Walking with Beasts, marketed as Walking with Prehistoric Beasts in North America, is a 2001 six-part nature documentary television miniseries created by Impossible Pictures and produced by the BBC Natural History Unit, the Discovery Channel, ProSieben and TV Asahi. The sequel to the 1999 miniseries Walking with Dinosaurs, Walking with Beasts explores the life in the Cenozoic era, after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, particularly focusing on the rise of the mammals to dominance. The UK version of the series is narrated by Kenneth Branagh, who also narrated Walking with Dinosaurs, and the US version is narrated by Stockard Channing.
Like Walking with Dinosaurs, Walking with Beasts recreated extinct animals through a combination of computer-generated imagery and animatronics, incorporated into live action footage shot at various locations. It was more challenging to create convincing effects, both computer graphics and animatronics, depicting mammals owing both to fur and more moving bits and to audiences being more familiar with how mammals look and move than they were with dinosaurs. The visual effects of Walking with Beasts, like those of Walking with Dinosaurs, received praise. The series won numerous awards, including a BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Award, a Monitor Award, a RTS Television Award and a Primetime Emmy Award.
Walking with Beasts was accompanied by a companion book, Walking with Beasts: A Prehistoric Safari, written by the executive producer Tim Haines, and a two-part behind-the-scenes companion series, The Science of Walking with Beasts. Also released were several children's books and the video game Walking with Beasts: Operation Salvage. In 2007–2011 an exhibition based on the series featuring fossils, life-sized models and behind-the-scenes information was held at different locations throughout the UK.
Premise
Walking with Beasts follows the previous series Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) in showcasing prehistoric life in a nature documentary style. Beginning in Germany 49 million years ago (in the Eocene), Walking with Beasts tracks animal life, particularly the rise of the mammals to dominance, in the Cenozoic era. The series also gives some insight into human evolution, with Next of Kin (episode four) being devoted to Australopithecus and Mammoth Journey (episode six) including both Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans.
Production
Pre-production, research and writing
After the success of Walking with Dinosaurs, the executive producer Tim Haines conceived Walking with Beasts as a sequel. The intended goal of the series was to introduce the general public to the fascinating mammals (and other animals) of the Cenozoic era, typically less represented in popular culture than dinosaurs. The budget of Walking with Beasts was £4.2 million, one of the most expensive documentaries ever made but much lower than a feature film with comparable visual effects needs. Tim Haines attributed the completion of the series despite this to solid planning.
Research in preparation for Walking with Beasts was conducted full-time for nearly two years by the geologist Paul Chambers and the zoologist Alex Freeman. Like Walking with Dinosaurs, Walking with Beasts was set to consist of six episodes which meant that six suitable settings had to be chosen for the programme. Chambers and Freeman picked the six settings of the programme based on the amount of good fossil evidence, position in the time line and number of interesting animals. The settings of some episodes had been picked already before any research was required, such as doing an episode on woolly mammoths and an episode on indricotheres. For much of the process, Chambers and Freeman were considering more than six settings, which meant that some potential episode ideas were forced to be abandoned. Among the abandoned ideas were an episode set in Australia, based on fossils from the Riversleigh World Heritage Area. After the selection had been narrowed down to six settings, selecting which animals would appear in each episode was a straightforward process.