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 didn’t. 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 I’m 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 you’re looking through this kaleidoscopic world of this tiger walking through a forest. But you can’t do that with a visual effects creature because they can’t 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 you’re 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 -28°C, but there weren’t any holes in the ice. We nearly flew to Finland to try to find one. Then overnight the temperature went up to 3°C, the wind picked up and all of the ice broke up and melted, and we couldn’t 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!”
