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Mike Gunton: I remember I was standing on a mountain with David Attenborough for the Africa series.
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Mike Gunton: One of the lines he was saying was, “Nowhere on the planet does wildlife put on a greater show.”
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Mike Gunton: And I started thinking about,
Mike Gunton: “I wonder what it would have been like to have stood here when the
Mike Gunton: dinosaurs and those creatures were at their finest moment.”
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And then I thought, “I wonder if we could actually make a show like that about dinosaurs.”
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(Roaring)
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Mike Gunton: It’s taken me 10 years to get the right people together,
Mike Gunton: to find the right stories, to find the right environments to make it.
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Jon Favreau: When the collaborating with Mike Gunton came up,
Jon Favreau: it would seemed like a fascinating prospect.
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How could we show dinosaurs as though we were filming them in nature today?
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Mike Gunton: We decided right up front this would be real environments.
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Mike Gunton: That’s influenced both the stories we’ve told,
Mike Gunton: the way we’ve told those stories, the way we shot it
Mike Gunton: the whole ethos of the series.
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Mike Gunton: When you watch this show, what you’re seeing in a way is just the tip of an iceberg.
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Mike Gunton: Because we have got so many people helping us on this,
experts of all types: paleoclimatologists, palaeobotanists,
paleo-ethnologists.
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Mike Gunton: The amount of data that is around at the moment is fascinating.
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What’s interesting here is how surprising these behaviors are.
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Jon Favreau: I think that’s part of the filmmaking process,
Jon Favreau: that you always have to keep the audience interested
Jon Favreau: by presenting them with things they don’t expect.
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Jon Favreau: We used the process that they would’ve used for a documentary,
Jon Favreau: which is sending a team out into the field
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Jon Favreau: to observe and to photograph an environment at a certain place at a certain time.
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You just need to look around the location I’m in now, and see the elements that we’ve been facing.
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Simon Bell: We are filming in places that are inhospitable,
Simon Bell: you know, places that are filled with lava, with fire.
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Simon Bell: You’re always looking for a great shot,
and almost half-jokingly I, you know, I invite the pilot,
you know, “can we-can we land there?
Simon Bell: A couple hundred meters away from this volcano,"
Simon Bell: you know, half-expecting for him turn around to say,
Simon Bell: “well there’s no way, that’s far too dangerous.”
And then my excitement turned to utter dread,
uh, when he started to, you know, dip the nose of the helicopter down and fly directly towards it.
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People might think, why bother coming to such, you know, challenging places to come and film?
Mike Gunton: Why not create environments in the computer?
Tim Walker: The natural world is an incredible place.
Trying to recreate that is a great challenge.
Tim Walker: If the opportunity’s there for us to actually travel,
Tim Walker: and capture in-camera the real atmospherics the real lighting conditions,
Tim Walker: it’s a far more satisfactory situation
Tim Walker: than trying to recreate the natural world in a computer.
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Mother nature still delivers when it comes to... comes to this.
Mike Gunton: It’s so hard to recreate in any other way other than reality.
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Neil Harvey: You know, we’re out here with minimum kit,
no lights, no–not a great amount of technology,
but sort of slightly, sort of roughing it in, in the elements.
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Neil Harvey: But we had to sort of philosophically adopt a way of shooting this series.
Neil Harvey: In a way, we imagined that we would do if we were around this period.
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Neil Harvey: Because one of the bespoke ideas of a natural history wildlife documentary,
Neil Harvey is the intimate portrayal of those animals that we see.
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And that’s where we can bring our skills as wildlife filmmakers to bear.
Sam Bell: You know, imagining if these creatures were real, how would we film them?
Sam Bell: Would we jump on ski-doos and follow them?
Sam Bell: Would we have the guts to walk alongside them?
Sam Bell: Would we be hiding in the bushes?
And that sort of really informed a lot of the decisions about, you know, where we would be.
Quite often we would deliberately place the camera a long way away, behind some rocks,
Neil Harvey: cause we’re thinking, “well, we wouldn’t necessarily want to be noticed by these creatures,
Neil Harvey: because that might effect their behavior.”
Look over this way here. -Yeah.
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We then do a round of shooting where we film dinosaur cutouts,
Tim Walker: to give the camera operators a indication of where they need to be focusing.
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Mike Gunton: The animals are portrayed quite extraordinarily
Mike Gunton: by the way that the artists have created these creatures.
You, you look into their eyes and you can see something’s going on in these creatures’ heads.
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Jon Favreau: When the final version of the shot gets delivered,
and we finally get to see it with everything incorporated.
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Jon Favreau: There’s a magic experience that you have, when you see it come to life.
Jon Favreau: It looks like something you would see in a nature documentary today.
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Jon Favreau: And because, at the end of the day,
Jon Favreau: our scientists have the veto power over anything we do
Jon Favreau: if anything doesn’t pass scientific muster, we rethink it.
Because we want this to be scientifically authentic.
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Jon Favreau: There are certain elements that just make everything come together.
Jon Favreau: In this landscape of so many visual effects, and so much content,
Jon Favreau: what made this one unique and what we were going for,
Jon Favreau: is what you feel when you watch it.
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And I think when you get that right, it makes you feel you’re there.
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