The Origin Story
Prehistoric Planet: The Official Podcast
The episode explores the creative and scientific intersection between Hollywood filmmaking and natural history documentary production. Host
Key takeaways
- Jon Fav Favre used photorealistic animation techniques from The Jungle Book and The Lion King to enhance the documentary aesthetic.
- The production team utilized real-world field photography of landscapes to ground CGI dinosaur models in reality.
Main topics
- Hollywood and Natural History collaboration
- VFX and photorealism in documentaries
Notable quotes
I always thought this was not a dinosaur series. I always thought this was a natural history series that was starring dinosaurs.
Conclusion
The episode highlights how the fusion of cinematic innovation and scie
Transcript preview
Speaker 3 (0:02) Planet Earth, 66 million years ago. We now know so much about Speaker 5 (0:11) a world that was ruled by the dinosaurs. And Speaker 3 (0:16) the latest imaging technology enables us to bring them all to life. Speaker 5 (0:31) It's always hard to remember exactly where you come up with an idea for a project, but this project I do remember. I was with Sir David Attenborough on a mountainside in Kenya. We were talking about how there's nowhere on Earth that nature puts on a greater show than in Africa. And as I sat there, I thought, I wonder if that's always been true. If you could take the whole history of life, when would nature have put on its truly greatest show? And I thought, it must have been when dinosaurs were alive. This is Prehistoric Planet, the official podcast. An Apple TV Plus podcast produced by BBC Studios Natural History Unit. I'm your host, Mike Gunton, executive producer of the series on Apple TV Plus. All episodes are available now. Speaker 5 (1:27) In season two, we're once again bringing long-lost animals back to life. We've seen strange mating dances, super-intelligent feathered hunters, even T-Rex taking a swim. You may well know, on a lot of BBC natural history shows, at the end, there's a behind-the-scenes bit we call the making-ofs. Well, this podcast is going to be the making-of of all making-ofs. We're bringing you the full story of how Prehistoric Planet was made. Helping to tell the story is series producer Tim Walker. Tim's the person who pulled all the strands together and pushed and pushed to get every aspect Speaker 4 (2:20) of this project over the line. It was like a dream come true, trying to create a world that is as scientifically accurate as it can possibly be, that by the time it comes to the screen, we're all walking, talking, those living animals. Tim will be Speaker 5 (2:34) here with me throughout the podcast and also joining us is... Dr Darren Naish. Speaker 2 (2:40) I can't emphasise enough what a dream job it is. Darren is our Speaker 5 (2:46) lead advisor, our guru, who steered us through the science of every episode on Prehistoric Planet. And he'll be doing the same here on the podcast. But first, we're meeting a man whose resume is extraordinary. He made the Marvel movie Iron Man, an amazing Star Wars reboot, The Mandalorian, and directed The Jungle Book and The Lion King. He is, of course, Jon Favreau. While Jon was making those films, his Hollywood world was about to collide with ours here at the BBC Natural History Unit. Jon was trying to make the animation in Jungle Book and The Lion King look photoreal, as if the animals had been filmed, like in a nature documentary. And the BBC's Planet Earth and Dynasty series had become an inspiration. Jon is joining us on the line from Los Angeles, and Tim's going to start us off. Hi, Jon. Speaker 1 (3:38) Hello. What do you want to talk about? Dinosaurs? Are you set, John? Yes, I'm all set. Okay, great. What Speaker 4 (3:46) I want to get into today is how you ended up meeting Mike and how it led to us all working together on this series. And I also want to chat about some of our favourite moments in the show and how he made them. But to kick off, I know you studied natural history shows for your films and I'd love to hear more about it. Can you tell me... Why were they such an important tool for you? Well, Speaker 1 (4:10) whenever you start off with a film or a story, something that you're going to be working with over the course of several years, you have to develop, I wouldn't say a mission statement, but a shared understanding of what the goal is going to be. The cliche is like, okay, we're going to do Alien, Jaws in space. I don't know that that's a conversation Ridley Scott ever had, but that's kind of a Hollywood shorthand for, you know, what the nature of the project is that it keeps you aligned. And so if you're doing the live action Lion King, that could mean a lot of things to a lot of people, right? It could be, let's take the animated characters and make them dimensional. Let's keep the aesthetic of what was done before. Now we had really... explored photorealism and how do you make people feel things with photoreal animals? And of course, a lot in Lion King, the lions are making jokes and talking and singing, but we wanted the sequences that felt naturalistic to be able to sit alongside of a documentary and hopefully not stand out. And you might even fool people to think that it is one. Because most shows or films that you're watching where you're your main characters are animals, there's a tremendous amount of liberty taken in the design and performance to make them feel more like humans. But planet Earth, well, there's an example of photoreal animals, because they're real, that are making you feel a tremendous amount of empathy. And really, sitting at the edge of your seat. And, you know, these were things that we were sharing amongst ourselves in the production offices just because they were viral moments and like, this is so cool. And then it becomes, you know, let's do our research about what behaviors we want these animals to exhibit. And can we make sequences that are engaging in the way that these documentaries are engaging and not so much in the way that a cartoon would be? And so that became the set of challenges we presented to ourselves. Speaker 1 (6:09) That's what we set out to do. And now it becomes about how we make the environments look that pretty. What environments do we choose? How do we have the animals act? How do we have them behave? How do we photograph them? How do we edit? And once you know the form, then you know how to push up against it or explore it or propel it. So we decided that those documentaries that Mike had worked on became our guiding Speaker 4 (6:32) principle. Okay, so Mike, one of the things that I think people will wonder... is how you two, these two great forces of Hollywood film and the natural world, got together. What happened? Speaker 5 (6:46) It took a long time to get this show off the road for a whole load of reasons, partly because it needed the right alignment of stars, and that is both the right team, the right people, the right science, but also the right resources. To make something like this is incredibly ambitious. It's probably the most ambitious thing I've ever done in my... Speaker 5 (7:06) over 35 years of wildlife filmmaking. And I always thought this was not a dinosaur series. I always thought this was a natural history series that was starring dinosaurs. So all the techniques of how you capture natural history today had to be reflected as if we had all got inside a time machine, unpacked the gear and started filming. So we had to find a way of replicating that in a world where the animals are created. And... It's so easy to get wrong. And I knew I only had one chance at this. And I talked to loads and loads and loads. I talked to probably every broadcaster on the planet. But in the end, I met Jay Hunt, who I'd worked with when she was controller of BBC One, and got talking to her about this project. And she got it and also was prepared with the extraordinary ambition that Apple TV Plus has to make this happen. Speaker 5 (8:02) One of the things that Jay also brought to the party was that Apple had been talking to John about using as reference for Lion King quite a lot of the programs that I'd been working on. So this strange meeting happened in Jay's office. And I think she was a bit nervous about us getting together. And, you know, we had this meeting within about... three minutes, I was talking about my Lion film, you were talking about your Lion King, you got your iPad out, we were looking at shots and we were talking about how we got this shot and how do you do this and then we were talking about tracking shots and Jay sort of sat back and I think she just sort of folded her arms and let us just go. And I knew straight away that we Speaker 1 (8:43) had the same same, yeah, the same curiosities I think. You know, so much of these conversations are about the the science or about the technology, but really it's about the people I found. And if people are clicking and share common curiosities and common interests, that's when everything kicks into gear. And I had heard about this project when it was already underway. And I tend to work on projects that I self-generate, either write or come up with, or that I'm involved with as a director or producer. But in this case, I had just been finishing off Lion King and we had... put so much effort into innovating around virtual photography and virtual cinema. There was no film actually rolling, no set. But all of this technology that we had innovated, we hadn't had any plans to do anything with it. I really wanted to continue to explore what could be done with that. And then when I heard about this project, it seemed wonderful, especially with the pedigree of the people that were already involved. And it seemed such a natural, just a Speaker 5 (9:47) natural. thing to do to collaborate and try and make this once in a lifetime collaboration of different skills and different experiences. Speaker 4 (9:55) John, could I ask you, after you'd made Jungle Book and The Lion King, people hearing that you're making something about dinosaurs might think, yeah, Speaker 1 (10:04) that's Speaker 4 (10:04) the natural next step. Why do people want to Speaker 1 (10:07) do dinosaurs? I think if you look historically, whenever there's new visual effects, everybody makes dinosaurs with it, whether it's stop motion. early hand-drawn animation. Some of the most beautiful initial stop-motion drawn animation was a dinosaur that would travel with vaudeville shows, and they'd project it on the screen. And of course, you have The Lost World, Willis O'Brien, you have Jurassic Park, Spielberg. Every new technology seems to take a crack at dinosaurs. As soon as you could make something out of the magic of technology, the first thing people want to do is dinosaurs. We're just fascinated by it. Why Speaker 4 (10:44) do you think that is? Speaker 1 (10:45) I think it's hardwired in. I think it's the ultimate predator. And I think that going back to when we were tree dwellers, we react to things with fangs, things that are big, things that could hunt you. And that's why you have dragons in mythology. Just like with an animal, you don't have to show a cat what a mouse is. There's just something in the wiring. I guess it's part of our survival mechanisms. I think the roots of that are probably in evolution and in what the earliest versions of us were very concerned with avoiding. Speaker 5 (11:19) Yeah, it's a good survival strategy. Big scary thing with teeth walking towards you, run away. Speaker 4 (11:25) At the heart of the series, the ethos is