Walking with Dinosaurs - Making Of

My Role

As a young animator at Framestore in 1998, I walked into a meeting with Mike Milne. The BBC wanted to know if it might be possible to take inspiration from Jurassic Park, and make an entire documentary about Dinosaurs. Mike recognised the cyclic nature of creatures, saw a moment in JP during the diplodocus reveal section, where side characters were drinking by the lake. With close inspection, their movement looped. I helped Mike work on the original test for the show, Working on pterosaurs fishing from the ocean. The project was greenlit, and I pleaded to take a diversion from my usual commercial duties to work on the project.

The show was worked on out of order. The first show delivered and I found shots didn't tie together as well as they could. Plates felt random. So I suggested a previz process be adopted, which got implemented into the pipeline. Also, I worked on the flying beasts. And
attempted to figure out how they might walk on land.

Walking with Dinosaurs

Walking with Dinosaurs is a major CG animation series for BBC Science produced in collaboration with Framestore, as part of the BBC's flagship science programme. A series of six 30-minute documentaries covering the natural history of the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous eras. Framestore's task has been to re-create the animals of that world, and to show what it must have been like to walk amongst the great reptiles.

The design and movement of the dinosaurs has been based on the guidance of a group of paleontological experts from both sides of the Atlantic, and the resulting footage (nearly two and a half hours of photorealistic CG animation) represents two years' work from a dedicated team of CG professionals.