“Prehistoric Planet” is back on Apple TV+ with over two dozen new extinct species to discover. Given the amount of dinosaurs and birds, the biggest challenge for supervising sound editor Jonny Crew was “capturing those prehistoric sounds”.
Without a library of extinct sounds to draw from, Crew, who also worked on the first season, says the trickiest task was differentiating the sounds of different birds. That’s where chickens helped crack a key moment in the show’s first episode, titled “Islands,” which exposes audiences to the behavior of the Hatzegopteryx, a stork-like reptile. A key scene focused on two mating dinosaurs.
“Whether you’re in a rainforest or a swamp, the birds will sound different, but birds weren’t well evolved at that time,” Crew says. Variety. The challenge was to capture the sound of “huge, ferocious creatures having this tender moment together”.
Crew says: “Paleontologist Darren Naish suggested that the sound of a chicken purring could be used as a starting point. The romantic moment between the dinosaurs was the basis of that.”
He adds, ‘I used to have a very ferocious chicken known as Evil Bluebell – she is no longer with us. She had a savage sound that was a fierce-sounding screech. So when the creatures are hunting and fighting, I used that sound as the basis for those scenes.”
Sharpening a sonic landscape for the underwater scenes, on the other hand, was easier. Having worked on ‘Blue Planet’, which was mostly subsurface, Crew says, ‘Flooding microphones in those sequences doesn’t sound very interesting, but you can pick up whale sounds and create that sense of being from there. Underwater.”
Elsewhere, Crew and his team looked at how to raise the bar from the show’s first season. “That meant taking the game to the next level in terms of sound, behavior and graphics, and digging deeper into the Cretaceous world,” he says.
Check out a snippet about the show’s sound design below.