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by showrunner Kirsty Wilson

The above image is a shot from an episode of Walking With Dinosaurs called The Orphan. In this moment T. rex is stalking a tiny orphan triceratops, Clover through the dense undergrowth of an ancient forest. This prehistoric landscape dates back 66 million years to the Cretaceous period when the earth was around 5 degrees hotter, titans roamed the land, sea and sky and our planet was covered in strange and exotic plants.

But whilst the dinosaurs in this shot are obviously computer-generated, the forest is very real. So where did we go to film this ancient-feeling, exotic landscape, I hear you ask? Perhaps the distant islands of the Pacific, maybe some remote and lush land in Asia, or maybe some corner of the earth you’ve never even heard of before? Well, I’ll tell you where we went… Slough!

That’s right T. rex and Triceratops were running around the suburbs of Slough, not 3hrs outside London right here in the UK. But it’s more exciting than it sounds because this area is home to Black Park which has hosted filming for everything from Deadpool v Wolverine to Harry Potter. But it wasn’t it’s famous filming history that brought us here…

We always wanted viewers to feel when watching the series that they could be watching a natural history documentary that had been filmed today. So we knew that the best way to give the show a true sense of realism and wonder was to film in real world locations. But we couldn’t just shoot anywhere, we had to find places that could pass for our planet over 66 million years ago and that presented some serious challenges! Did you know millions of species of plant on Earth today weren’t present in ancient times? When I realised that grass didn’t exist back then, I nearly passed out! Find somewhere in the world today with no grass?! I might as well have decided we were going to film on the moon!

But the production team was incredibly tenacious. Working with expert after expert, speaking to palaeobotanists, species specialists, you name it, they finally came up with some incredible places. Nothing is perfect, our Earth today simply isn’t the Earth that existed millions of years ago, but the team found locations that weren’t only jaw-droppingly beautiful but also as scientifically true to our ancient earth as humanly possible.

We repeated this process for every single episode, shot and frame of the series. We found locations everywhere, from the stunning mountains of Canada to the tropical islands of the Azores to the red rocks of Utah. But once we’d got our locations, the real work of filming them began! Try making a TV show about a hero character with no hero to shoot! I’ve been lucky enough to film animals all over the world from hyenas in Kenya to sharks in Australia but here, because our lead animals are now extinct, we had to film empty shots ‘imagining’ where our dinosaurs would be and what they would be doing – now that’s a real challenge!

Without our dinosaurs in front of us we had to be incredibly technically disciplined, filming our shots over and over again. These were the shots that we would later add our dinosaurs to. We had to make sure our characters were perfectly in the frame so that when they were added later digitally, they actually fit in! So the production team stepped up – running around forests with cardboard cut-out dinosaur heads on sticks or pushing through trees holding cut-outs of baby dinosaurs! But it didn’t end there, we also wanted audiences to feel that these dinosaurs were really interacting with the environment and there is rarely a better way than to do this for real. Cue directors swimming huge, scientifically accurate 3d printed dinosaur heads through water to create the perfect real life ripple, members of the VFX team wearing full body skin tight blue suits (which makes them easier to remove from the shot after but doesn’t do much for your embarrassment levels!) kicking up sand like they were a dinosaur pawing the earth, or even me crawling through the undergrowth to make the ferns wave backwards and forwards as if I were a tiny Triceratops – a moment the team will never ever let me forget.

I can’t even begin to explain every element of what went into finding locations that were both as beautiful to the eye as they were scientifically correct. I’d be writing for days if I explained how many different versions of each shot we had to shoot and the incredible level of technical expertise it took to make our dinosaur world feel truly real. And the VFX process, starting with choosing these locations to creating the finished shots and taking 3 years, was one of the most involved, creatively challenging, technically complicated and ultimately rewarding of my entire career. I’d be here forever explaining each mind-blowing detail.

So what I’ll just say is I’m incredibly proud of every member of the Walking With Dinosaurs gang, from our production team to the experts on and off screen to camera crews to VFX artists to the incredible support from ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Studios and each and every one of our commissioning co-partners. Without them, this wouldn’t be the fantastic series that it is.

And next time you’re in Slough, just remember be careful, T. rex might be watching you from the bushes…