Groundbreaking doco reimagined for a new audience

Perth Now

3 days ago

Twenty-five years after the original series first stomped across screens, Walking With Dinosaurs is making its way back to TV, using new technology to bring to life the stories of the ancient creatures that roamed the earth many millions of years ago.
This time around, as well as bringing dinosaurs to life digitally, the series follows the work of several palaeontology teams working in the field, including expert Dr Nazir Ibrahim, who travels with his colleagues to the Sahara Desert in episode two.
That episode is dedicated to fleshing out — literally and metaphorically — the story of a male spinosaurus, the largest carnivorous dinosaur ever to walk the earth.
For Dr Ibrahim, seeing his research come to life on screen was the realisation of a vision that had been in his head for years. Dr Nizar Ibrahim holds a spinosaurus tooth in the Sahara Desert. His dig is featured in episode two of Walking With Dinosaurs. Credit: Stephen Cooter / BBC / Stephen Cooter
'For me, when I'm in a place like the Sahara, for example, I look out at this incredible, vast landscape . . . and I don't see a dry desert,' he says.
'In my mind, I try to travel back in time, and I see this amazing landscape from the Cretaceous period.
'I see a vast river and crocodile-like hunters patrolling the waterways, and spinosaurus sails sticking out of the water, and other (creatures) in the sky, so I think this is a really amazing opportunity to share this incredible vision that I have in my head with people on an actual screen.'
Dr Ibrahim says he's thrilled about the prospect viewers will get to see his creatures 'fleshed out and resurrected.'
And it's not just his spinosaurus that gets a look-in — from the Sahara Desert to the badlands of Utah; the forests of Canada to the hills of Portugal, the series follows dinosaurs across 84 million years of their reign.
Other stories include 'a youthful triceratops battling a ravenous T-rex in North America', and 'a lonely giant lusotitan risking it all for love in Portugal'.
Their stories are brought to life using cutting edge CGI techniques provided by VFX house Lola Post Production. Two young gastonia butt heads as part of a ritual to make friends. Credit: BBC / Lola Post Production
Filming the series, and bringing the work of those palaeontology teams to life, was a huge undertaking for the series' showrunner Kirsty Wilson, who was acutely aware of the special place the original series had in viewers' hearts.
Her challenge was to create an updated version of that beloved property to the screen, while keeping all the aspects people loved the first time around.
'It was kind of terrifying, but also, you know, a great privilege to be handed a show like this,' Wilson says.
'The original series was really kind of innovative, and freshened up the form. We didn't want to just stick to the kind of thing they did, and regurgitate what had been done before. We wanted to innovate as well.'
This is the reason Wilson and her team decided to show the work of so-called 'dinosaur hunters' in the field — 'so that (viewers) can literally see the evidence coming out of the ground,' she explains. Walking With Dinosaurs showrunner Kirsty Wilson spent more than three years working on the series. Credit: Supplied
'And the other great benefit of doing that, is that we get to show the incredible work of palaeontologists like Nizar and what they're doing — it's not just the backroom stuff,' she says.
'Plus people love seeing palaeontologists up close — it's that real kind of 12-year-old kid thing that's in all of us.'
Each episode is dedicated to a different individual dinosaur, and it's the hope of the producers that through the series we'll come to 'love them, fear them, and root for these prehistoric legends'.
'The work of people like Nizar is to kind of show that these animals are, you know, real animals,' Wilson says.
'That they were real animals that once roamed the earth, not dragons, or myths, or monsters.'
When she was imagining how the show might take shape, Wilson says she wanted viewers to see these creatures as 'individuals'.
'They're always shown as these generic groups, so it's what a T-rex species would have done, or what triceratops the species would have been like,' Wilson says.
'But we had an amazing opportunity, because we were digging up the actual body of an individual, to create that actual individual's story, and add this new twist and turn of the wheel.'