"Three million pounds... three years in the making... brought you the story of evolution as it's never been seen before." "Using cutting-edge computer animation," "Walking with Monsters... breathed life into a host of bizarre and unknown creatures, from the giant Brontoscorpio to the killer Dimetrodon." "But Walking with Monsters is part of a much bigger picture, a 1.5 million pounds programme making odyssey which began with much more famous monsters." "Way before Walking with Monsters," "Walking with Dinosaurs made television history by bringing prehistory to life on our screens for the very first time." "It was seen by a staggering 400 million viewers worldwide." "And with its successor, Walking with Beasts, it managed to achieve the impossible, it made palaeontology sexy." "The creators of these three series transported viewers back hundreds of millions of years." "But we will take a smaller step." "We'll travel back just one decade, into the 1990s, to tell the story of the Walking with trilogy... in all of its carnivorous, computer-generated glory." "Probably almost 10 years ago now, the BBC wanted to do a big landmark series about palaeontology." "The real breakthrough idea was the idea... of a full-on natural history of dinosaurs." "We see them in their real past glory, rather than just as bones in the ground." "And really, I think the problem was that, by then, Jurassic Park had been made and people's expectation of what you could see with dinosaurs had got quite high so my starting point was how could we bring... those sort of quality graphics to television." "I can remember Tim coming to me for the first time and asking whether we could do two hours of..." "Jurassic Park quality computer-animated dinosaurs for a television programme at television budgets and I said no." "So I went away and talked to other postproduction houses and, interestingly, while I was talking to another one, they said, "Oh, yes, we've heard of this project." "But isn't Mike at Framestore gonna do this?"" "And so, I think between me first seeing him and then meeting him again, he'd changed..." "He had made his mind up." "That night when I went home I was thinking," ""What if somebody else says yes and they actually succeed and I'll be the person who turned it down?"" "So that made me really, really positive I wanted to do it." "The first step towards realising their vision was to take a quick weekend trip back into prehistory to make a pilot, or test, version." "This is the first time this footage has ever been seen." "The BBC put up some money and left me by myself to wander off to shoot a pilot, which started off as being about two minutes long but I think it ended up as six minutes, and that involved looking around for somewhere which we could shoot as the back place," "the place where the dinosaurs would be, and some palaeobotanist suggested the Mediterranean forests in Cyprus." "When we got there, I put on my dinosaur boots and, with one cameraman, we filmed a series of scenes, really just guessing what we'd put in them." "We had done a little storyboard, and that was the start of it all, really." "This animation may be crude compared to the roaring, salivating creations of the eventual series, but it does give a hint of things to come." "This female Eustreptospondylus is hunting." "With keen senses and a camouflaged body, she can ambush the fastest prey." "However, sometimes luck is not with her." "A 20 ton Cetiosaur has little need for stealth." "The herd moves like giant bulldozers through the trees." "It was actually magic to me as well seeing the final tape and seeing these, sort of, dramatic sequences that made you think you really were there in the past and that these dinosaurs really did live." "And I saw later on that he had to do all sorts of things himself, like being on the beach, bashing a log into the water to create splashes, and the next moment, he's not there and it's a dinosaur." "We then had to start fundraising seriously once we had the tape." "And that was another big challenge to us cause we had to raise money for what was the most expensive factual series ever to be made." "The massive research effort involved over 400 palaeontologists for Walking with Dinosaurs alone." "This resulted in the detailed storyboards that kicked off the production process." "When we have to start making these programmes, the first thing you need to do is to effectively get together your cast list." "So you need to know which animals you're going to be portraying and at what period in time they were alive." "Once we've got the cast list together, the next thing is to do an all-out research job on them." "So we ask all the experts, we consult all the scientific publications we can find and we start to slowly build storylines around all that." "We do get mini storylines preserved in the fossil record." "We sometimes get a little bit of a hint about the activity of animals." "We find, for example, evidence of predatory attacks that took place." "We find bones with teeth embedded in them." "We find footprints, or trackways in fact, that show a dinosaur was walking along, maybe with a youngster in tow, or maybe it was limping." "We get these mini storylines." "We wrote out a treatment which described exactly what we hoped would be in the pictures and what the narrator was saying, and we started to design what you would see shot by shot." "And, actually, the storyboard artist brought a lot to this because he came from a very dramatic film background." "So as we began to plot out our pictures, because, in fact, we could do anything because these creatures would be created later, the storyboard artist really pushed our stories along, saying, "Well, why don't we try that?"" "And so essentially brought a lot more drama into some of the scenes." "After storyboarding, the filmmakers ventured out into the real world, travelling from South Africa to New Zealand to find backdrops for the series." "Even then, the stars of the films, the dinosaurs themselves, existed only in their imagination." "The whole filming of Walking with Dinosaurs was the most amazingly surreal experience." "There's us in the middle of nowhere and a bunch of cameras, and saying, "Okay, what are we filming?"" "Well, we're filming nothing." "The animals, they're not there, and we've got to imagine them and we've got to do everything for them because they don't yet exist." "So we were going along, setting the camera up, filming an empty shot and then going around kicking up dust, knocking over trees, moving branches." "All that kind of thing, all the things that they would do if they'd bothered to turn up." "If a creature's walking through a sandy desert, you need to create the footfalls, you need to puff up sand." "If they're walking through water, you need to create the interactions with water." "And we had this big scene where our amphibians in the Carboniferous swamps were jumping out of the water and catching dragonflies, so we dressed these two guys in black bin bags, covered their heads in black bin bags," "we had them sitting in the middle of this swamp jumping up and then jumping down, jumping up and then jumping down." "We realised when we looked at them, they looked exactly like some strange little gimp things." "But, of course, this is a public place and every so often we would get American canoeists going by and they would see these guys jumping up and down in these gimp suits with me going, "Faster!" "Higher!"" "It would completely freak them out." "For those big close-up moments, the crew's got to wear the ultimate accessory, a foam and silicon animatronic mock-up of the creatures." "When you're working with animatronics, you know, they're just rubber." "That's all they are, rubber or foam or what have you." "And we want them to, sort of, salivate, spit and drool and all those kind of things." "We tend to be in quite remote places and the best way to make an animatronic drool is to use KY Jelly." "I've got so many experiences of the fixer going off and going to a chemist and say," ""I want 100 boxes of KY Jelly."" "You'd always come back a little bit embarrassed, but, basically, we'd clean out, wherever we went, would be cleaned out of KY Jelly." "I'm not sure what that meant for the sex life of those places after we'd been there, but there we go." "We had some drooling dinosaurs nonetheless." "Making animatronics slather may be a challenge, but conjuring up living creatures out of thin air requires a tricky process of computer animation." "The process has several stages, the first of which is the shape of the creature." "We were lucky to have two sculptors who are really skilled at looking at fossil records and recreating creatures from them." "It's a sort of forensic job, really." "They created clay sculptures of each of the dinosaurs, which we then scanned with a scanning system we really had to build up from scratch, which enabled us to scan in these clay models in great detail." "The next stage is to bring in the animators." "And what the animator does is simply, frame by frame, pose the creature." "And then the computer will fill in the odd frames in between the key frames, as we call them, and that will give a smooth movement so you've got a creature that has movement." "The next stage is to place that creature onto the background, and in order to place it onto the background, you've got to match where the camera was when it filmed the background picture." "Our biggest challenge is always to make... the dinosaurs look as realistic in the shots as possible to really feel that they're in that background and walking through the forest, breaking the light as it passes across them," "and casting shadows on the ground and on the trees." "After 18 gruelling months assembling the dinosaur cast, finally, opening night arrived." "What we didn't really estimate was just how many people would turn up for that first episode, and it was astonishing." "And the same thing happened later in America, so this appetite was there." "And, indeed, I think the delivery to this great big audience and families loving it, all that made it a big, big event." "This is Brachiosaurus, a 13 metre high sauropod that specialises in grazing on the treetops." "With chisel-like teeth, his kind can effortlessly harvest cones and fresh leaves no other dinosaur can reach and they have grown enormous on it." "These adults weigh over 70 tons, making them the largest land animals that have ever existed." "About 14 million people watched it on the first night and another four or five on the Sunday, which made it, you know, one of the top 20 programmes the BBC's ever had." "Which was fantastic except I thought," ""Well, there was a hell of a lot of trailing, and they all loved it, 'but next week it's gonna drop like a stone."" "And really, the nicest moment for me was the second week when the audiences were 12.5 million." "So, in other words, everyone was talking about it, they liked it and they wanted to see more." "The series transformed its cast of dinosaurs into natural history superstars." "It went on to be the most watched programme ever on the Discovery Channel." "And was sold in practically every country in the world, from France and Germany to China and Japan." "I think it's been very helpful in enthusing young people about palaeontology." "We've seen an enormous upsurge in interest in the university, many more people applying to study degrees in the subject." "As part of my PhD," "I go into local schools to promote science education, and, obviously, I'm doing that as a palaeontologist." "It's very difficult to take a static fossil in and sometimes make it exciting, but what's happened with Walking with Dinosaurs and subsequent programmes is that now the pupils at school have a fantastic image of all these dinosaurs running around and eating each other and all sorts of things." "So I just add to the images that they've already seen on Walking with Dinosaurs." "But it was in the area of science programme making that the impact of Walking with Dinosaurs was most felt." "Television couldn't be the same after Walking with Dinosaurs." "You couldn't make programmes without thinking of how do you combine dramatic narrative content and, say, special effects?" "And a whole generation of programmes were made as a result of Walking with Dinosaurs." "You know, in recent times we've had Supervolcano," "Seven Industrial Wonders, Pompeii," "Colosseum, and all of those programmes were influenced by this big cinematic quality and the ability to embrace technology, in a way, in service of a great story." "But, as with any major success, a backlash was perhaps inevitable." "In America, some Creationists complained that Walking with Dinosaurs favoured Darwin's theory of evolution over the biblical account of creation." "Some commentators closer to home claimed that the series had presented speculation as fact." "When I see a programme in which we clearly see things for which there is no supporting evidence, dinosaurs of different colours, dinosaurs marking their territory with urine, it's just quite ridiculous and it upset me, and that's why...." "One of the reasons that I wrote a couple of the articles that I wrote about this programme." "The bond between Cynodonts is extraordinarily strong." "They pair for life." "It was presented as a seamless natural history documentary and there's no way any member of the audience could decide for themselves whether they swallowed it all as fact or whether they thought the whole thing was a made-up story." "There was just no way of sorting out one from the other, and I think that did cause quite a lot of confusion." "For the programme makers, this criticism overlooked the main objective of the series, which was not to formulate an academic thesis but to bring prehistory to life." "It was almost as though they totally underestimated the intelligence of the audience." "The audience know what this is." "They know we haven't really gone to film the dinosaurs." "And I think, you know, sometimes some of the criticism was sort of saying," ""You're presenting stuff and people won't know what's fact and fiction. "" "People know." "They know this is a best guess and they're intelligent enough..." "Viewers are intelligent enough to understand exactly what Walking with Dinosaurs is." "As with all science and technologies, you can make mistakes." "In fact, our profession is littered with some wonderful mistakes." "Some animals, we put the head on the wrong end, for heaven's sakes!" "We just put the head on the tail!" "These things happen and we're going to make mistakes in the future." "So maybe there are some mistakes in Walking with Dinosaurs but that is the nature of science." "Science is about hypothesis testing and making an hypothesis is speculation." "We might say we believe T-Rex walked in a bipedal manner and the evidence is it's got very long hind legs and it's got short arms." "We'll never actually see it walking so I can't prove that T-Rex was a biped, but, based on all kinds of common sense," "I would say as a wild speculation," "T-Rex walked on its hind legs and did not use its arms in walking." "So you can call that speculation if you like, but I would call that scientific inference." "Of course the creators of Walking with Dinosaurs weren't the first to try to visually represent dinosaurs." "It's a grand tradition that dates back to their first discovery and has often produced weird and wonderful results... from early Hollywood animations to these highly inaccurate models in Crystal Palace." "I mean, where does one draw the line?" "As a palaeontologist, you go out into the field and you find your bones and, if you've got an artist handy, with a little bit of consultation, you actually might produce a picture of what that animal may have looked like with the musculature and the skin put back on." "Do you draw the line there?" "Well, I'm saying no." "I would say that if you've got animators who are happy to animate and to bring that animal alive, they should actually be part of the palaeontological team." "And so, therefore, if you like, the animators and the producers of Walking with Dinosaurs, they could call themselves palaeontologists." "One very interesting thing, for instance, during the shooting was with the Diplodocus head." "We had an animatronic Diplodocus head which had the teeth in the right place, and we were doing a scene about," "'Okay, let's see how these things can eat."" "And we were trying various different bits of vegetation, we were trying this and that and they were... getting stuck in his teeth." "We realised that the way they were eating was not breaking branches off and chewing them, the way that the animatronic head worked if you gave it something to eat, was it would strip the foliage off the branch." "So we were kind of learning as we went." "We were all doing practical experiments, to be honest, about how dinosaurs might have eaten and the palaeontologists were generally wowed by this and thinking," ""This is great." "We're actually taking the science forward."" "Dinosaurs were always going to be a hard act to follow, but, in true Hollywood style, the sequel was obvious," "Walking with Beasts, which traced the rise of mammals after the extinction of the dinosaurs." "We pretty quickly said we shouldn't do the same again." "We probably shouldn't do just another Walking with Dinosaurs II but there are lots of other areas which you can explore using this kind of combination of drama and storytelling and full-on CGI, and that can bring lots of different types of things to life." "So we pretty quickly got to, and Tim got to, the Walking with Beasts idea." "That was a huge problem for Framestore because, suddenly, having produced nice, scaly creatures, which are very convenient for digital graphics, they now had to start dealing with feathers and fur, which is a bit of a nightmare." "So Walking with Beasts, as it became, which is the period after the dinosaurs, was actually more ambitious than Dinosaurs." "Mammals are a lot more difficult to animate than dinosaurs, and the reason is they've got lots of floppy stuff." "They've got wobbly skin, they've got floppy hair, they've got eyebrows, they've got whiskers, they've got floppy ears, they've got tongues that hang out." "There's all sorts of stuff on an animal that moves and the problem is that, in the computer, you don't get any of that for free." "If something moves, you have to move it." "On a dinosaur, you've got a jaw that moves, eyes that swivel and the neck." "Three controls." "Four if you have one each for the eyes." "On a mammal, we've got 25 controls." "Now, just do the math." "When we had finished Beasts, we kind of knew that it wouldn't do as well as Dinosaurs 'cause Dinosaurs had...." "Not only were they dinosaurs, but they had that wonderful novelty about them." "But Beasts, in many ways, was a more ambitious project because these animals were much more difficult to realise." "It did very, very well in England but what's particularly delightful was that, in some countries, like Italy and Russia and Germany, it actually did better than Dinosaurs." "With the commission of Walking with Monsters, which reaches right back to the origins of life, the Walking with trilogy was finally complete." "I always hoped that I could complete the trilogy, a bit like Star Wars." "I could do the prequel to Dinosaurs." "And, fortunately, about two, two and a half years ago, we got the go-ahead to do that." "And that's an opportunity to introduce people to some really weird creatures they might never have thought of before." "And a lot of these creatures, strangely, were ancestral to us." "In other words, we were related to them but had nothing to do with dinosaurs." "Going back 540 million years, you'd expect that the fossil evidence might be less complete, but there's actually an extensive fossil resource for Monsters." "With sites in China, Siberia... and here, a little closer to home, in Portishead, outside Bristol." "In fact, it's often more complete than for later periods." "These layers of rocks, they contain a whole variety of giant creepy crawlies and large lungfish that actually appeared in Walking with Monsters." "Now, I'm not likely to find any fossils here today cause they're really rather rare, but here are some that have been found earlier." "This is actually the head of one of these giant sea scorpions." "You can see the outline of the head." "And there's even an eye preserved just here." "There was the joke amongst the crew before we started that this programme was going to be "Ambling with Amoeba"" "or "Browsing with Bacteria"" "because there is this sense that there wasn't anything before dinosaurs." "And it wasn't until they'd really got stuck in with the giant scorpions and Anomalocaris and all of these other amazing creatures that we began to get a sense that, just like Walking with Dinosaurs, these were creatures whose lives were fascinating." "With some of these creatures, there aren't as many complex behaviours." "There aren't as many emotional hooks." "Brontoscorpio's a big predator." "That's what he does." "He spends his time chasing Cephalaspis around and trying to eat as much as he possibly can." "But there's another side to this, which is that the arthropods, which Brontoscorpio represents, were the first creatures to ever take the first steps onto dry land, and that's Brontoscorpio's story again." "The story lies in these monumental steps, or these adaptations, that these creatures had and evolved." "They may not appear as big as dinosaurs, but in a world of unfamiliar monsters, size still matters." "We had to make sure that people knew how big they were." "For example, you look at a scorpion, you think tiny little scorpion like today." "The Brontoscorpio is actually massive." "Well, he's a metre long." "But in order for people to realise that by looking at a shot, we had to make sure there were always size references." "So in most shots of Brontoscorpio, you'll notice that there's a sea urchin or there's a shell or there's something that we know the size of so you can immediately compare him and you can immediately reference him." "Walking with Monsters had some large shoes to fill, so it was important that the programme makers continued to push the boundaries." "One way in which we advanced the technology and we pushed the boundaries with Walking with Monsters compared to" "Walking with Dinosaurs and Walking with Beasts, was that we brought the camera closer to the computer graphic creatures." "It's made a lot more work for Framestore, but you see these creatures in close-up and you think they're real." "There are a couple of shots such as a little Petrolacosaurus reptile hatching out." "We're very, very close and the texture is so detailed that you think it's real and they really stand up." "In order to demonstrate the key adaptations that certain creatures had in this incredible journey of evolution, we move inside their bodies." "For example, the Petrolacosaurus." "He had this incredible heart which is actually a template for our own." "But it would be another 248 million years until humans would enter the frame." "Walking with Monsters ends where this filmmaking journey first began, with the emergence of the dinosaurs, finally completing the grand sweep of the Walking with trilogy and the entire story of prehistoric life on our planet." "Fondly, I think that what you can do is put all three series together and kind of fast forward through them, and what you would get is that sense of the dynamism of life and how adventurous it is and how many different forms it's tried" "and, really, how the world as well, the earth behind it, the landscape, has changed, so I think it's a very..." "One would hope that people would find it very evocative and a very colourful way of looking at evolution." "The story of life is just the biggest story ever." "And what we're now feeling, you know, with Monsters now as part of the trilogy, the Walking with trilogy, at last, you know, the story of life is kind of being properly told." "And, you know, rather than people know about the odd dinosaur here and there, we've had an opportunity to really say," ""Look, this is kind of...." "You know, humans, you're here now, but look what's been before you."" "And every part of that story is amazing."