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By Walking with Dinosaurs director, Stephen Cooter

Unlike the original series that stuck to a traditional natural history style, this time around we wanted to employ the techniques of television drama and film to complement the series’ character-led approach – shooting in a way that helped the audience connect with the dinosaurs and become immersed in their stories.

The stunning visual effects sequences in Walking with Dinosaurs are typically made up of two elements: real-world backdrops shot on location and the VFX dinosaurs inserted into these backgrounds later in the edit.

A life size cut-out of a Gastonia head at head height, used to frame shots of George

And this presents a real challenge, because it means filming your drama without the stars of the show (the dinosaurs) on set. Something that’s particularly tricky when you’re trying to shoot a character-led film!

Cardboard cutouts were used across the series to line up the cameras and ensure the dinosaurs were in frame. This approach is fine for static shots when you can place your cut-out in front of the camera and film it for reference, but Utahraptors are one of the most charismatic and terrifying creatures in Walking with Dinosaurs and the fights they have with George and the Gastonia gang are some of the most dynamic.

Capturing that for the Band of Brothers film meant we needed to get the camera right in amongst the action, moving it in response to the battling dinosaurs.

So, working closely with VFX Supervisor Sam Reed, Director of Photography Julius Brighton and I devised a hand-held approach to the camera work that would allow us to get up close and personal with our dinosaur heroes (and villains!)

Helpfully for this film, both Utahraptor and Gastonia are broadly human-sized — at least in dinosaur terms, Utahraptor stood about 7ft tall and Gastonia was roughly the size of a large (and heavily armoured) cow.

So, using our cardboard cut-outs, we were able to act out the action, rehearse the hand-held camera moves following the action and then repeat the same move without the ‘actors’ in place to generate the handheld background.

Once we had the empty backdrop (with nothing in shot but the landscape), it was delivered to the VFX team along with the rehearsal (with the acted-out action) which was used as a guide to help the animators adding the CGI dinosaurs.

The lead Utahraptor hunts George and the Gastonia gang, deep in the forest

Another key sequence in the film presented a different challenge. When the raptors first encounter George and the Gastonia gang hidden in deep undergrowth, they crash through the forest hoping to flush them out. We wanted to contrast the Gastonia, oblivious to the approaching danger, quietly munching ferns, with the speed and menace of the raptors. We chose, low, static intimate shots for George and the gang, but to contrast them with the running raptors we needed to track the camera with them. Utahraptor is thought to have run at about 20mph – and that meant moving the camera… fast!

On the location scout, we identified a section of forest that would be nicely back-lit by the low morning sun, close to a long straight section of relatively flat forest track – perfect for a remote-control robotic camera dolly, or buggy-cam.

This stabilised set-up allowed us to track alongside the raptors running at full speed, with full control of the camera, allowing us to pan and tilt to follow the action. Finally, with the buggy-cam set, the smoke machine on and light streaming through the trees – it was time to let the raptors run!