Walking with Dinosaurs: The Arena Spectacular

There are 10 large dinosaurs in the Arena Spectacular which include:

• Plateosaurus which is 10ft tall x 31ft long
• Stegosaurus which is 18.5ft tall x 36ft long
• Allosaurus which is 14.5ft tall x 43ft long
• Brachiosaurus as an adult is 36ft tall x 56ft long and as a baby is 29.5ft tall x 48ft long – Ornithocheirus has a wing span of 38ft
• Ankylosaurus is 12ft tall x 34ft long
• Torosaurus of which there are two in the show, are 13ft tall x 30ft long
• Tyrannosaurus Rex of which there are two in the show (including one spare) are 23ft tall x 42 ft long.

• Three Utahraptors which are 8 ft tall x 14ft long
• One Baby T-Rex (including one spare) which is 7 ft tall x 14 long
• One Liliensternus which is 7.5 ft tall x 16 ft long

Walking_with_Dinosaurs_Education_Pack

‘Walking With Dinosaurs took six years to create. The show requires 150 people to stage, including a spectrum manager to control radio frequencies used to operate the dinosaurs. Twenty- ve tractor-trailers are needed to transport the 116,000 pounds of scenery, lights and sound equipment, and the 30 tons of dinosaurs’. The New York Times

The idea for Walking With Dinosaurs started in 1996. At the time it was a science TV producer at the BBC and knew they were looking for a big series about palaeontology. In particular they wanted it to appeal to the widest possible audience, to bring the subject alive. This was only a couple of years after Jurassic Park had come out which set a new bench mark in dinosaur imagery, so rather naively I suggested we use the same techniques to make a series of prehistoric natural history programmes. I had an image of a small raptor trying to catch dragon- ies in the evening light of a Cretaceous summer – one of these extraordinary animals doing something quite nor- mal and natural. Overall the aim was to create an immersive experience that was both spectacular and informa- tive.

As I investigated further I realised how dif cult it would be to achieve. The rst quote I got for creating these computer dinosaurs was 10,000 US dollars a second which was way beyond a TV budget and Jurassic Park had only about nine minutes of dinosaurs in it, we needed three hours. So my initial ideas concentrated heavily on the insects, plants and landscapes of the Mesozoic with the occasional dinosaur thrown in. Fortunately my search
of UK graphics companies brought me to Framestore where I met Mike Milne. He understood exactly what I was trying to achieve and showed a exibility and imagination that allowed us to bring down the cost of animation. Suddenly, thanks to Mike and his team, I could have a programme full of dinosaurs.

We shot a six minute pilot among some old Mediterranean pines in Cyprus and this was enough to persuade the BBC, Discovery and BBC Worldwide to fund the series. It was essential that this vision of the past was as accu- rate as possible even though it could only ever be based on scienti c conjecture. For six months we did nothing but research – carefully choosing the moments in the Mesozoic that scientists knew the most about.

To create a complete picture of the past we needed all the information we could get. Then between the summer of 1997 and winter 1998 producer Jasper James and myself took a small production crew to some of the last places on Earth where ancient plants and trees still survive so we could capture the right backgrounds for our dino- saurs. These small patches of untouched wilderness are some of the most beautiful places on the planet and we were truly privileged to spend weeks in them lming. These included the araucaria forests in New Caledonia and southern Chile, the redwood forests in California, the beech gap on South Island New Zealand and the Labyrinth in Tasmania.

While the lm crews sat in southern Paci c forests shooting lots of pretty shots of landscape with nothing in it, Mike Milne and his team of animators started work on the dinosaurs. With a lot of advice from Palaeontologists we built accurate models of almost 20 dinosaurs (and several other weird and wonderful creatures from the same time) and then scanned them into the computer. The team then faced a huge task. They were attempting some- thing that had never been tried before even in Hollywood – hours of high quality photoreal animation. The rst show took a year to animate but once Mike’s team have overcome their teething problems, the last ve only took six months.

Once our creatures were up and running they looked magni cent and suddenly the era came alive – walking, run- ning, feeding and ghting, a whole menagerie of creatures many of which have never been seen outside the pages of scienti c journals. When I rst saw the images of our polar Allosaurus wandering among the Podocarps of New Zealand I knew we had created something quite special. The six half hour programmes were nished and rst broadcast in October 1999 on the BBC1.

TIM HAINES
Creator and BBC Series Producer Walking With Dinosaurs