‘This is as good as we can make it’

SURVIVING EARTH IS BEING BILLED AS ONE OF THE MOST AMBITIOUS, CINEMATIC AND DRAMATIC HIGH-CONCEPT SERIES TO DATE, VISITING EIGHT MASS-EXTINCTION MOMENTS THROUGHOUT THE EARTH’S HISTORY TO SEE WHAT THE PLANET’S PAST CAN TELL US ABOUT ITS FUTURE.

JULIAN NEWBY SPOKE TO SHOWRUNNER AND CREATIVE DIRECTOR TIM HAINES

natural-history programme that you’ve ever seen, full of animals that you’ve never seen before and incidents that you won’t have experienced”.

The aim of each show is to go back to a moment in history when there was a mass extinction and to try to understand and explain the reasons for that. “Often these things take place over thousands of years, but we use the lives of individual creatures as a sort of parable for what’s going on. Natural history works well when it’s got a really good story — people like stories, they like to buy-in to subjects with good stories. In our case we can create those stories; everything that we want to happen can happen, unlike natural history where you have to wait for the animal to turn up — in our case it turns up on time.”

And a good story can help viewers to forget that — locations aside — what they’re looking at isn’t real. “No matter how beautifully you make it, people know that they’re looking at CGI. But we want them to immerse themselves in it and the way we do that is to produce a story and then emotionally engage them with it, so half-way through you realise that you’re rooting for a tiny little armoured fsh with a funny expression.” He adds: “Buried in all of that is a huge story about how the relationship between life and Earth works, and that’s what concerns everyone nowadays. Everyone is asking questions about the efects of mankind, and ‘Are we going through mass extinction?’ So we look back and say, OK, what is a mass extinction and how does life cope with it?”

SURVIVING EARTH is a coproduction between Tim Haines’ UK-based Loud Minds and Universal Television Alternative Studio and will blend location filming at 12 destinations around the world — starting with New Caledonia in the South Pacifc — with CGI, to tell the dramatic stories of extraordinary creatures trying to survive against all odds. VFX studio Milk is creating the spectacular digital environments, landscapes and creatures that will bring the series to life, while crews go out to fnd and flm locations closest to how they were thousands or even millions of years ago. From the ‘Great Dying’ 252 million years ago, when the world overheated and 95% of life died out, to a massive food just 12,000 years ago, which plunged the planet back into an ice age, every episode will immerse viewers in a specific moment in the

Earth’s history and recreate the drama of a specifc mass-extinction event. Haines is the man behind previous hits Walking with Dinosaurs and Primeval, and he says that Surviving Earth goes beyond what those series achieved.

“I’ve made these types of shows before where you’re recreating the past and using CGI to make it look as real as possible in a photo-real, not hyper-real way. And actually a lot of things have shifted since I last visited this, which made it a really compelling proposition,” Haines says. “The CGI had improved no end, the amount of money people are prepared to pay, because of the advent of streamers, meant you could get better quality and indeed, what scientists knew had changed. The ambition of naturalhistory flmmakers had changed, so the whole thing meant that you could tell this story in a way people hadn’t seen before.”

Haines says Surviving Earth will be like “diving in to the most spectacular

But Haines stresses that this is not a Hollywood movie; it’s not science fction: “We haven’t said ‘Let’s give it really angry eyes to make it into a baddie!’ We’re trying to recreate the creatures as they were. That’s the bedrock of the storytelling.”

And to do that there can be between 20-30 scientists working on one show. “Because scientists specialise. If you want to talk about a carboniferous coal forest there’ll be an expert on the lycopsid trees; and there’ll also be an expert on the amphibians, or one type of amphibian. And you need to chase them all down and essentially fnd out about what the latest thinking on each creature is. You work with a paleo artist for each creature and they get approved by the scientists, who all agree that that’s what we think it is.” He adds: “The promise to the audience is that this is as good as we can make it. So we take all the research really seriously.”

Part of keeping that promise is to shoot in the right locations. “The point about photo-real is that we want people to feel they’re looking at something that is real. If you go into a studio and basically build a digital environment, or if you make the whole thing in Unreal Engine, the audience just peels of. They think game, they think cartoon, no matter how good your animation is. However if you are looking at a huge shot of a forest, which is a real forest, and in the middle is a little creature smiling at you, you believe that that creature is real — and it’s a big diference to the way people perceive what they are watching. They’re not aware of the diference between hyper-real and photo-real, but innately they understand it. It’s a bit like the diference between flm and tape — tape came from news and flm came from films — people look at tape and think, that looks a bit cheap, and they don’t know why.”

So the choice of locations is crucial for the truthful telling of these stories. “We have a very particular brief, which is to try and fnd places where the plants concerned are old enough — not the individual plant, the species,” Haines says. “The further back we go, the more difcult that gets. We’ve had to admit defeat with one time period — the coal forest — because none of those things exist anymore. The giant horsetails that now grow in a scrubby part of a garden, used to be 30 metres high and we can’t fnd them, they don’t exist. In that case we had to build a set and digitally extend, but that’s the only one.”

In another episode the crew shot in a part of Iceland where nothing lived on the land. “In parts of Iceland there are mossy rocks, fields of rock with no vascular plants, just low mosses and that’s quite a good analogy for life’s frst steps onto the land. So Iceland is good for the very earliest times.”

Surviving Earth even revisits one of the locations that featured in Walking with Dinosaurs: “New Caledonia in the Pacifc. It has just the most bizarre vegetation. It’s a French dependency and they’ve done a lot of mining there, heavy metals from the ocean floor,” Haines says. “Not many plants can adapt to that, there’s hardly any grass. Yet it has 12 of the 14 species of araucaria in the world, so it has all these diferent species of ancient conifers. We went to a particular place on top of a mountain where you have these bizarre tall, thin trees with lichen on the ground and ferns and red soil, and it is just like nothing you have seen before. That works really well when we’re stretching back 270 million years ago. Most of those plants as a family are accurate.”

All flm crews — fact or fction — have to tread carefully on location and often try to leave the place better than they found it. That happens regularly in fction flms where buildings have to be restored or repaired to make them flmworthy.

And up to a point the same applies to natural history: “Funnily enough years ago in America there was a really unpleasant confrontation with a man with a gun, but that was only because they were terribly protective of that particular environment and he didn’t know what we were doing,” Haines says. “But mostly, as in New Caledonia, they were happy I came back because actually they were quite proud of what they have and this is what the programme celebrates really, the uniqueness of the environment. Most places that people protect, they are equally proud of and if you are not going there to chop it down or dig holes or pull up plants, then they’re quite happy.”

Surviving Earth will be delivered at the end of 2024 and plans at the moment are for it to be premiered on NBC and then move to Peacock.