Mixing practical with partial and fully CG shots, the 4-part Netflix miniseries takes viewers back 235 million years to an Earth teeming with creatures big and small, feathered and scaled, all quite hungry.
After experiencing success on Life on Our Planet, Silverback Films has partnered once again with ILM to bring prehistoric beasts back to life for the four-part Netflix miniseries The Dinosaurs. “There wasn’t anything that transferred into the story and how they wanted to bring the series to life,” notes Steve Moncur, Visual Effects Supervisor, ILM when comparing the two Natural History productions. “From an animation and technology point of view, obviously, we had our past experience on doing Life on Our Planet and what works and doesn't work for some of the mechanics of the creatures; that was transferable.” One technique that returned was using stuffie blue heads as stand-ins for the extinct stars of the show. “Story is always what we're trying to make sure we're following and guiding,” states Stafford Lawrence, Animation Supervisor, ILM. “Having those markers for timing and space, definitely is important. It gives us a framework to work within.”
Surprisingly, extensive digital augmentation was not needed to create authentic Earth environments from the Triassic Period, which occurred over 235 million years ago. “There's a surprising amount of research that goes into it, from the scientists, in terms of picking their locations and going, ‘That's as close as we know it would have potentially looked like,’” remarks Moncur. “You might need to sculpt a little bit of landscape, remove trees or fauna that would not have been developed by that point. But I was absolutely astounded that a lot of the locations the scientists were pointing us towards were still, shall we say, period appropriate.” A diverse selection of dinosaurs populates the prehistoric cast. “It was 64 different species and then there was variants beyond that, so it went into the high 70s,” observes Lawrence. “We all managed it in London. There were general types of dinosaurs such as the theropods and sauropods, and having a key hero version of each of those that we could then develop to a high level. Any other variant of a therapod or a sauropod would be based on that. The flying dinosaurs were another separate category.”
Lawrence notes there was one specific physical therapod trait that was quite peculiar. “There's this muscle that goes from the base of the tail to the upper thigh and it's slightly counter intuitive,” he says. “If it's the right leg moving backward, the tail would be moving to the right. If you're an animator you're thinking about overlaps so your natural inclination might be to move the tail the other way.”
During production, there was a Post-it notes wall in the Silverback Films office. “It started off with these crazy, color coordinated Post-it notes,” recalls Moncur. “Dan Tapster, who's the show’s producer, would pick these Post-it notes of key moments, and go, ‘We're going to storyboard those things.’ Sometimes that's all that they would take out onto the locations with them. They maybe would have pictures of the locations next to the Post-it notes. Other sequences were going to be heavily augmented or all CG, so we'd get much more involved in doing some previs to figure them out. We ended up with two all-CG sequences, a couple where we're a 50/50 hybrid, and a few were lighter touch augmentations.” Among the dramatic visuals are top-down shots of failing rain and snow in forest settings. “A lot of those shots were caught in-camera, so we were given good footage to work with,” Moncur explains. “They got lucky, particularly with those snow scenes, and we can add in that 10 percent on top to help that moment. It was all carefully coordinated and planned to try and hit those sweet spots in the weather.”
Episode 103 features miniature Magyarosaurs, running through the grass of Hațeg Island, and a giant Hatzegopteryx. “Amber Cherry Eames, the director, threw a bunch of references my way like Jaws and Arrival,” states Moncur. “I started throwing her horror movie references, like Children of the Corn, because these creatures are small and these horsetails are huge and still exist to this day. Then we got this rolling mist in there as well as horror contra-zoom tricks. You've got this enormous freedom to throw these mad ball ideas. We're making a dinosaur documentary, not a war movie, but it also gets thrown into the mix. Similarly, in Episode 104 with the T. rex versus the Ankylosaurus, it ended up being we wanted it nice and really spooky. At some point someone said, ‘What if we make it rain? That's really miserable.’ I could almost hear the tears of my effects artists going, ‘Oh no, I’m not having to make it rain in every single CG shot.’ But it worked. It created this incredible atmospheric and we had the control to do that, which you wouldn't have necessarily got if you had to try to shoot that in a location. You don’t have to constantly fight weather and light. Those are the two of the best examples of us doing something where it really helps play into all the narrative and the storytelling, where we've got freedom to throw everything at it.”
Much easier to achieve with live-action photography is capturing a creature through grass. But, recreating that signature Natural History shot in CG is an entirely different matter. “That is just us having to roto layer things up,” observes Moncur. “It's a mirror. Jonathan Privett [Visual Effects Supervisor] was out on location with Jamie McPherson [Cinematographer] 90 percent of the time, so he was always there to guide how do we set this up to capture all of the elements that we need to then stack all that together to make that moment work.” The camerawork had to be rethought. “In visual effects, the camera would always follow the action so the action will start, and then the camera will follow,” observes Lawrence. “Natural History photographers got so good at it that they are tuned in enough to actually pre-emptively move the camera when they know that the creature is going to be moving. We would get notes which were quite counterintuitive for a visual effects animator. There are little things like that that bring it back into that Natural History photography which was interesting to learn.”
One intense action sequence occurs when tiny territorial Longipteryz launch an inflight attack on a Guidraco. “We definitely tried to tap into the twitchy bird-like nature and that helped the Longipteryz to feel small,” remarks Lawrence. “That was all plates. We had this chase that was happening down the river and even though they’re swarming essentially, they’re all hand keyed. The fact that they’re moving quicker helps to guide the eye. We tried to keep it on scale. Particularly for the wide we might have pushed the scale a little bit and also played with the light so that you’re definitely capturing them as they’re going down that waterfall. The rocks behind the waterfall were darker so you can see those moving shapes.”
The drone photography was captured in New Zealand. “They LiDAR scanned all of the locations as well,” states Moncur. “Basically, we could build a big set of that so we could map out all of that action down there. We didn’t quite follow the drone, but we knew the flight path that the drone would be taking so we were able to get fairly predictable results in our shots.”
In one shot, when a Nodosaurid resurfaces, an enormous leaf gets shaken off of its head. “In that second shot where the Nodosaurid walks through and the leaf slides off, there was definitely a lot of communication between animation and the visual effects department to make sure that we were setting things up appropriately for them,” Moncur says. The nuanced action adds to overall tone of the miniseries and conveys a sense of personality. “There was a strong desire to not let go of having these little light moments, like the leaf on the head and shaking it off,” explains Moncur. “Even though actually they can be quite technical and expensive to do, such as modelling the leaf and running all of the simulations on it. The directorial team at Silverback fought just as hard to make sure we will try to make that work because it puts so much more color and nuance into the show and the types of performance that Staff and the animation team were able to bring to it.”
To capture a T. rex pulling the corpse of an Ankylosaurus, a prop was built to get the proper environmental interaction. “They did build an Ankylosaurus prop and dragged it through bits of water and forest in the UK,” reveals Moncur. “We always had that as reference for our CG version of it and the idea was, we should be able to cut between the two and you should never be able to tell, ‘Are you looking at the prop or the CG one?’ All of the wides and mids are all CG. The only ones where the prop ended up being used are underwater and where we see it going through little glimpses in the leaves. It ended up being much more practical for us to replace the churned-up ground when we see it from behind doing those kinds of things. As the shots progressed, more and more bits of the real thing got chipped away. So, we figured we might as well put the CG one there because it’s the same effectively. Because the propmakers gave us all of their color references, we could match what they were doing accurately.”
Each episode is about 40 minutes long. “I’ll probably get shot down for this but there are 720 shots in total,” laughs Moncur. “By the time we got footprints and even minor dust kicks in there were probably 650 that had some form of nuanced effects work in on top to help embed those creatures.” ILM did some of the forest fires, but the larger environmental destruction set pieces on Earth and in outer space were handled by Lux Aeterna VFX. “It was the volume and scale of it,” remarks Lawrence. “There were so many different types of dinosaurs, so dealing and managing that was hugely challenging; having our generics certainly helped that. The scale of the show was epic in every way. As well as the variations. What’s lovely about the show is there’s so many different environments. It travels all over the world. You have not only the dinosaurs, but you’ve also got snow, fire, underwater, flying, and wide expanses.”
“I’m proud of all of the sequences,” continues Lawrence. “The T. rex versus the Ankylosaurus in the last episode was fully CG. We were controlling the narrative and it’s spooky. You have this lurking predator and the way the whole story builds up. One of my favorites is the Hesperornis, which is the aquatic bird. I love how it starts off with them ridiculously clumsy on land, clambering over each other and looking very inelegant. Then they jump into the water and move so elegantly. I’m proud of the work that the animators did throughout the show.”
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.
