CRAFT
you put that camera and what would be the constraints on it?”
Building dinosaur worlds
“On one level, there’s the extraordinary achievement of the VFX and the other is the unfolding of the story in animation that had to follow the rules of natural history filmmaking. That‘s the Venn diagram. We had to hit a sweet spot and I think we did.”
Before the shoot could start, MPC first built the prehistoric worlds, complete with the series’ dinosaur stars, in a game engine to previsualize the scenes. They plotted camera positions and moves and a rough animation of the dinosaurs within the environments.
The environments were shot in the field, to create authentic back plates for the dinosaur action. The teams on location were small, but critically they included MPC visual effects crew, who taught natural history filmmaker 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 (High Dynamic Range Imaging maps) 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.
Bringing
T.rex to life
The dinosaurs were brought to life at MPC’s Soho studio. 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, 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”.
Gunton says, “sometimes you look into the eye of one of the creatures and you can
connect with what it’s thinking. That was the bar and they absolutely nailed it.”
APPROACHES BETWEEN THE VFX ARTISTS AND THE NATURAL HISTORY FILMMAKERS
A FASCINATING EXCHANGE OF
The ambition was for the audience to suspend their disbelief within a minute. “The very first shot of the show is a real beach and a real footprint and real water, so you’re in the real world. The next shot is
T.rex swimming in a world that’s real, but it isn’t. Within 15 seconds you’ve flipped into the world.”
The Televisual Bulldog is for VFX like never before. “They are doing
something in a unique space and it’s hard for people to work out where it fits,” says Gunton. “It’s not a feature film, not traditional TV, it’s a bit of a genre on its own, in technical and visual terms. We are so pleased that our peers have recognised it as such.”
televisual.com
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