[man] In bringing prehistoric giants back to life, accuracy is everything. But this is the VFX you'll never see on screen. For the show, we wanted to embed our VFX creatures in real-world locations to give them that kind of veracity. So we went from South Africa to the Seychelles, Iceland to the U.S. of A. But the trouble with doing that is, when you get there, you're filming shots of nothing. No T-Rex, no Ankylosaur, no Hesperornis, just empty plates of nothing. And that's actually really, really difficult, which is why, to help, we nearly always took these.

[aweinspiring music plays]

[laughs]

[majestic music playing]

[Dan] As strange as it looks, running around with these heads provided our VFX team with the context for the shot. The height of the dinosaur is right. The speed that it's moving through is right. When the crew, and by the crew I mean me, got really into it, it can even give the animators the nuance of the scene too.

[whimsical music plays] Of course, we couldn't always use this technique because some dinosaurs had heads that were simply too big for us to take around the world. So then we had to freestyle.

[whimsical music continues]

[whimsical music fades] Now, while the blue head technique may seem kind of simple, at the other end of the spectrum, filming VFX gets really technical, nothing more so than LiDAR scanning.

[man] You've got to be careful, right?

Yeah. One of the most difficult things is actually putting the creature where it needs to be on the ground. To do that, we need an accurate map of the ground where we film the shots. So the LiDAR is essentially a very sophisticated laser and mirror measuring system.

[Dan] And what this means is that the digital artists know the precise layout of the environment when they create their VFX.

[wonder-filled music playing] So those ripples that Spinosaurus makes amongst all of those tree roots are absolutely 100% accurate, which is kind of amazing.

[man] Next time you see a dinosaur on screen, remember somewhere someone dragged a busload of kit and a blue head to the middle of a wilderness.

[laughs] And that someone was us.

[music fades]

[roars loudly]