On behalf of Apple TV+, filmmaker Jon Favreau (The jungle Book) and Mike Gunton, Creative Director, Factual at BBC Studios, produced the five-part natural documentary prehistoric planet, which imagines what life was like when dinosaurs roamed the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago. The Oscar-winning duo of visual effects supervisor Adam Valdez (The Lion King) and animation supervisor Andy Jones (Avatar) were hired to direct the episodes, with MPC digitally resurrecting and inserting the extinct creatures into footage captured by the BBC’s Natural History Unit. The famous Sir David Attenborough narrates the series.

“Andy and I both come from an animation background and it’s a little different from everyone else in the visual effects industry who is starting to oversee things,” Valdez notes. “You are already listening to the story. We try to find ways to make every scene something that has a progression and a beginning, a middle and an end. When you start channeling this take on photorealism, you’re suddenly in this weird place of balancing aesthetics and physics.

Noting how natural history documentaries influenced The Lion Kingsays Valdez, “Andy and I have probably sat through a million hours of meetings, dailies and reviews of Jon Favreau trying to analyze and understand what seems effortless but actually requires a lot of attention and of craftsmanship to make it happen; that’s what was in this one.

The sequences were extensively planned and prepared before plate photography began. “Adam and I did what we learned about The Lion King, which is a style of virtual production where we would animate an entire beat and then overlay it with a virtual camera,” Jones explains. “We would grab an iPad and start framing our shot and working out locations, scale and lens size. Should it be close or wide? Edit it together. We figured out exactly where our footage needed to be. Then we would find a place to shoot it.

The couple always kept the visual language of a documentary in mind. According to Jones, “You will notice that in many shots the feet can be framed; it’s intentional. In a lot of natural history documentaries, you don’t always see the feet touching the ground. For us, it’s a saving because you don’t have to deal with interaction and casting shadows. Our cuts are economical in a way that makes it look like you see more than you see.

Throughout the series, audience members actively participate. “The story I like to tell people is when you try to figure out what wolves or lions are doing and then you just watch YouTube to see what people have organized and are saying,” Valdez notes. “‘Look how cute he is.’ Or “He looks guilty”. There is this fascinating thing with this projection that we do with each other, but even on animals. It already works for you. The show’s episodes represent particular biomes and are titled accordingly: “Coasts”, “Deserts”, “Freshwater”, “Ice World”, and “Forests”. “If you had Mike Gunton here, he would remind us all that this is a planetary story,” Jones says. “The reason it’s framed by biomes is because the Natural History Unit believes there’s a fascinating relationship between flora, fauna, and the Earth itself. Part of the reason dinosaurs aren’t around is that there have been massive changes to our planet between then and now. The Cretaceous period had enough similarities to today’s Earth that you could fill in a lot of backgrounds on today’s Earth. Then you frame it in areas of the planet itself and what are the stories of living creatures in each of those areas.

“Deserts” explores how procreation has been a driving force in evolution. “That one was rooted in the idea that there were different morphologies in the males themselves and those crazy crests and shapes that you see in modern animals were obvious back then,” Valdez remarks. “It’s the recognition that there are universal themes of competition when it comes to life. What is the value of ornamentation for mating? There’s this sentence that evolution happens in the bedroom. It’s one thing to survive, it’s another to pass on your genes. Higher evolutionary stages do not spread through the population without reproduction. I can’t say how hormone-stimulated a pterosaur is, but you see most males on the planet get excited at mating time! The competition can get quite fierce. “We mixed this Titanosaurus footage with what you see today with elephant seals,” Jones reveals. “How a male rules them all and if you want access to his female heritage you have to beat him. A final battle takes place to earn the right to this.

A young Triceratops is separated from its mother and must navigate a dark cave in “Forests”. “He’s super cute,” Jones laughs. “I want a small model of him on my desk!” It learns to eat the vegetation with the parents and there is a scientific fact that these types of plants were even poisonous to their stomachs, so the Triceratops needed a way to combat this. They ate this type of clay found in these caves. The caves are so dark you will be stepped on if you are unsure of footing or pace. The family continues to move through the cave and the baby tries to find them. The family comes out the other side and finds the clay while the baby is still sitting in there. At the end, we get a moment of triumph with the baby when he finally emerges from the cave and finds his mother, who is teaching him to eat clay for the first time.

“Ice Worlds” features a family of Pachyrhinosaurus being hunted by a Nanuqsaurus. “Well done,” Jones shares. “The animation team was successful in trying to get the details of the protection from the family. The babies pull through. The old bull is too tired to keep running and knows that if he sacrifices himself, the rest can live. It’s a beautiful moment.

prehistoric planet provided an opportunity to correct some popular cultural misconceptions. “We wanted to show the scientifically more accurate T-Rex than what people have seen before,” Jones notes. “Even the sounds it makes. Our scientists were saying that based on its morphology, the T-Rex would have hissed more than it roared. Then we wanted to frame the T-Rex like what we know today. is a large body. It was a predator but also a scavenger. The T-Rex was not that fast so it could not easily catch prey. But it relied on being the largest and most nasty, so he would come in and steal victims.

The biggest challenge for Valdez was learning to shoot underwater. “I did a lot of underwater stuff and it was new to me,” he reveals. “It’s tricky to tell stories in a space where you have no spatial reference. It was probably the hardest thing for me on the show. In terms of what people will see, the Pachyrhinosaurus and Nanuqsaurus sequence was one of the most dramatic. It was fun.”

Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and film profiles for Voice VFX, Animation Magazineand British cinematographer.