Managing Innovation, Design and Creativity

Chapter 2. Innovation = creativity + commercialisation

CASE STUDY 1: BBC'S WALKING WITH DINOSAURS^[9]

How it all started

I wanted people to think that dinosaurs were real animals – not monsters. The only other place you'd see really good digital images of dinosaurs was in Jurassic Park. Our idea was to create a 'David Attenborough' on the prehistoric world.

—Tim Haines, Series Producer

Tim had been fascinated by dinosaurs almost all his life and recalls, "There was a footprint in the Tunbridge Wells Museum which I saw when I was five and I have been interested in dinosaurs ever since." Over the years, many films have attempted to depict dinosaurs – often with rather comical results. However, the arrival of computer-aided animation opened up new possibilities, first demonstrated in the highly successful Hollywood movie Jurassic Park. Dinosaurs had been a neglected subject for television-makers and no one had attempted to use the same techniques for the small screen.

Introduction to Dinosaurs

• Dinosaur – from the Greek words deinos meaning terrible and saurus meaning lizard.

• Coined by British scientist Richard Owen who founded the Natural History Museum.

• The first dinosaur fossils were actually identified as belonging to an extinct reptile in 1824.

• The oldest, or earliest, dinosaurs found so far are prosauropods from the Late Triassic around 130 million years ago. These were found in 1999 in Madagascar. The animals are thought to be quite closely related to the great sauropods such as Apatosaurus ...