"You are about to take a trip back in time to a world that existed before "Prehistoric Park"." "This is an epic adventure into the minds of the team who dared to imagine the impossible." "Journey with us through the making of "Prehistoric Park"" "and learn the secrets of the series from the people who refused to let sleeping dinosaurs lie." ""Prehistoric Park" is not a zoo." ""Prehistoric Park" is like the ultimate wildlife sanctuary." "A sanctuary where we're not just bringing giant pandas back from the brink, we're looking after extinct animals, so it's the most incredible wildlife conservation project." "There's an adage that conservationists use which is "extinction is for ever", so we turned that on its head and thought, "What if extinction didn't have to be for ever?" ""What if you could bring back the creatures" ""that we've lost over the billions of years since life began?"" "Then you think, "How do we bring them back" ""and how do we look after them?"" "Once the big brains had the concept for the series, it was time to find an explorer to cope with perilous environments, who could deal with being charged at by a massive dinosaur or ten." "That person was Nigel Marven." "Every zoologist would love to go back in time and since I've been knee-high to a grasshopper," "I've thought how fantastic it would be to see dinosaurs." "I Iove living reptiles, but imagine finding a Deinosuchus, a 65-foot crocodile, amazing things that lived in the past, and to bring them back to the present day, every naturalist's dream!" "But the team now had what seemed" "like an impossible obstacle to overcome." "How on earth were they going to travel back in time?" "(James) Einstein made a big deal about space and time and time-travel." "I think in reality he knew really like we do now that it's quite simple." "You just need a stick with lights on it." "You stick that in the ground, the time portal comes up and you go back in time." "So that's what we did." "Come on!" "Come on, T-Rex!" "(Roars)" "Once the team had the Nobel Prize winning, time-travel solution in hand, they had another tricky task." "They had to find the perfect location for "Prehistoric Park"." "We recced lots of zoos and sanctuaries to get our ideas." "It was important that the "Prehistoric Park" audience don't feel sorry that these creatures have come from open landscapes 65 million years ago to a tiny little pen, so we worked hard at creating a place we thought prehistoric animals would Iike to be." "What it needed was a sub-tropical climate." "Lots of the creatures were reptiles that rely on external sources of heat." "We needed the right mosaic of habitats with big cliffs surrounding the Park, so if animals did escape, which, fingers crossed, they won't, they'II be kept in by the geography." "These unusual creatures would have unusual problems." "Who would make sure they stayed healthy?" "They advertised in a proper veterinary journal - it was in with all the other job ads for a horse vet and a dog vet." "It said, "Do you want to be a dinosaur vet?"" "I thought it was quite cool." "Iflooking after their wellbeing was going to be hard, running the Park would seem to be impossible." "With thousands of tons of lizard heading their way, the team needed an actor to play Bob, the park-keeper." "Can you get a ten-foot pole at the bottom of the paddock?" "Check everything cos it's home to a dangerous creature." "What sort of person were they looking at to play Bob?" "There's a question!" "I think they wanted someone..." "good-Iooking, suave, debonair." "No, with avuncular qualities, somebody warm with an interest in the history of the dinosaurs, someone with a genuine love of animals of all sorts, someone that liked the outdoors, that liked the sweltering heat of South Africa." "Just basically me, I think!" "It's not always totally serious around Bob." "Things go wrong around Bob and he has to run around fixing it." "So with Bob we used to play a bit." "Bob the park-keeper would deal with creatures like the troublesome Titanosaur and Matilda and Terence, the tricky T-Rex." "You'd have to be very brave to look after two baby T-Rexes." "They're very hungry because they're growing so fast, so they need a Iot of food to grow." "They're constantly looking for an easy meal and an unwary park-keeper might make a good snack for a baby T-Rex." "But what was Nigel going to rescue?" "The team had to decide what the viewers would want to see in "Prehistoric Park"." "They had the luxury of choosing from the past 500 million years." "(Low-pitched cries)" "Choosing the animals for the Park was difficult and a real joy for me, but we wanted the famous extinct creatures, the Sabre-toothed cats, T-Rex, the ultimate predator." "T-Rex is the most famous dinosaur of all time because it's thought to be the largest ever predator." "Anything with teeth 30 centimetres long will catch the imagination of people interested in the fantastic and the terrible." "We also thought we'd spin in a few different ones." "Some of the latest research is into dino-birds found in China." "There's this crazy thing called a Microraptor with four wings." "No one's ever seen these things realised in any form at all." "It was a chance to say," ""This is brand-new to science." "Let's see what they're like."" "It was like a prehistoric detective agency in the production office." "The researchers and directors were reading all the latest papers and were speaking to the key experts to piece together the life and death of the stars of the show." "Palaeontologists have many different clues." "Starting with the fossil record, we have the bones, the skeletons of the animals." "We can look at those and compare them with those of living animals." "We also have some indirect lines of evidence coming from "trace fossils"." "Trace fossils are non-body remains such as footprints, eggs, burrows and even prehistoric poo." "Nigel travelled to Scotland to find out more." "There's two rows of tracks here, one along here and the other one down here." "This is 36 centimetres wide, so it must have been made by a Iarge animal." "This is a real Scottish treasure." "There's not many of these in the world." "No, there's only a handful of this age." "It was made by Arthropleura, a giant extinct millipede." "I think of these things as Palaeo-Polaroids or snapshots in time of the activities of these animals." "We're seeing preserved on this surface a fleeting moment of what happened 300 million years ago." "These ancient creepy-crawlies were C-List celebrities." "But this was about to change as they earn their new-found status as the rock stars of "Prehistoric Park"." "But before any of these became 3-D creatures, they were trapped in a 2-D world on one man 's drawing board." "(James) At the beginning of the process, we sit around with our fevered imaginations and think, "What animals do we bring back, what are they gonna do?" ""Imagine a dinosaur getting pregnant or a mammoth needing a haircut!"" "Lewie, the storyboard artist, takes these mad thoughts and turns them into something people can understand." "(New speaker) Storyboarding is one of my favourite parts of the process because it's there that you're making the programme, the film." "It's actually a time where you can throw in as many ideas as you want and if you've got a talented storyboard artist like we did, when you get the boards coming back to you and you look at them," "you think, "This is how we'II film it and how it will look."" "If you've got a document you can go back to every now and then to remind you what you're supposed to be doing without any ambiguity, it ensures that you'II get what you knew you wanted in the first place," "which can so easily start going awry in the chaos of filming." "One by one, Nigel's extraordinary adventures were coming to life, from the hot swamps of the Carboniferous to the freezing temperatures of the ice Age." "(Trumpeting)" "(Marven) Programme two, very exciting for me, Woolly Mammoths." "We know a Iot about them because they were preserved in the permafrost." "They only became extinct relatively recently, 10,000 years ago, and you can find out about their DNA." "Palaeontologists believe they are very close in their social behaviour to elephants." "But building a mammoth was not as simple as dressing an elephant in a hairy coat." "They had to come up with a more controllable beast." "To create animals from nothing you need something." "We used animatronics, which is a Iife-size puppet." "So they turned to a company called "Crawley Creatures", experts in hi-tech rubber models of all shapes and sizes." "When I first saw the animatronics..." "Sorry, squeaky chair, start again!" "When I first saw the quality of the animatronics, I was stunned." "The skill, the quality, the sculpture, the electronics that go into operating them is breathtaking." "There's no magic any more." "They can do it." "It's brilliant." "Sightings ofthe rubber dinosaurs were reported around the globe, from Chile and Florida to Brazil and South Africa." "Wherever they went, a team of operators followed." "Not only did they have to look good, they needed the right moves." "I think even a slower move round and more of an amalgamation of different kinds of moves on her." "So push her forward a Iittle bit, move her, rock her." "Martha the Mammoth was mostly computer animation, but there were some moments that she had to be an animatronic as we were looking for an interaction." " Action!" " (Man) Wag your ear!" "The elephant was led up towards the animatronic mammoth which was hidden until the last moment." "(Kelly) The handler told us the elephant will ignore the animatronic mammoth or go crazy!" "We waited with baited breath and then something amazing happened." "The elephant believed our mammoth was real and she stretched out her trunk and tried to interact with her." "Everybody believed that Martha, just for a Iittle moment, was really real." "13 animatronics were used throughout the series, but the majority of the creatures were created by computer graphic geniuses working at "Framestore"." "(James) We've worked with "Framestore" in the past when we did "Walking with Dinosaurs"" "and by working with them together over the Iast six to eight years, we've kept pushing the boundaries about what you can do with factual programmes." "The "Framestore"team needed environments, so the directors spent months filming nothing, but doing everything to build this fantastic world." "To create a shot with computer animation in it, you shoot a back plate, an empty shot without animation." "If you want a moving shot, you have to not just shoot a single back plate, but shoot several back plates, to sew them together and move through the shot." "In this shot we put a pole in with a Iittle ball on the top, just to give Nigel an eye line." "If the actor's looking in the wrong place, you don't believe the shot." "So in this case he's looking at what will soon be Martha." "(Marven) You imagine you're looking a Woolly Mammoth dead in the eyes!" "(Arthur) Acting with nothing is unusual, but you get used to it when you're doing it every day." "You sort of have to build your own world, which all these fantasy creatures live in, this invisible world." "Come on, it's time to meet your public." "I knew I could do it." "I think I had the temperature too low, but these two have finally hatched out." "The rascals are following me everywhere!" "I was the first thing they saw and they think I'm their mam!" "I do talk to my dog at home all the time, so I talk to them like I talk to Frankie." "Tuck in..." "Steady now, come on!" "Don't bolt your food." "If you eat that quickly, you'II get wind!" "It's not easy being a mother!" "That's what I did and it seemed to work." "It's a Triceratops!" "We've done it!" "Our first dinosaur, look at him!" "He's magnificent." "Hold it, hold it, calm down." "While Nigel and the actors were imagining what the creatures will look like, back in London the "Framestore"team are starting to build the creatures and bring them to life." "When we build our creatures, we start with a physical maquette, which is sculpted." "It is important for everyone to see what we're looking at." "This maquette is scanned in using a laser and the information is transferred onto computer." "Once that comes in, you build an internal skeleton to make the whole creature move and this allows the animators to animate freely." "Once the scanning is complete, the animators take these virtual beings and breathe life into them." "This is where the creatures take their first few steps and eventually run, jump, fly or swim." "It's like taking hold of a creature and just posing it in certain ways, taking a snapshot of that and moving the time slider on." "Similar to stop-frame animation, but we don't have to redo it each time it's filmed." "We can re-import these positions on to other creatures." "But a very strange creature was complex to animate and even harder to pronounce." "Parasauro..." "Iophus." "Parasaurolophus." "Parasaurolophus." "Parasaur...olophus." "Parasauro..." "Parasaurolo...phus." "Parasophalus." "Parasauro..." "Parasaurolophorus." "No." "Parasaurolophus." "No, it's not in my programme!" "The Parasaurolophus might have moved in a number of ways." "It mainly walks on two legs." "The hind legs are massive, but the front legs are not so strong." "(GIasbey) What we believe it does, and what looks very natural, is it will walk on four legs." "A similar gait to a camel because of the structure of the creature, but once it gets up to speed, it would shift its weight backwards," "lift up and then run on its back legs." "It would be a very strange creature to run on all four legs." "It looks like they would get tangled up." "But not all oftheir walks made it into the programme." "But to make it look real, you have to have physical interactions." "You have to have the creature looking like it's kicking something or kicking some bones on the ground, so we shoot physical interactions." "(Bennett) In the New Zealand shoot, episode 3, we had an actor, Morgan, and we have a scene where he's attacked by the Mei Long, which are these vicious dinosaurs, Iike a pack of wild dogs." "And for that interaction we actually had to pull him backwards through a hedge." "Aagh!" "Aagh!" "Aagh!" "Aagh!" "Aagh!" "Aagh!" "Help me!" "We did about ten takes in the end and this poor guy is getting pulled through clean off his feet about six foot by this enormous stunt co-ordinator and that interaction is what these programmes are all about." "You imagine you are standing next to enormous dinosaurs and it's amazing how quickly our actors and presenters get into that." "Aagh!" "Aagh!" "Help me!" "They're after the food." "Get your bag off!" "Get off!" "Help me!" "Aagh, get off!" "Aagh!" "Help!" "Aagh!" "Aagh!" "Help!" "Oh!" "They're away!" "(Snapping)" "While the directors were filming in exotic locations, the sound designer was shut in a small, dark room in London, making and recording strange noises." "A Iot of the time we don't have any sound at all, so we have to make the whole thing up from the word go." "It's exciting, but it's also hard work." "(Growls)" "We take a dinosaur which has no sound recorded on location and we can give it our own special touch, so to speak, with obviously a bit of authenticity entwined with it." "(Thumping)" "Big whack if we were creating the T-Rex sound." "See what you have to do for your job?" "(Crunches)" "That's biting the bones and what have you." "You've got to have good teeth for this job and do other horrible dinosaurs." "Back on location, thousands of elements were being filmed by the directors and fed back to "Framestore"." "The magic is pulling these pictures together in "compositing"." "In this next sequence Nigel gets chased by a Tyrannosaurus Rex and runs right past a pen of crocodiles." "It was dangerous to have Nigel running past them, so we shot them separately." "There they are." "And I made a Iot of noise off-screen to get a reaction for when the T-Rex runs past." "We then shot Nigel against a blue screen and then put the elements together." "Then in the finished shot we had a footprint, a bit of stuff being kicked off." "A bit of camera move, a bit of shake when the T-Rex's foot hits the ground." "Putting these shows together is like a giant jigsaw puzzle and in the final scene, that amazing chase when Matilda the T-Rex escapes, she runs past crocodiles chasing me, that was done in South Africa." "The next shot we cut to Deinosuchus, the prehistoric crocodile, erupting out of the water and saving my Iife by distracting Matilda." "That was done in Australia, so you have to think about how the stories flow together." "They can be shot in many locations." "The Deinosuchus was one ofthe creatures" "Nigel was really looking forward to meeting." "I've done a Iot with living crocodiles and alligators." "The largest crocodile alive today, the saltwater crocodile, is 25 feet long, but just imagine deinosuchus, a crocodile 60 feet long!" "That's a crocodile that actually hunts dinosaurs." "(James) Every time we do CG work, we push the boundaries more." "And I think one that's definitely causing them cause for some concern is this crocodile roll we're doing." "It took an enormous amount of preparation." "It shows you what goes into CG." "Nine, ten months before the shoot, we were having hour-Iong meetings about how to achieve this shot." "(James) It's something we never tried before, showing a giant crocodile rolling in the water as it does a death roll." "This could get the prize as the hardest shot in the programme." "The Deinosuchus roll." "We've been dreading it ever since we saw the storyboard, how we'II film it and composite the whole thing." "The interactions are very difficult with all these splashes." "(Thompson) To make things even harder for Sirio," "I shot it in slow-motion, so everybody can stare in loving detail at every frame." "The shot's not quite finished and my fingers are crossed that it will come out OK." "(Sirio) People ask, "Do you have to do stuff frame by frame?"" "It gets worse." "Sometimes it's pixel by pixel!" "It would be easier if we had a 50-foot prehistoric crocodile to film for real!" "But there wasn't time!" "But finally, the Deinosuchus was ready to rock and roll!" "It's Ieapt out there." "The Parasaurolophus is being dragged back." "(Groans)" "(Low-pitched cries)" "With the deadly Deinosuchus roll complete, it was time for the icing on the prehistoric pudding." "Composer Daniel Pemberton spent a year in a flurry of staves, crotchets and quavers." "He worked with the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra to tell an epic musical story that would guide us through 300 million years of prehistoric life." "Making "Prehistoric Park" was an amazing experience." "Sometimes it pushed us to the limit." "We were in very difficult conditions, dealing with real animals, CG animals, actors, hostile climates, long hours, but I think what we've made is really, really special." ""Prehistoric Park", what a roller-coaster ride, 150 days' filming!" "Of course, you rarely see anything until you get back here." "It's so realistic." "I've always wanted to travel in time." "It's a dream come true to see myself with these prehistoric creatures." "When I'm an old man, I'II believe I travelled back in time." "What we hope we've shown with this series is extinction doesn't have to be forever." "What is "Prehistoric Park"?" "Ask me another one." "That's too hard." "...to the location we wanted to... (Phone rings)" "The phone's down there, is it?" "Hello?" "No, she's not." "Certainly the tractor scene where we allow the... the, er..." "Tyrannosaur..." "Was it the Tyrannosaur?" "For example, on the tractor, when we let the..." "I've forgotten its name again!" "Each one of our story..." "Eugh!" "It's quite hard." "I'm always on that side and it looks so darned easy!" "Now I really know how hard it is!"