Across the four-part Netflix documentary series The Dinosaurs, produced by Silverback Films in association with Amblin Entertainment and narrated by Morgan Freeman, the camera travels across vast spans of geological time. Continents shift across the planet, dense prehistoric forests emerge and disappear, volcanoes reshape the terrain, and oceans deepen as coastlines fracture.
While Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) focused on animating the prehistoric creatures themselves, VFX studio Lux Aeterna was responsible for the transitions that situate those animals within an evolving Earth.
The sequences demanded something beyond simply creating multiple prehistoric landscapes. They required a way to visualise planetary evolution within continuous cinematic shots. To solve that problem, Lux Aeterna developed a procedural system in Houdini where time itself became a controllable parameter.
Treating time as a system variable
The transitions between eras had to carry narrative weight, communicating continental movement, climatic shifts, and evolutionary stakes without feeling didactic. For Lux Aeterna, that meant approaching time as a spatial problem. Their shots were designed to move directly between geological eras rather than cutting between them.
“Over half of the 62 shots we produced were dealing with the time travel element,” says Lux Aeterna Senior CGI Artist Paul Greer. “We were taking the narrative from one geological era to another, which meant inventing solutions such as spinning time-lapse star fields, morphing landscapes, and satellite-style orbital shots where continents physically shift as the camera dives through time.”
For the filmmakers, the challenge was ensuring those transitions remained clear to the audience.
“The big narrative challenge was comprehension,” says Dan Tapster, showrunner at Silverback Films. “We were asking audiences to travel across vast spans of time, through completely different worlds, and still feel oriented, not just ‘this is the Triassic’ versus ‘this is the Cretaceous.’ We wanted to convey what’s changed and why it matters.”
To support this approach, the team built a procedural framework that dynamically evolves landscapes over time.
Building a living environment in Houdini
The backbone of the pipeline was a modular Houdini framework designed to manage multiple evolving systems simultaneously. Earth processes were structured as interconnected procedural components, each responding to the shared timeline driving the sequence. This architecture allowed the team to iterate on geological changes without rebuilding entire landscapes from scratch. Terrain deformation, vegetation growth, atmospheric conditions, and erosion were all linked to the same timeline variable, allowing large-scale changes to unfold within a single shot.
“Building the time-travel sequence was as much a technical and logistical challenge as it was a creative one,” Clive Llewellyn, FX Supervisor at Lux Aeterna, says. “Beyond crafting evolving terrain, jungles, volcanoes, deserts, and waterfalls, the team had to solve issues around time scale, budget constraints, data management, collaboration, and iteration.”
Because landscapes had to transition through multiple geological states, simulation management became a key consideration. Lux Aeterna developed custom level-of-detail tools and proxy simulations that enabled artists to preview landscape evolution quickly while maintaining the ability to scale up to high-resolution renders for final shots.
This approach kept complex planetary transformations manageable within production timelines.
Compressing millions of years into 825 frames
The most ambitious sequence condenses millions of years of planetary change into a single continuous shot lasting 825 frames.
The camera begins within a dense prehistoric jungle before the terrain erupts into volcanic upheaval. Lava spreads across fractured ground as ash plumes fill the atmosphere. As the sequence progresses, the landscape cools and stabilises, revealing newly formed rock formations carved by waterfalls and erosion.
Above the terrain, the sky evolves through a hyper-lapse system driven by a non-linear orbital sun rig. Days, seasons, and years accelerate across the sky while cloud formations shift and dissipate.
By ramping the underlying timeline throughout the shot, the team could control the perceived pace of geological change. Rapid terrestrial transformations could be followed by slower phases where the audience could absorb the newly formed landscape.
The result compresses geological processes that normally unfold over millions of years into a transformation visible within seconds.
A visual language for deep time
Natural history documentaries increasingly operate at a cinematic scale, particularly when reconstructing prehistoric worlds. For Lux Aeterna, The Dinosaurs provided an opportunity to extend its environment and FX pipelines into planetary-scale simulation.
By building a procedural system capable of evolving landscapes through time, the studio transformed deep geological history into a dynamic visual narrative. Landscapes shift, climates transform, and continents move beneath the camera as millions of years unfold.
“Lux Aeterna gave us a storytelling tool that enriched the whole series,” Tapster says. “They not only created beautiful planetary visuals; they delivered a clear, repeatable visual language for moving through deep time, and that became part of the show’s identity.”
Jon Creamer
Share this story
