By TREVOR HOGGA herd of Mammoths walk across the wintry landscape.(Image courtesy of Netflix)A quarter century ago, the landmark production Walking with Dinosaurs was released by BBC Studios Science Unit, Discovery Channel and Framestore. The six-part nature docuseries pushed the boundaries of computer animation to envision the iconic prehistoric beasts in a more realistic fashion than the expropriated Hollywood DNA of Jurassic Park and sentimental cartoon cuteness of The Land Before Time. Building upon the nature documentary television miniseries are Netflix and Apple, which partnered with BBC Studios Natural History Unit, Silverback Films, paleontologists Dr. Tom Fletcher and Dr. Darren Naish, narrators Sir David Attenborough and Morgan Freeman, cinematographers Jamie McPherson, Paul Stewart and David Baillie and digital creature experts ILM and MPC to do a natural fusion of photorealistic CGI and wildlife photography to produce Life on Our Planet and Prehistoric Planet.The giraffe-sized flying predator Hatzegopteryx courting on its own love island in the Islands episode of Prehistoric Planet 2. (Image courtesy of Apple Inc.)Shooting CG rather than live-action creatures was educational for Jamie McPherson, Visual Effects Director of Photography for Life on Our Planet, who previously took a GSS (Gyro-Stabilizer System) normally associated with helicopters, attached it to a truck and captured wild dogs running 40 miles per hour in Zambia for the BBC One documentary series The Hunt. I never did visual effects before this, so it was a big learning curve for me, and ILM never tried to do visual effects in a style that we came up with, which was to make it feel like a high-end, blue-chip documentary series. It was also sitting alongside Natural History. If youre doing pure visual effects, youve got more leeway of people not seeing how those two worlds mix. In terms of the creatures, the process was incredibly long. We worked out what the creature was going to be between the producer, director, myself, ILM and Amblin. Then you have to work out how it interacted with another creature of the same or different species. You have all of these parameters that youre trying to blend together and make them feel believable. When we were out filming the back plates for this, we made sure that they felt reactive, so we were careful to work out where the creature was going. As for behavior, we had to dial it back from what I filmed in the real world because we didnt want to break that believability and take people out of the moment of them noticing a crazy camera move, like a T-Rex walking over you.The T-Rex was clever, as revealed by a large brain, so its young were doubtless curious and even playful, so Cinematographer Paul Stewart imagined this scene in the Coasts episode of Prehistoric Planet 1.(Image courtesy of Apple Inc.)GSS and RED Monstro camera on location in Morocco to film Terrorbirds hunting for Life on Our Planet. (Image courtesy of Jamie McPherson)Being able to rely upon predetermined CG creatures provided the opportunity to utilize the best of narrative and Natural History cinematography. To me, its a drama, and you dont give the audience anything more by pretending that youre in a hide 160 million years ago with a long lens, observes David Baillie, Director of Photography for Prehistoric Planet and Life on Our Planet. Its more important to tell the story. Coloring his perspective is that Baillie continually shifts between narrative projects like Munich: The Edge of War and Natural History productions such as Frozen Planet. My job as a cinematographer is to tell the story with all of the emotion, and I do that by using focal length, camera movement and framing. Some limitations need to be respected. Were in a location that we maybe havent recce before. There is a bit of rock and river and you say, Lets do this. Everybody says, That looks nice. Then, the Visual Effects Supervisor will say, Using that shot will cost another 100,000 because weve planned it the other way. That can be quite frustrating. A slightly different mental attitude had to be adopted. I have to be more disciplined with things like changing focal length and stop. If Im doing a documentary or even a drama, I might think, Ill tighten it up a bit here. But theyve already done one pass on the motion control, Baillie notes.According to Cinematographer Paul Stewart, Prehistoric animals are a mix of the familiar and strange. This large predatory Pterosaur evolved into a lifestyle similar to some modern storks. (Image courtesy of Apple Inc.)An example of a full CG shot from the Coasts episode of Prehistoric Planet 1. (Images courtesy of Apple Inc.)Aerial photography for the Oceans episode of Prehistoric Planet 2,which was captured in Northern Sweden. (Image courtesy of Apple Inc.)Everything had to be choreographed narratively and visually before principal photography commenced. To ensure our plates matched the action we wanted, we had reference previsualization video prepared by the animators for every backplate we planned to shoot, remarks Paul Stewart, writer, Producer and Director of Photography for Prehistoric Planet, who won Primetime Emmy Awards for The Blue Planet, Planet Earth and Planet Earth II. Using accurate scale cut-out models, or [for the big ones] poles on sticks, we could see how big the dinosaur was in the actual scene. Sometimes shockingly huge! Knowing size helped us figure out the speed and scope of any camera moves; we would capture a good plate then plates where we mocked up environmental interactions like kicking dirt when running, brushing bushes and picking up twigs. We also tried where possible to isolate foreground elements using bluescreen. In some cases, we even used beautifully made blue puppets and skilled puppeteers to create complex interactions; for example, a baby Pterosaur emerging from a seaweed nest. This all went back to the MPC wizards, together with LiDAR scans and photogrammetry, to make the magic happen.There was a lot of unforeseen rethinking later about how things worked out. For instance, when the Natural History Unit is on location, its one guy with the camera shooting for maybe months, explains Kirstin Hall, Visual Effects Supervisor at MPC. Theres no DIT [Digital Imaging Technician] or a script, and hes not even taking notes on his cards. We didnt think about that as a reality. When we showed up with our huge crew, and all of these shots that we had to get and things we had to do, it was a huge shock for everybody involved. It caused us to think, We need to plan this a different way. How are we going to get the data? Also, they need to shoot a script, whereas most of the narratives in Natural History come in the edit. Because we wanted to keep it as holistic as possible, the biggest thing for us was working together and becoming one healthy team. The NHU started doing their own charts, and we did HDRIs on the side. The shoots became like clockwork for Prehistoric Planet 2.ILM put a lot of detail into the CG dinosaurs, as showcased by this image of a T-Rex. (Image courtesy of Netflix)Even with the experience of working on The Lion King and The Jungle Book, MPC still had room for improvement when it came to depicting CG creatures in a naturalistic and believable manner. We had to get up to speed on animal behaviors and instinct and tailor our whole kit to that, like the lenses and cameras we used and filming off-speed; everything is slightly slow-motion, about 30 fps, Hall states. In Prehistoric Planet 2, we went 100 fps or more, which is hard to do with feathers and fur, but it helped us to get the full experience of these blue-chip Natural History Unit productions. It was not until Jurassic World Dominion that feathered dinosaurs appeared in a Hollywood franchise, but this was not the case for Prehistoric Planet, We knew from the beginning we would have to [do feathers] for it to be scientifically accurate, Hall explains. We were lucky enough to work with Darren Naish and didnt realize how integrated he would be in our team. It felt like Darren was a member of MPC because he was in every asset and animation review. If something was not authentic in how something moves or blinks, we would catch it early on and rectify going forward. We learned a lot, even with the plants. When shooting on location, we made sure to rip out holly, and we couldnt film on grass because it did not exist [during the Late Cretaceous period].Cinematographer David Baillie used a helicopter to capture aerial photography for Prehistoric Planet 2. (Image courtesy of David Baillie)Some unexpected artistic license was taken given the nature of the subject matter of Life on Our Planet. We tried to be as authentic as possible, certainly in the cinematography, remarks Jonathan Privett, Visual Effects Supervisor at ILM. Where it varied because we could control what the creatures did, there are quite a few places where we used continuity cuts that you wouldnt be able to do if you were shooting Natural History because it would have required multiple cameras which they rarely use. We didnt start off like that. It was a bit of a journey. From the outset, we said we wouldnt do that. However, theres something about the fact that creatures are not real even though they look real, which led to a sense of being slightly odd that you wouldnt do those continuity cuts when you watched the edits back; so we ended up putting them in.A Morturneria breaks the water surface courtesy of MPC for Prehistoric Planet 2.(Image courtesy of Apple Inc.)Cinematographer Paul Stewart filming on a beach in Wales for a Prehistoric Planet sequence involving a Pterosaur beach. (Image courtesy of Paul Stewart)A hovercraft brings in a proxy 3D-printed dinosaur head to allow Cinematographer David Baillie to properly frame a shot for Prehistoric Planet 2. (Image courtesy of David Baillie)Essentially, the virtual camera kit emulated the physical one. We shot a lot of it on the Canon CN20, which is a 50mm to 1000mm lens, Privett states. Jamie has a doubler [lens extender] that can make it 1500mm. An incredible bit of kit. We also used a Gyro-Stabilizer System. The process is the same as if we were making a feature. We took Jaimes GSS and shot lens grids for it. Its optically quite good because its quite long, so everything is quite flat, but we mirrored the distortion, and inside the GSS is a RED camera, so that is a relatively standard thing. The other $300,000 worth of equipment is the stabilization bit, and our traditional methods of camera tracking work fine for that. The hard bit is we never use lenses that long. In a drama, nobody is breaking out the 600mm lens. Thats quite interesting to have to deal with because you probably dont have much information. It could be a blurry mass back there, so our brilliant layout department managed to deal with those well.What made my hair go gray is the language of wildlife photography and doing long, lingering close-ups of creatures, Privett laughs. Youre right in there, so theres nowhere to hide in terms of your modeling and texturing work. We had to spend a lot of time on the shapes. For instance, a lizard has a nictitating membrane, so when closing its eye all the muscles around it move, and actually the whole shape of the face almost changes. We had to build all of those into the models probably in more detail than we would normally expect. The image is more compressed as well. Generally, the crane is panning with the GSS, and Jamie will counter-track around the creature so you get this great sense of depth. You can also see the air between you and the subject because youre so far away from it. Any kind of temperature gradient shows up as heat haze in the image. In some of the shots, were warping the final rendered image to match it with whats happening in the background because you can get some crazy artifacts, Privett remarks.There was lots of creativity but less freedom. The fusion of science with the creatives at MPC paid off in a spectacular way, Stewart notes. Creativity could never come at the expense of accuracy, and surprises and beauty had to be hard-baked into the sequences rather than serendipitously revealed in the course of filming. Giving ourselves hard rules about what could and could not happen in the animal world helped set limits and improve the believability of the films. We might have wanted the animal to jump or run, but the bones tell us it could not, so it didnt. I even found myself checking the craters on the moon for any we should erase because they happened in the last 65 million years! There was also the matter of cost. We could never afford to make all the creatures we wanted or to get the creatures to do everything we would have liked. Interaction with water, vegetation, even shadows and the ground, required huge amounts of art and render time to get right but would be hardly noticed by the audience. We got savvy quickly at how to get impact without costing the sequence out of existence. But the thrill of recreating a world that disappeared so long ago never dulled. Even the scientists and reviewers said they soon forgot they were watching animation, Stewart says.Standard visual techniques had to be rethought. The easiest way to explain it is, if Im filming a tiger in the jungle, I would want to be looking at it so you get a glimpse into its world, McPherson explains. I tend to shoot quite a long lens and make all of the foliage in the foreground melt so youre looking through this kaleidoscopic world of this tiger walking through a forest. But you cant do that with a visual effects creature because they cant put the creature behind melty, out-of-focus foliage. The best example is the opening shot of Episode 101 of Life on Our Planet of a Smilodon walking through what looks to be grass. There is a lot of grass in front and behind it. The only way to achieve that was to shoot where the creature was going to be on this plate. You shoot it once clean. Then we add in and shoot multiple layers of out-of-focus grass and then those shots are all composited together so it looks like the creature is walking behind the grass, and we match the frame speed, which then makes it feel like youre looking into that world.Having limitations is not a bad thing. There are restrictions, but they also make you more creative, McPherson observes. You have to overcome the limitations of a limited number of shots by making sure that every shot works together and tells the story in the best possible way. The usual friend or foe had to be dealt with throughout the production. Because of weather, some shoots were hard, which had nothing to do with visual effects, Baillie states. We had to do some stormy cliff shots in Yesnaby, Scotland, and had winds of nearly 100 miles per hour, which was great for crashing waves. In Sweden, when we were doing the ice shots for the Oceans episode of Prehistoric Planet, it was great to begin with because it was -28C, but there werent any holes in the ice. We nearly flew to Finland to try to find one. Then overnight the temperature went up to 3C, the wind picked up and all of the ice broke up and melted, and we couldnt find any ice without a hole! Dealing with the requirements for visual effects led to some surreal situations. The Pterosaur cliffs sequence was one of the most complex sequences because it involved shoots on land, sea, aerial and practical effects, Stewart recalls. Animation Supervisor Seng Lau worked with me in the field to help direct the plate work, and it was a fun collaboration. Watching our Smurfblue baby puppet Pterosaurs emerge from their seaweed nests was a bonding moment!Proxies ranging from 3D-printed heads to cut-outs were allowed Paul Stewart to frame shots properly for Prehistoric Planet. (Image courtesy of Paul Stewart)Cinematographer Paul Stewart describes, mimicking other cameras like thermal cameras to point out that many dinosaurs were warm-blooded and insulated by feathers. (Image courtesy of Apple)Cinematographer Jamie McPherson on location to film Komodo dragons with the cine-buggy. (Image courtesy of Jamie McPherson)