Jon Favreau (Lion King, The Mandalorian) and the producers of the multi award-winning Planet Earth series bring you Prehistoric Planet. Possibly the most immersive and realistic dinosaur show ever. They combine real world wildlife filmmaking, the latest paleontology insight, and state-of-the-art VFX to give their CG creatures personalities and a natural environment to live in.
You won’t need to wait for Jurassic World to see real looking dinos!
The camera crew choose locations based on the advice of the scientists, to most accurately match the many environments of the Late Cretaceous, 66 million years ago. Then they added photorealistic visual effects from MPC (The Lion King,The Jungle Book) applied to concept art created by Jellyfish Pictures (The Book of Boba Fett, Spirit: Untamed), again guided by paleontologists. Prehistoric Planet presents little-known and surprising facts of dinosaur life set against the backdrop of the environments of Cretaceous times, including coasts, deserts, freshwater, ice worlds and forests. Sir David Attenborough narrates. After seeing footage he agreed to do the show saying: ” It could not have been done any better”. This is high praise from the dean of nature documentaries.
Executive producer Mike Gunton had an idea for Prehistoric Planet and spoke with Favreau, who Gunton said: “held the keys to the time machine that could transport us back to the time of the dinosaurs and show how they lived.” Favreau said he worked with dozens of animators, like he would in a movie, to give each creature natural motion and personality. This was based on their studying living relatives like reptiles and birds, plus fossil evidence of behavior, like hunting in packs.
The team includes showrunner/series producer Tim Walker, lead scientific consultant Dr. Darren Naish, directors and series animation supervisors Adam Valdez and Andrew R. Jones, and score composers Anže Rozman and Kara Talve. From eye-opening parenting techniques of Tyrannosaurus rex to exploring the mysterious depths of the oceans and the deadly dangers in the sky, this looks to set a new standard for dinosaur documentaries. The series will likely be a real contender for many awards, especially visual effects.
Prehistoric Planet is produced for Apple TV+ by BBC Studios Natural History Unit. More images and trailers here.
Release date: May 23, 2022 on Apple+ The series will roll out one episode a day for 5 days.
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David Raiklen wrote, directed and scored his first film at age 9. He began studying keyboard and composing at age 5. He attended, then taught at UCLA, USC and CalArts. Among his teachers are John Williams and Mel Powel.
He has worked for Fox, Disney and Sprint. David has received numerous awards for his work, including the 2004 American Music Center Award. Dr. Raiklen has composed music and sound design for theater (Death and the Maiden), dance (Russian Ballet), television (Sing Me a Story), cell phone (Spacey Movie), museums (Museum of Tolerance), concert (Violin Sonata ), and film (Appalachian Trail).
His compositions have been performed at the Hollywood Bowl and the first Disney Hall. David Raiken is also host of a successful radio program, Classical Fan Club.
As irony would have it, today I saw both the trailer for this and an episode of *The Flintstones*, the cartoon series that has humans living with dinosaurs.
While I can certainly appreciate the work that went into *Prehistoric Planet*, I wonder how much we don’t know, and how much we eventually will know, about dinosaurs. Even their colors were a complete mystery until melanosomes were discovered and started being analyzed around the 1990s. But I honestly don’t know how much we yet know about the colors or other things covered by this program. Every time I think I’m up to date on something, there’s something new….