The obvious inspiration was the Steven Spielberg movie Jurassic Park, which not only had demonstrated the technical ability to present credible moving images of dinosaurs. but had created intense public interest in the subject. The same Soft Image software as had been used in the movie was employed for the television series, with the images created at the Frame­ store facility in London, and similarly large-scale ani­matronic heads were also used for close-ups on location. Academic experts on dinosaurs were consulted throughout the process in order that the lives of these creatures be portrayed as accurately as possible, although some things, like their color, remain unknown and had to be guessed.

     Unlike Jurassic Park. however, the dinosaurs had to be placed in locations that contained the correct ancient species of trees and other habitats. These were found in Chile, New Zealand, and New Caledonia, amongst others. The animators then had to place the dinosaurs into the locations in such a way that the lighting of both images was consistent and the dinosaurs looked as though they were interacting with the location.

     To increase the sense of a traditional natural history program, the producers decided to present it as though individual living dinosaurs were being filmed by a camera team and the narrative built around the footage captured. Series producer Tim Haines, interviewed in Radio Times (October 2-8, 1999), said, "We followed all the rules the paleontologists gave us, then directed the action like it was a real natural history programme. We had to be utterly convinced it was all real, even though we were making educated guesses. It's the conviction that what you see is real that drags you into accepting it."

     The six parts of Walking with Dinosaurs covered such topics as the growth of a long-necked sauropod from birth to adulthood, dinosaur life in the waters and the skies, and the reasons dinosaurs became extinct. Though originated in Britain, it was a major international co-production, the BBC's partners being the Discovery Channel (United States), TV Asahi (Japan), Proseiben (Germany), and France 3. As with other natural history coproductions, this enabled easy versioning for different countries and helped ensure worldwide success. The British version was narrated by actor Kenneth Branagh.

     In Britain, Walking with Dinosaurs came at a time when educational documentary programming in the public service tradition was considered under threat from "infotainment" and the ubiquitous "docusoaps." Following its success, it was cited as proof that well­-made educational programming was capable of capturing significant audiences, and it prompted an overdue policy shift in the commissioning of factual programming.

     Naturally, it also instigated a series of follow-up programs from the same production team. As well as the inevitable "making of' documentary, a Christmas special, The Ballad of Big Al, and accompanying documentary Big Al Uncovered (BBC, 2000) explored the life of an allosaur. The next full series was Walking with Beasts (BBC, 2002), which used the same techniques to present a natural history of the now-extinct giant mammals that lived in the period between the disappearance of the dinosaurs and the coming of man. A further innovation associated with this series was the presentation of background detail on an interactive television service.