January 2007: BBC Post Production London has won editing, grading, finishing and sound work on 15 half-hour episodes of Dinosapien, a new children’s high definition co-production for BBC Worldwide and CCI Entertainment. The broadcast partners are the BBC and Discovery Kids (US).

Sixty-five million years ago an asteroid impact wiped dinosaurs off the face of the Earth and the age of mammals began. Dinosapien explores what would have happened had some of the dinosaurs survived and evolved into intelligent life. The programme combines live footage with CGI and requires the BBC Post Production sound team to create sounds from scratch for the animated characters.

With the production team in Canada and the post production team based in the England, the programme is benefiting from an innovative workflow solution based on existing File Transfer Protocol (FTP) technology. The audio scratch effects, the animation and the offline edit are being transferred across the Atlantic via BBC Post Production’s FTP site.

Nick Keene, Lead Editor, BBC Post Production says: “Sharing files across networks is not new, but sharing files across continents on this kind of scale definitely is for the BBC: around 10,000 -15,000 files travel back and forth per episode, needing around 30 gigs of storage per episode. It is benefiting the production enormously, enabling us to save days in the schedule and deliver work within extremely tight deadlines. Moving media in this way also means we can make the most of the time difference too and upload files in the morning UK time, to be ready for the Canadian team when they arrive at work.”

The workflow remains tape-based in part, as it is the most effective way to move material in the early stages. Daily rushes, shot on HD Cam are sent to BBC Post Production London and down-converted to SD. DV Cam copies are then sent back to Toronto for an offline edit. The Avid Bin of the first picture lock, without animation, is compiled and sent to BBC Post Production so the programme can be conformed on Avid Adrenalines in London. After a grading session using POGLE, the animation backplates are sent to the FTP site for the animators to use as backgrounds for the CGI Dinosaurs.

Each episode comprises 6 minutes of CGI animation, provided by Yowza Animation, also based in Canada. The final animation arrives as a sequence of Tiff files for use in the offline edit in Canada and is also put back on the FTP site for use in the 2 nd conform. Once the Offline edit with the final animation is locked in Canada, the Avid bin containing the sequence is sent to London for the final conform using the same Tiff sequence as used in the Canadian offline.

After the final conform, the dialogue tracklay is carried out and the final dub. The will also be a foley mix to make the programme suitable for foreign broadcasters.
BBC Post Production is also undertaking all re-versioning of the series for BBC Worldwide.

Dinosapien is set at a Dinosaur Summer Camp in Canada’s badlands, where Dr. Hillary Slayton lives with her teenage daughter Lauren. Hillary’s husband Alan Slayton was a palaeontologist, who mysteriously disappeared on a fossil expedition into the badlands and Lauren still hasn’t come to terms with his death. Lauren is the first human to encounter one of the evolved dinosaurs, which she eventually befriends and names Eno. Lauren and Eno form a special bond. Through Eno, Lauren hopes to learn the fate of her father, and through Lauren, Eno seeks protection from the dangerous Diggers – dinosaurs that are tracking Eno down and trying to kill him. Over two series, Dinosapien will unravel the mystery of the evolved dinosaurs, and reveal the extraordinary truth of what really happened to Lauren’s father in the badlands.

BBC Post Production Sound Designer, Kian Wong, is creating sounds for the CGI dinosaurs, drawing on clean animal vocalisations to create sample sounds for the CGI characters. He is using a mixture of animal noises for the sound morphing, such as parrots and vultures for Eno, who is based on a giant bird and walrus and camel roars for the Diggers. As the series progresses, Eno becomes more and more intelligible, as he mimicks Lauren.

Kian says: “We needed to find a way for the dinosaurs to communicate without speaking in our language, as the production team wanted them to be as real as possible and blend in with the live footage, rather than standing out as animation. With no subtitles, this was a real creative challenge, but the sound morphing has been really effective.”

BBC Post Production has invested in a new sound technology to support the programme – a KymaX from Symbolic Sound in the US, which enables real-time digital sound processing. In addition to creating sounds, BBC Post Production is providing sound editing, adding dialogue, backgrounds, spot effects, music and atmospheres.

For further information, please contact:

Georgie Hollett, Head of Communications, BBC Studios and Post Production
Tel: +44 (0)20 8624 9495
Mobile : +44 (0) 783484 5612
Email : georgie.hollett@bbc.co.uk

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