Prehistoric Planet season 2 is almost here, with Apple TV+ set to immerse viewers once again in the world of the late Cretaceous period. Returning are some fan-favorite dinosaurs from the unique docuseries’ first season, as is series narrator David Attenborough. The five-episode event series premieres May 22 on Apple TV+, with a new episode to be released every night.
The show follows in the tradition established by hit BBC docuseries like Planet Earth, focusing on different ecosystems with each episode to great and fascinating effect. Two major creative minds behind the series are executive producer Mike Gunton and showrunner Tim Walker, who together have managed to take what worked about the first season of Prehistoric Planet and flesh it out even more for season 2. From new creatures to a wider range of camera techniques, Prehistoric Planet season 2 has managed to improve upon the already fantastic original iteration.
Mike Gunton and Tim Walker spoke with Screen Rant about getting determining the behavior of their subject species, the immense work behind each shot, and more.
Mike Gunton & Tim Walker on Prehistoric Planet Season 2
Screen Rant: Mike, I believe you had the concept for this show, which was then made possible with the help of Jon Favreau and his work on the technology side. Did this idea predate the technology, or did the technology inspire you to use it in this unique way?
Mike Gunton: In some sense, the technology has been around for a while. If you go back to Walking with Dinosaurs, people have CG-animated creatures. So the idea is a bit older; the idea really was about 10 years ago–maybe more, actually, now. It was a shift in thinking, basically, “Could we do a classic natural history series like Planet Earth, but set it 65, 66 million years ago?”
At the back of your mind, of course, it would have to therefore be in CG. Luckily, it took a long time to get the right people together and to raise the resources and all the rest of it, and during that time the stars were never quite aligned. Suddenly, they clicked into alignment when we met Apple, met Jay Hunt, and at the same time happened to be talking to Jon about some projects. He came into the sphere of the planners, and because he had just done Jungle Book and just done Lion King, which elevated the ability to make these hyper-real, hyper-accurate creatures, that was the technological thing that allowed us to realize the ambition.
So, the ambition was a theoretical ambition. We knew that, yes, there’ll be technology, but could it deliver? It was only when Jon joined us (that we realized it could). We did a test quite early on. In fact, it became the T-Rex swimming sequence where the T-Rex goes on the beach with the baby turtles and the baby T-Rexes. We did that as a test, and it was incredible, and we just thought, “Absolutely. This can deliver.” The level of authenticity, the level of nuance, (and) the level of behavioral sophistication we can now reflect in these CGI animals is just mind-blowing.
Tim, can you talk about the process of putting together a single shot from start to finish?
Tim Walker: Yeah. We’ve got an amazing collaboration here between ourselves as the BBC Natural History unit, and then Jon Favreau, and then the amazing team at MPC. What we’ve got to remember is (that) at the heart of this is wildlife filmmaking. Working with Mike is a real privilege because Mike has spent 35 years making some of the most iconic blue-chip natural history documentaries that the world’s seen, so we’ve got this incredible wealth of experience.
Now, that extends across into the rest of the production team as well. We work with a great team of wildlife filmmakers, people that have been out in the field filming every animal imaginable on every continent, so they’ve got vast experience in terms of how things look and how you capture things, but also (in) the type of behaviors that you then see from animals. Of course, until you’ve seen a behavior on camera, it’s hitherto unknown, isn’t it? Then you put it on camera and everyone knows that it happened.
Added into that, we’ve got our fingers on the paleo pulse. The paleontological world is moving at a faster pace than ever before. Everyone can talk to each other on the Internet and transfer data very, very quickly, and we’ve got a wonderful relationship with paleos across the world in loads of different disciplines. So not just bones and stones, but paleoclimatology, paleobotanists, (and) behavioral specialists. Now add all of that together, and then look at the fossil record, and you see what animals were around at the time that we’re depicting.
We’re in a relatively small window of geological time: the Maastrichtian, which is the last five or 6 million years of Late Cretaceous. We’ve got a really good fossil record from that period, so you can see which animals are around (and) what the habitats were like, and then we start to build stories utilizing (the) experience of being out in the field and looking at the kind of behaviors that animals do. We know that we need to create stories that reflect the natural world; it’s just 66 million years ago.
With all of that in mind, we then storyboard a sequence out. Let’s say it’s Beelzebufo, and we’re going to see Beelzebufo try and attract a mate. We know from our experience that that type of animal will behave in a certain way. We know, from the fossil record, which other animals were around Beelzebufo. In this case, we feature Rapetosaurus, a large type of sauropod, and then we start to storyboard the beats out. We then take those beats, we turn them into pre-vis, and use virtual cameras to create a virtual version of the arena–the location–and then we work out all the shots that we require.
Then, we find a location that represents that arena. We’re using real-world locations as much as possible, because there’s no substitute for the real world, (and) that nuance that you get from Mother Nature. In the case of the Beelzebufo sequence, we filmed that in Southern Africa. We’d go out into the field, and we film a shot list as per what we’ve designed in pre-vis, and then we’d come back and start the very, very lengthy process of putting all the CGI characters into it.
That goes on for about a year for each sequence, and then we write the script, and work with Sir David Attenborough to get the voiceover script in place. We then work with Hans Zimmer and the team at Bleeding Fingers to put the music on board, all the sound effects come on board, and everything comes to a great crescendo. Finally, we press “complete render”, and out comes the pipeline.
Mike Gunton: Sounds easy, doesn’t it? It takes almost as long as it does for Tim to describe it.
Tim Walker: That was the short version.
Mike Gunton: And that happens for every single thing. You’re describing that over the bigger picture of a sequence, but every single twitch, every single snip, every single micro-movement of those creatures all has to go through this extraordinary decision-making process about how it’s going to do it (and) when it’s going to do it. It’s like being Mother Nature. It’s like being evolution. We’re trying to be natural selection in action.
It has actually been great fun, but also (a) fascinating learning journey and creative journey to do this, (and) to try and make a project that feels exactly as if we had filmed it. What that involves is all sorts of very strange mental twists, because you have to start constraining everything you do in photography terms. You can put cameras potentially anywhere in the VFX world, but you can’t do that in a real world. We have to try and reflect that. Also, you can’t have perfect continuity because again, in nature, you can’t ask an animal and say, “Oh, stop, would you mind just doing that again? We didn’t quite get the shot.” But if it’s too bad, it looks like really bad natural history. It’s very fine needlework. I think (that’s) an expression you could use to describe it.
Tim Walker: And that end of the process that Mike describes is what Jon Favreau refers to as the wabi-sabi. He’s always talking about the wabi-sabi, which is the Japanese art of appreciating the imperfection. That is the sort of the essence of wildlife filmmaking because, as Mike says, an animal will do something once. If you don’t get it all on camera, you’ve got to then work out how you build your sequence. You might get 95 percent of it, but you’ve lost a couple of shots, so you’ve got to work out where your shots come from elsewhere.
This is something I’ve been dying to know since the first season. How far does research take you, and where do you have to take a little bit of creative liberty? Because you’re doing the sounds they make, the way that they walk–every single aspect of these creatures.
Mike Gunton: There are many, many answers to that, depending actually on the sequence, because there are different strands of evidence for everything we do. One way of considering it is that you’re looking (it) up, and there are hundreds of these little tiny strings of evidence. You’re pulling them all together, and you’re starting to weave–going back to that analogy–that tapestry. It’s not a perfect picture, but in the end, as it starts to build, the possibilities of what it can be get less and less and less and less and less. It’s almost like Sherlock Holmes. “It can’t be that, it can’t be that, it can’t be that; it must be that.” So, that’s one of the ways that we end up where we get, and Tim, I’m sure, will talk about the fossils.
I’ll just talk a little bit about some of the comparative biology. I think (what’s) been our advantage as biologists and natural historian wildlife filmmakers, is that there are surprisingly tight rules in nature about what animals do in certain circumstances. A good example is the finale of episode one, which is the courtship between the two massive Hatzegopteryx. There are a lot of reasons why that sequence is the way it is. Part of it has to do with theoretical biology–to do with the fact that we know those animals were what we call K-selected, which means they had a few large offspring, which they put a lot of effort into.
When you’re in that sort of circumstance, unlike a frog or something which has millions of (offspring), and just lets them all go, there’s a lot of investment. When (animals) do that, you tend to have lots of assessment of your mate. If you’re only going to invest in a few babies, you want to make sure you’re investing in a good mate, (so) you tend to get dimorphism, you tend to get bigger males or different males and females, (and) you tend to get display.
Also, if you have animals that are very dangerous, which those (pterosaurs) are—(they’re) probably one of the scariest animals in the series–and you’re in an intimate situation with one of those creatures, you want to make sure there are rules of engagement. You don’t get it wrong, because you’re going to get a beak stabbing you. These courtships tend to have these little escalations of commitment through them, so once you start to have these rules and parameters, then the sequence starts to only be able to have a certain way of doing it. Then there’s some fossil evidence, of course, which you also bring into the equation.
Tim Walker: As Mike says, with the fossils, one of the beauties of focusing on this time period is that the fossil record is very good. Simosuchus is a great example; that animal is very well-preserved. You can look at the features of it and compare them to the features of other animals, both from the time and now, and you can see commonality between different behaviors that come out of having those features. Simosuchus, the pug-nosed crocodile (or) crocodylomorph, had a head that was shaped for burrowing, it had arms that were shaped for burrowing, (and) it had bony coverings all over its body, which would suggest that (the covering) was used for some kind of defense, a little bit like a wombat. The wombat has got a leathery backside, which it plugs its burrow with so that things don’t get to it.
And then for many other aspects of the comparative biology side of things, we utilize a technique called phylogenetic bracketing, where if you know where an animal sits on the evolutionary family tree, you can see which animals are on either side of it on that tree. You can look for aspects of anatomy or bits of behavior, or sounds, for example, that animals on either side of it have that might still be around, and then you can infer that that (extinct creature) could possibly follow similar rules.
Sound-wise, if you look at T-Rex, for example, you’ve got birds on one side of it, and crocodilians on the other. You look at the sounds that they make and sort of marry them together, and start to think, “Well, this animal must have made very very similar sounds. Albeit, it was massive; it was 12 meters long, and it was very, very pneumatic, and so it would have been very raspy. But you can start to build this, as Mike always calls it, spellbook all of these different strands.
Mike Gunton: And there are physics about resonant frequencies, about the sorts of sounds that animals of certain sizes would make, about how animals use sound differences, the gap between their ears, (and) how they localize sounds. Every strand of contemporary biology goes into this to make these decisions. It might be worth even just quickly saying that one of the things that we love about this is that we’ve become kind of part of the scientific community now. We’ve got so many friends out there now telling us all this stuff, and often stuff that’s not published, which is very useful for us. But also, we have contributed back into the science.
There’s a story in the “Oceans” episode of a Mosasaur (that) attacks (an) Elasmosaur. (The question is,) “How does a Mosasaur of that particular scale hunt?” Well, we think it was an ambush predator. When you’re a big animal like that, and you’re attacking other big animals with big teeth, one of the things you don’t want to do is get into a fight. If you can, you want to get in there, kill it, (and get out). If you look at contemporary animals, often things like Great Whites go in, (deliver a) catastrophic bite, then leave, let the animal bleed to death, and come back and eat it when it’s safe. It’s not going to bite you back.
We thought that would probably be the situation with Mosasaurus; it would probably hit its prey, catastrophically damage it so badly, and then swim back and get it later. But to do that, it would have to have a massive acceleration. It’s a huge animal; has it got the power and the swimming technique to accelerate out of ambush and hit one of these things with enough power to do that damage? What sort of momentum, and all the rest of it? We worked with some academics in America and said, “We need to know.” So they did all sorts of computer modeling, all sorts of mathematical modeling, and ran four or five different scenarios, and then came up with a massive equation which actually shows that they have a particular anatomical form where they bend their bodies into a “C” and then spring it over, which creates a huge thrust. They worked out the speed, and (discovered that there) would be enough force to, when it hit one of these things, do the damage that we described. In a very vivid and colorful way that only American scientists can say, it was like being hit by a semi-truck. I don’t actually know what a semi-truck is, but I think it’s probably quite a big thing.
Was there anything that you weren’t able to do in the first season that you were excited about for season 2? Or were there certain creatures you were excited to explore this time around?
Tim Walker: One of the things we’re very proud of is that we brought back the cast of favorites from the first series, but we (also) brought some new ones in. Every episode has at least one new dinosaur, and in some cases, it’s the first time they’ve ever been depicted on screen anywhere. We brought back a very varied cast of characters, so not just the dinosaurs and pterosaurs and the marine reptiles. We brought back snakes and birds and fish, and other reptiles and amphibians, and mammals. We’re painting a very, very rich and diverse picture of the prehistoric planet, showing that it was a really vibrant, wonderful place. The camera techniques we’ve used are pushing the boundaries, as any sequel does. (From) Planet Earth to Planet Earth 2, the camera techniques changed. We follow the same rationale, so we used thermal imaging cameras, we use a lot of slo-mo that we didn’t do in season one, (and) we use night vision cameras to depict nightlife at night. I know Mike, you’re very, very proud of the soundscape as well.
Mike Gunton: Absolutely. We were, as Tim was saying earlier, (serious) about wanting to create the sense that this was a very, very rich ecology. We can’t show every animal that lived there, but if you step out into the Costa Rican rainforest, you’ll see animals around, but you’ll hear an extraordinary cacophony of all these other creatures. I felt in series one, we perhaps didn’t reflect that as richly as we could and should, so we’ve definitely done that for this (season). So I think it feels (like a) richer, and for that reason, more authentic world. And I think just generally, you learn from the first series, in terms of the CG (and) in terms of the storytelling. As Tim was saying, we’ve got the cameras feeling like they’re closer and telling more intimate stories. I just think we’ve just upped our game; it’s gone another level up. I think it’s an extraordinary thing, this second series. It wasn’t a difficult second album. It’s the cool second album.
About Prehistoric Planet Season 2
“Prehistoric Planet” season two continues to bring Earth’s history to life like never before as the series presents new dinosaurs, new habitats and new scientific discoveries while taking viewers around the world in an epic five-night adventure. With new dinosaurs like the Tarchia, one of the largest ankylosaurs, to returning fan-favorites like the Tyrannosaurus rex, and many more, “Prehistoric Planet” returns with an all-new season of prehistoric wonders.
Prehistoric Planet season 2 premieres May 22 on Apple TV+, with one new episode per day until May 26.