00:01It's a very demanding thing to do, to create a world in CG that is this authentic.
00:08It is so believable.
00:10We're able to bring the ancient world to life like no one's ever seen before.
00:15It's been a real exercise in trying to have the hand of the artist be invisible
00:19so that the story and the science gets to take center stage.
00:25It's such a thrill, and that's a remarkable achievement.
00:30After making the first series of Prehistoric Plant, we felt there was so much still untold.
00:39So the second series takes some of those stories further.
00:44You have the most sophisticated reconstructions of dinosaurs that you ever had,
00:50and yet at the same time you film it in the way as though they were living animals.
00:56Ultimately, the object of the exercise is to make a natural history show.
01:00It just happens to have dinosaurs in it.
01:01When you first see one of these things in the bones, as it were, and certainly in the reconstructions,
01:11it takes your breath away.
01:13But you really then want to start asking questions, very simple questions.
01:17How did they mate?
01:19How did they catch their food?
01:21How fast could they run?
01:23Were they aggressive?
01:25If you study the physiology of animals and are a zoologist, you are accustomed to those questions.
01:36Finding the answers from a bit of bone is a different thing.
01:40But the fact is, we do know the answer to these questions.
01:51Dinosaurs have been studied for over a century, and we're in a golden era of dinosaur interpretation.
01:57That was why I thought it was the right time to do this series, because the vibe I was getting
02:01from the scientific community was that it was no longer about the bones.
02:05It was about behaviour.
02:06And it was about interpreting the bones in terms of the lives the animals sleep.
02:11These sorts of basic realities are what paleontologists use in order to work out how an animal that was alive 66
02:20million years ago actually ate its food.
02:22It's very important that after her mind's been blown by these wonders, that someone says yes and we can prove that they're true.
02:33There's no point in doing this unless it is a piece of fundamentally accurate science.
02:40The process of making this project, just simply of making the animals look as accurate as they can, has demanded such deep scientific research.
02:52That's why the answers are as convincing as they are, because the questions came from knowledgeable minds.
03:03New finds are being made every day, so we wanted to reflect some of these new discoveries.
03:10For season two, we've created a whole cast of new characters, about 15 of which are brand new dinosaurs that people won't have seen before.
03:17Lurking in these muddy pools is a monster.
03:24There's one sequence with a massive frog.
03:30The Bielzebufo, the giant toad.
03:32It's a nice fun sequence that, isn't it? It's a surprise.
03:36Mind you, if you don't like toads, I mean, you've got a huge, great toad.
03:40Quite a lot of people, I find, mysteriously, don't like toads. I love toads. I'm terribly keen on goats.
03:50I always love the stories of the families, too.
03:53How the families interact with one another and move through nature, and the learning curve for the little ones.
03:59I'm aware that I'm looking at extinct animals that I've never seen in life.
04:04But on the other hand, they are very familiar in the way they behave.
04:10It's all about authenticity, not just the authenticity of the reconstructions.
04:14The animals are as realistic as possible, but also the authenticity of how it is presented as a television program.
04:20What surprised me was the skill with which they decided to accept the limitations that they would be if the subjects of their films were actually alive and there.
04:33Can you get yourself immersed in the lives of these recreated animals enough to actually care what happens to them?
04:41They have to deal with all sorts of problems. That's part of life.
04:44It doesn't matter if it's today or 66 million years ago. Animals still had to face similar challenges of bringing up babies and avoiding being eaten and challenges of the environment.
04:57So, you know, you can start to join the dots a bit.
04:59And through that, we can draw conclusions to exactly how the dinosaurs looked, where they fit in their ecological niche, and how they behave.
05:07The visual effects are certainly my inroad into this project.
05:11I didn't have a background in paleontology, though I had a fascination with dinosaurs.
05:16And when I met with the team, we were talking about, hey, could we actually present this in a way where the effects become invisible?
05:23What John has brought to it is a confidence to us that technically we could deliver the accuracy that all the other work demands.
05:33Of course, you can make them do anything, but the animators have clearly watched animals living today in that sort of circumstance, and how they go about dealing with the problems.
05:51That's the most extraordinary part of what these animators have done, that they make you feel that those animals are thinking, living creatures.
06:01These artists have a deep understanding of how to breathe life into characters through animation, and how to bring photorealism through shading and through lighting.
06:11The scale of this project, and the resources you need, and the ambition and the risk to make a series about something that doesn't exist anymore, was a very ambitious project to do.
06:22But all of it is in preparation for letting people of all ages watch it together, and maybe seeing something they've never seen before presented in this way.
06:36The present is only a very small part of the natural world, and to know the history of our predecessors is an important thing.
06:46That's what science is about, about discovery, about knowledge. Knowledge is exciting.
06:50Season 2 of Prehistoric Planet ups the ante in every way, and it creates just an impression of a long lost world that unfortunately we can't go back and see.
07:02But using our imagination and our scientific know-how, we can collaborate with an amazing group of people to create the best dinosaurs people have ever seen.
07:10I'm glad that we gave it time to develop, because there is no doubt that we know very significantly more about dinosaurs than we did even ten years ago.
07:25It was only Apple TV Plus that did back us, and to have Sir David and John and the Natural History Unit working together, it's a dream team.
07:33It's a dream team.
07:34And dinosaurs will always come and produce something unexpected.
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