CHERTSEY, England �
Dinosaurs can be challenging co-stars. Especially when you can't see them.
"Basically it's a man in a identical colorful jumpsuit with something attached to a foresightful pole exit, 'It's swooping, it's swooping, it's advent around, it's coming down. Araaagh!'" says Ben Miller, mimicking an on-set reliever for the beasts, later to be fully completed by computer-generated special effects.
As Sir James Lester, an arrogant politics official, Miller only at times encounters a dinosaur. But the lie of the cast of BBC America's "Primeval" continually meet up with the fiercest of the species - or cozy up to the cutest.
"At first when you are reacting to a traffic cone on a stick it's a spot hilarious. The hardest affair was non to gag," says Andrew-Lee Potts, wHO plays dinosaur-obsessed computer oddball Connor Temple.
"It was a learning curvature for all of us and on that point were a lot of giggles along the way," Potts added. "But now when you see raw characters derive to the show and you control those actors struggle with it, you realize how it's suit part of your life-time, so I don't get it ruffianly any more."
The series, which premieres on Aug. 9 at 9 p.m. EDT, is built around the adventures of a group of scientists turned action heroes. Attached to the alleged Anomaly Research Centre, they're investigating the sightings of alarming and intriguing creatures, which pour down up in modern lifetime via clip warp holes in the universe.
On a recent rainy day in Chertsey, about 25 miles west of London, motion-picture photography of the series continued on the Anomaly Centre set, which was built on an old industrial site.
A belittled dinosaur, a Diictodon, has escaped from its cage. But, of course, there's no sign on the set of anything that even remotely resembles a prehistoric beast.
"It looks like a big guinea pig bed," says Miller, helpfully describing a Diictodon to the uninitiated.
"Primeval," which airs in Britain on ITV, is the innovation of Tim Haines and Adrian Hodges.
A science journalist turned film maker, Haines produced the Emmy-winning BBC documentary series "Walking with Dinosaurs," a brobdingnagian hit when it aired on the Discovery Channel in 2000. He likewise used exchangeable CGI, animatronics and fix footage to create plausible images of extinct creatures in the 2001 serial "Walking with Beasts" and "Walking with Monsters" in 2005.
"It gave me a skill set where you say, 'Well, what else can this do?'" says Haines.
So he devised this TV drama with "a wight of the week" - often scarey, but never so grim that it oversteps the bounds of
family-friendly programming.
Haines explains that most of the creatures are haggard from historic truth because "if you obey the rules and design a creature based on biology or something that did exist, then people go, 'Oooh, that looks real!'"
Yet the fantasy element of the show provides licence to allow the resourcefulness soar. "It's a fantastical relief not to have to vex about the length of their teeth and the size of nostril hair," Haines notes, "so I could bring an duplicate sabre tooth to the Gorgonopsid and no one cared, because this is drama."
Besides the huge, predacious dinos, the show likewise features a harmless Scutosaurus, which looks like an elephant merely is actually related to a turtle. On a smaller scale, there's Rex, a domesticated flying lizard. There are also giant spiders, millipedes, scorpions, worms, cute but deadly Dodos, the alligator-like Mosasaur, and a fast-flying Pteranodon, which invades a golf course.
Because "Primeval's" fourth dimension warps include the future, there is also the strange, apish and skull-headed Future Predator. It was the trickiest of the show's creatures to create because it is entirely imaginary. Bringing it from idea to screen took about tercet months.
"When effects step out of the background and become an active participant among the characters, that changes the dynamic, alters the drama. That gives you something audiences hadn't seen before," says Haines.
He notes on that point are noneffervescent very few TV shows with such integrated personal effects: "If you look at space operas, they designate flying machines and from time to time people walk on in a pair of prophylactic ears. Personally I consider the age of rubber eraser ears is over. What you need to do is to produce believable digital characters."
"Primeval" does that, but Haines is besides quick to credit scriptwriter Hodges, "because I privy stick as many monsters in front of you as I like, but unless you fell for the characters, the squad, you would not be interested."
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