The Real T-Rex With Chris Packham, BBC2

Who doesn’t love a dinosaur story? Few animals on Earth, past or present, spark the imagination like the Tyrannosaurus rex.

It is a creature so familiar, immortalised in films from One Million Years BC to Toy Story, that you’d think there was nothing new for a primetime science documentary to say.

But when Chris Packham seeded the idea that “they made it all up” to a bunch of a science and natural-history film-makers, a remarkable journey into the Cretaceous was bound to follow.

My Tyrannosaur, as the project was then known, was Chris’s dream to build the most accurate model of a T.rex ever. It was hatched over a coffee with exec producer and Talesmith founder Martin Williams a few years earlier.

Sold by Chris’s personal journey to discover the truth about something that had been a childhood obsession, combined with revelatory science, natural history and ambitious CGI, the BBC was the first to sign up.

CBC, Cineflix and France-Televisions soon followed. For the next eight months, we travelled North America, challenged the CG animators, and left no stone unturned.

We opened the treasure trove of research and interrogated the good and bad science, simultaneously tackling the creative process of innovative scripting and storytelling.

Narratively, we wanted to have fun with the story, to add humour and magic for a Christmas audience, while treating T.rex always with scientific respect.

The questions piled up. How could we take it a step beyond ‘fun CGI with a natural-history sequence’? How could we capture the work of these great palaeontologists embracing new disciplines to turn back time? And how could CGI fuel our journey forward?

After all, this was a classic detective narrative, rebuilding T.rex from the bones up, with every twist and turn reshaping what was accepted as the norm – from its colour to its feathers, its inability to roar, and the juvenile being unrecognised as the same species until just last year.

We needed scientific consultants to help redesign the T.rex and back up what will only ever be educated speculation about a creature that has been extinct for 66 million years.

Professor Dave Hone, who literally wrote the book on T.rex, redesigned ‘Rexy’, egged on by Chris and other experts. Our model was rigged from a skeleton based on lidar scans of an actual specimen.

The colour, skin, scarring, bristles, teeth, even the tongue and the way the tail swipes, all had to be signed off by Professor Hone.

The story meant everything to Chris. It was a real childhood dream come true, and he moved mountains to be involved in the process. The day after filming a major live event for National Geographic, he flew across the continent to meet our crew at a T.rex dig in Montana.

Chris was a pleasure to work with – he understands narrative, what it is to be a film-maker, and what is needed from those on screen.

The locations were mainly in the US and Canada, the home of T.rex. This investigative approach required a fast turnaround of sequences and cinematic visuals, which meant balancing shoot days with a great deal of travel.

Of course, there were challenges: visas that didn’t come through, thunderstorms that filled the spectacular tyrannosaur trackway with silt, vultures in a grump, a lack of female palaeontologists in our specific field, and emus that refused to run.

Capturing the boom

As I write this in the glow of concluding the final mix in Montreal, my most sincere message to all producers is simple: avoid infrasonic animals.

The most realistic T.rex ‘roar’, a low-frequency ‘boom’, sounds remarkable in the 5.1 booth, but it’s a tougher ask on the lightweight laptop that some of the audiences will watch it on.

It’s the kind of challenge I’ve not faced since contemplating the sound design for the soundless vacuum of space in Channel 4/Discovery’s Stephen Hawking’s Universe in 2010.

For Chris, the journey has proved every bit as complex and surprising as he had hoped. For Talesmith, T.rex has metaphorically torn down the electric fence and allowed more specialist factual commissions in. We have moved to a larger office, we are growing by the day, and 2018 is looming large.