Bringing the Age of Dinosaurs Back to Life.
I had the privilege of working on this Netflix series at ILM between 2024 and 2025 , a Spielberg/Amblin/Silverback/ILM collaboration following on from Life on Our Planet. Given the sheer volume of creature work (the whole show is dinosaurs, after all), each lighting TD had the rare luxury of taking real ownership of a sequence, building bespoke lighting and PBR setups to match specific plates, and rendering shots considerably longer than what film work typically calls for.
The models were exceptional. An enormous amount of craft went into making them look and move with scientific accuracy, with a panel of palaeontologists giving feedback throughout production.
One of the sequence I had the chance to work on
About the show.
A Spielberg and Amblin production, made with Silverback Films and ILM — the same team behind Life on Our Planet. The series traces the rise of the dinosaurs across the Mesozoic, blending photoreal CG creatures with real-world environments, and built under the watchful eye of a panel of palaeontologists to keep every feather, scale, and footstep grounded in current science.
A few favourites from the show
I worked on a wide range of creatures across the show, but a few stand out. The Marasuchus, a small, bipedal proto-dinosaur covered in feathery fuzz, carrying the early blueprint for everything that would follow. The Rhynchosaur, not a dinosaur itself but a key contemporary reptile, a beaked, chunky herbivore that thrived across Pangaea before ecological upheaval cleared the stage for the dinosaurs proper. And the Spinosaurus, the largest carnivore ever to walk the earth, semi-aquatic, dominating rivers and deltas and hunting prey as large as sharks with those long, crocodilian jaws.
Each came with its own lighting puzzle : feathered fuzz catching rim light, wet semi-aquatic skin under shifting water caustics, scale and skin detail holding up in long, sustained shots and that variety was a big part of what made the project so rewarding.