the environments and animals were like because it’s the most recent time to us. We have a great lead consultant Dr. Darren Naish who has his finger on the paleontological pulse, which means we have a great relationship with the paleontology world. You might think that paleontology moves at a glacial pace because it starts with the laborious task of excavating fossils, but the actual interpretation of the science moves quickly. And it hasn’t been quicker than it is at the moment because people can talk to each other on the Internet and can instantly transfer data. Working with this wonderful worldwide group of paleontologists from many different disciplines, not just the stone and bones but also paleobotanists, we can start building this rich world. Then we call upon the expertise of Mike as the creative director of the Natural History Unit that has been making some of the most iconic wildlife films for the last 35 years, as well as the wonderful producers we work with who have spent years in the field filming animals, to start building the stories based on the type of behaviors they’ve seen. We know that animals have a suite of behaviors that they need to do to get through everyday life; that occurs now but also happened 66 million years ago.”
The episodic themes are based on habitats, with the prevailing question being how do animals survive within them? “There will be a range of adaptations that will allow them to survive,” remarks Gunton. “We’re storytellers and entertainers as well as scientists. You try to find the stories where the challenges and adaptation are extreme because it’s more gripping to watch. That’s how you cast both the animal and story.”
The key word for Season 2 is “extreme.” “Having covered the five different habitats in Season 1 where we saw ‘Coasts’, ‘Forests’, ‘Freshwater’, ‘Ice World’ and ‘Deserts,’ we wanted to look at more extreme environments that may require more extreme behaviors as well,” notes Walker. “We push into the badlands and see dinosaurs living alongside volcanic activity, and we go into the swaps where animals have to overcome challenges that type of environment throws up. It was a desire to bring new dinosaurs and new habitats for this new season.”
When it comes to dinosaurs, audiences have certain expectations. “If you were making Planet Earth 3, you have to have lions, elephants, and tigers, because they’re box office,” states Gunton. “But then you have a weird little bird that does a funny dance or a frog that lives on top of a mountain or a fish that has a fishing rod sticking out from the front of its head. You mix-up the cast. Audiences are really interesting. You must have your T-rex in there somewhere but what they want is the T-rex doing something unexpected. One of Tim’s favorite sequences is a T-rex in a tender courtship. People expect if there’s a T-rex it will be a hunt. No. It’s going to be parental care and courtship. That’s the trick of successful wildlife documentary making. The big headline is, ‘Surprise Your Audience’ because nature is extraordinary. Mother Nature comes up with the craziest things and behaviors. We want to share that with people. It’s just that we’re showing people a story that happened 66 million years ago.”
Universal narratives revolve around hunting, mating, and family. “At the heart of storytelling is emotion and we see all different types in wildlife documentaries,” observes Walker. “You see the relationship that we have as a viewer with the character whether it be a lion or bear or tiger, and in our case, whether it’s a T-rex or triceratops or one of the new cast of characters. This season we brought back some of our favorites but have also introduced about 25 new characters ranging from dinosaurs but also many of the other animals that lived alongside them. We created mammals and brought in fish, birds, and other reptiles and amphibians. But it’s that emotional attachment the viewer has with the character and the story that you’re telling. It’s something that we see in the natural world around us now or whether it’s the planet 66 million years ago.”
The “in the moment” camera style of wildlife documentaries had to be replicated within the computer. “The ambition from day one was to do exactly that,” reveals Gunton. “The trick of that is to back engineer all those constraints and fortuitous moments that happen in the real photography world of nature filming and then make it appear as if we had found footage. You should feel as if they’ve got hours of material and then edited it down to this moment. Of course, we haven’t but the skill is making it look like that. That is the hardest thing to do and is the thing that makes this series unique. We’ve been able to do it because we know how to do it for real, so we know what to do in order to reflect that in a CG world.”
“Mike mentioned the sequence I loved from Season 1, which is about the two T-rexes courting and if you look at the way the shots were designed, they reflect exactly what we observed in the field if we had been filming that for real,” states Walker. “In reality, we would have been out in the field for a long time following an animal and that means we would have to exist without impacting on its environment at all. We would have a limited range of cameras and lenses and that would dictate the type of shot we would get. When the behavior starts to occur, you’d be capturing that little moment with maybe one or a maximum of two cameras. You might be able to get a drone into the air. Then that all feeds into the cut of the film and the style of the storytelling. We’ve replicated that across the series so that everything does look as though Mike got the keys to the time machine and we went off to film Prehistoric Planet for real.”
As to whether anyone has asked how the footage was captured, Gunton replies, “There is one moment in the ‘Badland’ episode where a baby Isisaurus falls into basically a geyser, a mud pot. You can see it in there and it’s looking up as if it’s trying to escape. But it can’t get out. What I want is for people to write in and ask, ‘Did the crew put the cameras down and reach in to save the Isisaurus?’ Because if they do that then we know that we’ve done it. They believe that we were really there. And the answer if they ask me that is, ‘Of course we did!’”
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and movie profiles for VFX Voice, Animation Magazine, and British Cinematographer.
