After the amazing success of Walking with Dinosaurs, the BBC decided to bring the magic back to the small screen with a sequel looking at early mammals, entitled Walking with Beasts. Technological breakthroughs in computer animation have made it possible to visually create worlds never seen before, giving this series the potential to be even more realistic than its predecessor.

Being screened in the UK from November, Beasts' creators at the BBC turned again to London-based Framestore for the animation magic that made the first series so famous. The project ended up being one of the largest animation and visual effects projects undertaken by the company, and Mike Milne, director of animation, had to double the size of his team to help create the many creatures. The team then had to meet the challenge of a range of movements and textures way beyond those created for ‘Dinosaurs.

Principal filming took place last year across several continents and even beneath the sea. Work with animatronics also took place at this time, with creatures created at the Crawley Creatures workshop outside Oxford. Moving heads, limbs, and even underwater models were created and used for the show.

A lot of time and effort went into the making of the animatronic models, which Jez Gibson Harris’ team helped to make. The amount of work required meant that the core team of seven grew to 18, and additional support had to be called in from several specialist out-workers. In the end, over 40 items were created for use in the show. These ranged from a full sized mammoth, to small shrew-like creatures, plus assorted limbs and heads. Work on creating the models took place over the course of a year and a half, with some of the creatures taking twice as long to build as normal, due to more sophisticated animatronics. “There were more movements than before,” said Harris, “Lips, ears and eye movements, which were all more sophisticated.”

The under-skull and body-forms were created in the animatronics ‘mechy’ department, where radio controlled mechanisms were built from scratch to move eyebrows, whiskers, noses and mouths. All these movements were then combined when the model was operated to create snarls, snorts and blinks.

The models were controlled by a mix of manual and radio control.  “Its very tiring,” said Harris, “creatures like the mammoth had five or six puppeteers, and special backpacks were designed to take the strain off the back and hands.”  Larger engineering work went into producing Steady Arm rigs - which are similar to Steady Cam rigs worked by cameramen - to support smaller heads during puppeteering. They were created to help carry the weight of the heads, and help with the larger movements while puppeteers controlled close up shots of moving heads. A wheeled dolly featuring a counterbalanced arm with universal movement was also designed in order to make the bigger creatures move around easier.

“It was able to be assembled in 10 minutes, and could be moved around on quad bike wheels” said Harris. This was used to help with operating larger heads like the mammoth and woolly rhino. The team even went on so far as to use animatronics in underwater shots, all of which were filmed in one day. The most extravagant shot was when they had to show a mammoth falling through ice. A whole system was created to drop the mammoth using wires and animatronics to make it look like a lifelike struggle.

Once the basic filming was completed with all the animatronics work completed, the film was then passed over to Framestore for 18 solid months work.

All the animation and rendering of the creatures took place using a similar pipeline to that used for the original Walking with Dinosaurs, with a total of 271 separate programs being employed to make the process run smoothly. Moreover, Beasts was such a big task to undertake that it would not have been practicable for the team to start over from scratch, especially as they had a tried and tested pipeline already set up.

A total of 11,490 processing hours were spent on creating all the CG that went into the programme. This was due to months of hard work by a team of 30 people, each working on Silicon Graphics or NT workstations. Alongside this was Framestore’s render farm, working 24 hours a day for close to a solid year. This render farm consisted of 35 dual Processor NT render machines working continuously. 

A lot of time and effort went into creating the wide selection of creatures but the basic approach remained the same throughout. First, a 2D computer animated model of the creature was created, from a selection of angles; top, left side, right side, bottom etc., which were then put together to create a 3D version. Three layers of texture mapping then took place; from colour, to bump mapping and then shine. This created realistic looking animals with lifelike skin. After being placed into shot shadow was added to create the final lifelike model of a beast that existed millions of years ago.

Extra effort had to be put in when it came to creating the basic skeletons and looks of the many creatures from ‘Beasts - numerous animals having never been reconstructed before so this was a step on from Framestore’s time on Walking with Dinosaurs. Many of the creatures seen have evolved into pigs, cats, shrews, elephants - all the mammals we see today. The sheer variety of elements on a mammal’s face, such as eyelids, eyebrows, whiskers, jowls, twitching noses and ears make the job of bringing them to life much harder than dinosaurs.

Mike Milne, head of computer animation at Framestore, said: “All of those elements have to be animated. So, the number of animation controls the animators have to work with is vast compared with dinosaurs.” The series even contains humanoid, upright walking creatures. “This was more adventurous for us,” said Max Tyrie, animation supervisor at Framestore. “There were more complex shots, more creatures, more hurdles to overcome. It was all very enjoyable.”

All the work came together to create three solid hours of animation. However, they didn’t just leave it at creating the creatures. The team took it upon themselves to work on new angles and types of filming to take the animation even further. “We worked with different camera styles from hand-held tracking to wide angle, fish eye lenses,” said Tyrie. They also worked on film speeds such as time ramping, ultra slow motion and even time-slicing (aka the Bullet Time effect from The Matrix). Time lapse scenes include watching a herd of mammoths graze over land whilst the clouds fly by overhead. “We took our inspiration from ‘Dinosaurs,” said Tyrie, “and then took into consideration what trends have appeared since then. With this work we are attempting to break the mould.”

Of all the hurdles Framestore had to face, creating realistic fur would have had to be the hardest. “It's quite tricky,” said Martin Macrae, digital texture artist. “There’s no easy way to do it.” First the team tried out a selection of software programs and even considering creating their own custom programmes to deal with the problem. Finally, they chose a combination of off-the-shelf packages consisting of Softimage3D, Maya and Mental Ray for the rendering, and PhotoShop for painting the texture, to create the pipeline which created the fur. Strands or tufts of hair were hand sculpted with one hair in a hundred being individually created - the programme was then told how long the hair wanted to be, how dense etc. The programme then did the mathematical calculations to create that area of the skin with the designated hair. The team found that this approach worked best for long hair, and that sometimes short hair could be painted on. The animators went even further with some of the mammoth scenes; they had to create snow falling onto the hair which was then made to matt.

Overall the hard work seems to have paid off - the project and the technology behind it have reproduced a world not seen for 65 million years where mammals rose to inherit the dinosaurs' ruling mantle and man and mammoth flourished in an ice-bound wilderness.