The arrival of the dinosaurs heralded a golden age of iconic creatures who would stalk the earth for over 100 million years. But beneath their feet, new characters were appearing as other dynasties flourished in this fertile new world. With the arrival of the first flowers, life became more colourful, triggering breathtaking new forms of diversity. Insects became social, dinosaurs evolved feathers and the first true mammals emerged in the shadows. Ruling over them all were giants like Tyrannosaurus Rex.
But of course, there was something on the horizon that would take out the dominant species of this era – and once more completely upend the order of succession on Earth.
Key moments
Diplodocus vs. Allosaurus – Like Komodo Dragons, Diplodocus lead a “double life.” As adults, they are almost immune to predation, thanks to their giant size and defensive abilities. But as babies they are super vulnerable, not least because they hatch from an egg no larger than a grapefruit. It is thought that baby Dippies adopted a “hiding posture” to avoid detection by predators, in the same way some antelope do in the Serengeti today.
“Dippie vs. Allo,” as it became known to the filmmakers, was likely the most technical of all the VFX sequences in the series, as it brought together so many disparate elements. Backplates shot in an area of the UK that was open enough to accommodate five Diplodocus adults – itself no mean feat – had to be shot during the day when there was enough light to be able to film VFX, and then later colorised to bring the scene to nighttime. ILM then added not just dinosaurs, but all the vegetation to the foreground and background to make it feel like the kind of landscape that could support such giant herbivores. On top of that, they then added rain and lightning to complete the sequence.
Megaponera Ants – This war between ants and foraging termites was designed to have the same epic feeling as Braveheart or Game of Thrones’ “Battle of the Bastards.” Specialized cameras allowed the crew to film at ant’s eye level. Amazingly, thanks to the relentlessness of the ants going to war every single day, the crew had ample opportunity to pick off their shots and their storyboard was achieved in full.
This remarkable behaviour was filmed in the forests of the Ivory Coast, near the border of Burkina Faso, an area that has become particularly dangerous in recent times due to terrorist activity. This meant several postponed shoots and lengthy calls with security experts to ensure that the team could be as safe as possible at all times.
Filming the ants’ nursing room had never before been recorded, which was particularly pleasing to the scientist the team worked with on this scene. This is the only known example of an animal other than humans using antibiotics to care for injured comrades.
Virtual Filming Snakes – Montages have been a part of natural history filmmaking since the 1970s, and Life on Our Planet makes use of this technique at several points, but there’s never quite been a montage like this before. That’s because, much like the Mandalorian series and most modern blockbusters, the snake montage was shot using a virtual production studio. To show their true diversity, the team set out to film about 20 species of snake, each in their own habitat around the world. Rather than travel many thousands of miles to get a couple of shots of each snake, they created 3D, computer-generated forests, deserts and jungles, along with detailed foreground sets filled with real plants, trees and sand dunes, into which they placed snakes from three different reptile park collections.
The virtual studio and the engine it uses are such that the virtual sets moved as the camera moved, and the depth parallax was as if they were in the wild. To achieve this, they had to erect a wall of TV’s nine feet high and 30 feet wide, encompassing 177 individual scenes in total. The building we were in was only 12 feet high and 31 feet wide, so to say it was a squeeze would be an understatement.
T-Rex Dance-off – Having featured T-Rex as the classic hero we know from the movies in Chapter 1, the goal in this sequence was to show its softer side with a mating display. Planning the sequence started in early 2019, when the team liaised with all sorts of T-Rex experts to ensure that the display was as realistic as possible. The challenge here, of course, is that behaviour doesn’t fossilize. The team turned to a technique known as phylogenetic bracketing: looking at modern-day relatives of a prehistoric creature and inferring that the prehistoric creature behaves the same as their relatives.
But it wasn’t all conjecture. Recent MRI scans of T-Rex skulls show that they have a great many nerve endings towards the end of their snout – strong evidence that touch, or some sort of nuzzling, would be involved with the courtship.
