PRODUCTION


BIG PICTURE PREHISTORIC PLANET


shooting in 8K (for 4K transmission), and a full frame sensor, usually a Helium Super 35, the first time it had been used in natural history film making. This gave them great image quality and data set, capturing large frames where they could zoom in later. For slow motion and time lapse, there were Phantom cameras. And to get right inside a habitat, there was the Laowa macro probe lens, also used in keyhole surgery. DJI drones were another essential. The teams on location were small, but critically


they included MPC visual effects crew, who taught natural history filmmakers to use LIDAR scanners to ensure correct scaling. Basic dinosaur models, or cut outs, were placed in the real environment and, when this wasn’t possible, they used long boom polls or flew drones to capture the eyeline. HDRIs were also critical for lighting, so that conditions could be replicated in CG. On set, the vfx team might need two HDRI’s for a day’s shoot, but the constantly moving natural light changed the game, needing closer to 150.


Meanwhile, the dinosaurs were brought to


life back in London’s Soho. Elliot Newman, vfx supervisor at MPC, explains the detailed attention required by the animators, getting to grips with anatomy, “the skeletal part of it, the muscles,


“IT’S NOT A JAWS AND CLAWS SHOW, IT’S MUCH MORE


ABOUT THE NUANCES AND SOPHISTICATIONS OF THE DINOSAURS”


how skin slides on top of muscles.” On top of this physical understanding, it was important to bring a little magic, for each creature to have a personality. Newman describes “a selection process in terms of the puppetry and the controls of that character to really help define how a leg, or tail should move…. The rig would drive a lot of that, but obviously the animation team would provide the nuances of that animation performance as


well.” Sharing the visualisation with the natural history team, “was a kind of feedback loop.” Prehistoric Planet didn’t just rely on film


titans for the visuals, the music was composed by Hans Zimmer and Bleeding Fingers Music. Alongside conventional instruments, the composer fashioned their own. Antlers, bones, giant eggs and slabs of 200-million-year-old petrified wood were used to make bone cellos, bone violins, ostrich egg flutes and a fossil xylophone. Sound gathering for the project was extensive,


while created sounds were meticulously invented. “You have to extrapolate what their soft tissue structure would be and if sound echoes through different cavities within the skeleton,” says Favreau. “The last piece of the puzzle that came


together was the narration,” says Favreau. Gunton has worked across the years with Attenborough; for Favreau, it was a first. “When his voice came on, it just hit a different part of my brain and all of a sudden there was a feeling… I didn’t realise I associated so much with this man.”


44


televisual.com Summer 2022


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