Anthony Geffen Brings Ancient History to Life

National Geographic’s History of the Emirates, narrated by Jeremy Irons, tackles one of the most daunting tasks that a three-part television series can: exploring and explaining the little-known 125,000-year history of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a country that in its current iteration is but four years old. The land it sits on, though, has a far more storied past, one that the series aims to bring to life using the latest cutting-edge technologies.

BAFTA winner Anthony Geffen, the CEO and creative director of the U.K.’s Atlantic Productions, which co-produced the show alongside Image Nation Abu Dhabi, was at the series’ helm, serving to guide it from the research stage through its production, which took almost four years. “Because the history is not well known in the UAE, we had to go right back to scratch to talk to experts, interview thousands of people, really work to understand it,” Geffen tells TV Real. “And not all of [the history] is written down, and that’s what’s exciting about the series. So we had to do a lot of work before we even started rolling cameras.”

The UAE is known today for its gleaming super-cities of the future Dubai and Abu Dhabi, which are often touted as the models of modernity, luxury and wealth. Much of the region’s past, however, is now buried in the vast deserts these lavish cities sit on. In order to unearth it, Geffen and his team employed various new technologies to help them tell the story. “Because a lot of the history is in the desert, in ruins or under the desert, and obviously there aren’t pictures of a lot of it, we had to use the full gambit of things we’ve used to make series in the past,” he says.

Geffen and his team used a remote-sensing method called LIDAR to scan what’s underneath the desert sands, and then brought that data to life through CGI so viewers can visualize what the deserts looked like thousands of years ago when they were cities where ancient cultures thrived. They were able to re-create in painstaking detail the architecture of the ancient cities, and then dramatize and bring to life—using existing knowledge of what these people would have eaten, worn and looked like—what daily life would have been like in the UAE of thousands of years ago.

“People have often used CGI to just say, Well it could have looked like this. We were doing it and that’s exactly what it looked like, and that’s very powerful,” Geffen says. “We can go into houses and have the details and everything else. So I think that’s pretty surprising. And it’s also the style—it has a very high-end style with clever use of dramatization and other things. It really brings alive a history of the past in a very vivid way for the audience.”

Virtual reality is also a huge part of the series’ feel, as Atlantic employed the British Academy Award-winning techniques of its VR studio Alchemy to give viewers as real of an experience as they possibly could. They made a VR vignette that allows viewers to swim with a pearl diver—one of the region’s most storied and unique professions—as well as one that brings one of the country’s most famous forts, Al Hisn, to life, first scanning it with LIDAR and then using that data to put audiences into different time periods of the fort. “And the last one we made was about crossing the empty quarter on a camel and off a camel, and you know, when are you going to do that?” asks Geffen.

Geffen and the directors also took special care to show all of the varied landscapes across the region, shooting throughout the Emirates and in all terrain. Geffen is a veteran producer who has tackled the better-known—but shorter-lived—civilizations of Ancient Greece and Rome in his previous work. Still, there’s nothing quite like attempting to tell such a huge story that spans over 125,000 years and is yet so unsung. “And it’s such a rich, rich story,” Geffen says. “And I think certainly in the West, we know nothing about Arab culture, and it’s important that we do. What’s really exciting is making a series about history that is actually very pertinent to us, but that we don’t know. And that’s really, really important. It makes us wiser, and it makes us interested in other cultures.”