page_title: Walking with Dinosaurs (film)
section_title: Filming
hierarchical_section_title: Walking with Dinosaurs (film) / Production / Filming
caption_attribution_description: English: Lakes and mountains on the Kenai Peninsula
context_page_description: Walking with Dinosaurs is a 2013 family film about dinosaurs set in the Late Cretaceous period, 70 million years ago. The production features computer-animated dinosaurs in live-action settings with actors Justin Long, John Leguizamo, Tiya Sircar, and Skyler Stone providing voice-overs for the main characters. It was directed by Neil Nightingale and Barry Cook from a screenplay by John Collee.
  The film was produced by BBC Earth and Evergreen Films and was titled after BBC's 1999 television documentary miniseries of the same name. The film, with a budget of US$80 million, was one of the largest independent productions at the time. It was financed by Reliance Big Entertainment and IM Global instead of a major studio. The majority of distribution rights were eventually sold to 20th Century Fox. The crew filmed footage on location in the U.S. state of Alaska and in New Zealand, which were chosen for their similarities to the dinosaurs' surroundings millions of years ago. Animal Logic designed computer-animated dinosaurs and added them to the live-action backdrop.
context_section_description: The film features computer-animated creatures in live-action settings. Live-action footage was filmed in New Zealand and in the southern part of the U.S. state of Alaska. Director Nightingale said, "[They] have that kind of temperate climate which represents the period very well. The world was a bit warmer then, so they would have had 24 hours of sunshine in the summer and 24 hours of darkness in the winter." Filming began in 2011 in Alaska, where Evergreen Films is headquartered. In the second half of 2011, more than 55 people were working out of Evergreen's office in the Alaskan city of Anchorage. While the film's dinosaurs lived in Alaska during the Late Cretaceous period approximately 70 million years ago, they lived more in the northern part of the state due to the climate at the time. Filmmakers considered Southeast Alaska's rainforests below the Arctic Circle close to the climate that the dinosaurs experienced, so they filmed there and in Southcentral Alaska. Specific locations included Crow Creek Mine near Girdwood, Alaska and the Kenai Peninsula. In 2012, the state government of Alaska awarded the production companies a subsidy of US$1.7 million. Additional filming also took place in the South Island of New Zealand. For a river chase scene, filming was performed at rapids in New Zealand using a helicopter and with a 3D camera rig in a rubber boat. At the locations, the crew built dinosaur shapes out of PVC drain pipes to give the filmmakers a sense of the dinosaurs' scale when filming the live-action backdrop.
caption: The directors filmed footage at the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska to serve as a live-action backdrop for the computer-animated dinosaurs
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