66 million years ago, dawn breaks across the planet, heralding a new day. T-Rex teaches her two off-spring how to hunt Triceratops, a female hadrosaur tends to her newly hatched babies, and a herd of mighty sauropods feasts on tender pine shoots. But this will be a day like no other. Suddenly, the great dynasty of the dinosaurs is thrown into chaos as an asteroid the size of Mt. Everest, traveling at 30,000 mph, slams into Earth.
In a sensory spectacle drawing on new science and making use of cutting-edge VFX, we witness the shockwaves, earthquakes, tsunamis and raining fire as they spread havoc across the doomed dinosaur kingdom. 95% of all dinosaurs are wiped out in the cataclysm as Earth becomes unrecognizable, shrouded in a long, deathly nuclear winter. From the ashes, we meet the survivors who reclaim the recovering planet. Amongst them is the most unlikely of creatures, the last remaining branch of the otherwise extinguished dinosaur family tree – the birds.
Key moments
The Cold Open – To provide a unique hook, the team set out to depict what the world would have looked like a few years after the dino-killing asteroid, when the world was shrouded in ash, cold and lifeless. Much of this was accomplished not with VFX but with props and set dressing: burnt trees (easier said than done in Iceland where there are seldom few trees) and a half-size Triceratops head made by a prop house with expertise in dinosaurs – although they’d never before been asked to create a burned, desiccated, mummified version.
The K/Pg Extinction – The team consulted with many scientists to ensure that the day the dinosaurs died was depicted as accurately as possible – both the impact and the chain reaction it set off. ILM’s world-building skills capture the emotion of what the dinosaurs experienced on the ground, like the Edmontosaurus with their young as the are cooked alive. The sequence was filmed in locations all over the world, including a canoe park in the UK (for the scene of dinosaurs getting swept away by the currents).
Bringing Anchiornis to Life – The fossil evidence of Anchiornis, one of the first flying dinosaurs, is truly unique. Even the feathers are preserved in stunning detail, with something extraordinary – they still contain the color and patterns of the plumage of these pioneering aeronauts. This scientific detail allowed the VFX creature team at ILM to painstakingly bring to life Anchiornis in all her feathered glory. What the viewer sees is tantalizingly close to how the actual creature would have looked when it graced the Earth 160 million years ago.
Hummingbirds – Taking the viewer into the miniature world of the hummingbird in the cloud forest of Ecuador was one of the great challenges of Chapter 6. The ambition was to immerse audiences into their extraordinary 3D world of sublime flight skill.
To do this, Emmy-winning camera team Matt Aberheard and Joe Fereday employed a cutting edge set of filming techniques. The first was to work with world champion racing drone pilot Alex Jordan, who used state of the art FPV micro-drone technology, combined with miniature 4K cameras to weave his way through the forest canopy, perfectly to the millimeter, in a way never attempted before. To capture the marvel of hummingbird flight, super high-speed cameras were combined with new rotational rigs and camera pivot systems, to fly with the tiny birds and experience them feeding on flowers on the fly at up to 1,000 frames a second. After three weeks of relentless filming and over nearly 5,000 shots, the sequence came alive.
Terror Bird vs. Theosodon – One of the most iconic scenes in Chapter 6 is when we join the Terrorbird as it hunts Theosodon on the palm-dotted plains of the ancient Earth. As this landscape no longer exists, the team searched the planet for a suitable candidate and ended up in Morocco. After driving over a thousand miles, Director Nick Shoolingin-Jordan and DoP Jamie McPherson finally found the perfect location in the most unlikely of places – central Marrakech.
Close to the city centre is a historic palm forest that would normally be bustling with tourists and local traffic. But the crew happened to arrive just one day after the entire city was plunged into COVID lockdown. A seemingly impossible location was suddenly free of all people, trucks, cars and motorbikes – with an abandoned football pitch making the location perfectly smooth for McPherson to track at 40mph with his gyrostabilized vehicle rig. It was the only time in history this has happened, and it made filming the sequence possible.
