Our Post Production Sound team carried out all the sound work on Dinosapien, the hit international children's high definition series, which aired on CBBC and Discovery Kids. The 15 x 30 minute episodes were produced jointly by BBC Worldwide and Cambium Catalyst International with SEVEN24 Films.

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 wsould have happened had some of the dinosaurs survived and evolved into intelligent life. The programme combines live footage with CGI and required the Post Production sound team to create sounds from scratch for the animated characters.

In the series, Lauren, the teenage daughter of Dr Hillary Slayton, lives at a Dinosaur Summer Camp in Canada's badlands. Hillary's husband was a palaeontologist, who mysteriously disappeared on a fossil expedition into the badlands and Lauren has still not 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 unravels the mystery of the evolved dinosaurs, and reveal the extraordinary truth of what really happened to Lauren's father in the badlands.

Sound Designer, Kian Wong, created sounds for the CGI dinosaurs, drawing on clean animal vocalisations to create sample sounds for the CGI characters. He used 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 Studios and Post Production 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, Post Production provided sound editing, adding dialogue, backgrounds, spot effects, music and atmospheres.

With the production team in Canada and the post production team based in the England, the programme benefited from an innovative workflow solution based on existing File Transfer Protocol (FTP) technology. The audio scratch effects, as well as the animation and the offline edit were transferred across the Atlantic via our FTP site.

Nick Keene, Lead Editor, says: "Sharing files across networks is not new, but sharing files across continents on this kind of scale definitely was for the BBC: around 10,000 -15,000 files travelled back and forth per episode, needing around 30 gigs of storage per episode. It benefited the production enormously, enabling us to save days in the schedule and deliver work within extremely tight deadlines. Moving media in this way also meant we could 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 arrived at work."

back to top