WALKING WITH DINOSAURS

Walking with Dinosaurs is a six-part documentary television miniseries that was produced by BBC, narrated by Kenneth Branagh, and first aired in the United Kingdom, in 1999. The series was subsequently aired in North America on the Discovery Channel in 2000, with Branagh's voice replaced with that of Avery Brooks. It is the first entry of the Walking with... series and used computer-generated imagery and animatronics to recreate the life of the Mesozoic, showing dinosaurs and their contemporaries in a way that previously had only been seen in feature films. The programme's aim was to simulate the style of a nature documentary and therefore does not include "talking head" interviews. The series used palaeontologists such as Michael Benton, Thomas R. Holtz, Jr., Peter Dodson, Peter Larson and James Farlow as advisors (their influence in the filming process can be seen in the documentary The Making of Walking with Dinosaurs). The Guinness Book of World Records reported that the series was the most expensive documentary series per minute ever made.[citation needed] A 3D movie based on the series is currently being produced by BBC Films and 20th Century Fox. In a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes drawn up by the British Film Institute in 1999, voted on by industry professionals, Walking with Dinosaurs was placed 72nd. The series won three Emmy Awards: Outstanding Animated Program, Outstanding Special Visual Effects and Outstanding Achievement in Non-Fiction Programming – Sound Editing. CommonSense Media greatly praised the program, giving it five stars out of five and saying that, "Somebody had a great idea, which was to make a documentary series about dinosaurs, but with a twist. The aging Ornithocheirus on a desperate final flight to his mating grounds, the sauropod hatchlings struggling for survival in the late Jurassic, the migrating herds and the undersea life of 150 million years ago would all seem as real as a nature program about polar bears or snow monkeys." This technique of narrating the prehistoric life as though it were current proved to have a lasting impact,[according to whom?] and has been used several times since, for example in the BBC's 2011 Planet Dinosaur series.