{"id":13804,"date":"2019-12-11T09:00:57","date_gmt":"2019-12-11T14:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev2.worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/worldscreen.com\/"},"modified":"2019-12-12T09:09:13","modified_gmt":"2019-12-12T14:09:13","slug":"anthony-geffen-brings-ancient-history-to-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/anthony-geffen-brings-ancient-history-to-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthony Geffen Brings Ancient History to Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

National Geographic\u2019s History of the Emirates<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

BAFTA winner Anthony Geffen, the CEO and creative director of the U.K.\u2019s Atlantic Productions, which co-produced the show alongside Image Nation Abu Dhabi, was at the series\u2019 helm, serving to guide it from the research stage through its production, which took almost four years. \u201cBecause 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 \"***Image***\"to understand it,\u201d Geffen tells TV Real<\/em>. \u201cAnd not all of [the history] is written down, and that\u2019s what\u2019s exciting about the series. So we had to do a lot of work before we even started rolling cameras.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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. \u201cBecause a lot of the history is in the desert, in ruins or under the desert, and obviously there aren\u2019t pictures of a lot of it, we had to use the full gambit of things we\u2019ve used to make series in the past,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

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\u2014using existing knowledge of what these people would have eaten, worn and looked like\u2014what daily life would have been like in the UAE of thousands of years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople have often used CGI to just say, Well it could have looked like this. We were doing it and that\u2019s exactly<\/em> what it looked like, and that’s very powerful,\u201d Geffen says. \u201cWe can go into houses and have the details and everything else. So I think that’s pretty surprising. And it’s also the style\u2014it 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Virtual reality is also a huge part of the series\u2019 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\u2014one of the region\u2019s most storied and unique professions\u2014as well as one that brings one of the country\u2019s 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. \u201cAnd 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?\u201d asks Geffen.<\/p>\n

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\u2014but shorter-lived\u2014civilizations 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. \u201cAnd it\u2019s such a rich, rich story,\u201d Geffen says. \u201cAnd 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The CEO and creative director of the U.K.\u2019s Atlantic Productions, which co-produced National Geographic\u2019s History of the Emirates, talks about the three-part series narrated by Jeremy Irons. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1049,"featured_media":13805,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,69],"tags":[3205,265,1009],"class_list":["post-13804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-profiles","category-top-stories","tag-anthony-geffen","tag-atlantic-productions","tag-national-geographic","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"\nAnthony Geffen Brings Ancient History to Life - TVREAL<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/anthony-geffen-brings-ancient-history-to-life\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Anthony Geffen Brings Ancient History to Life - TVREAL\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The CEO and creative director of the U.K.\u2019s Atlantic Productions, which co-produced National Geographic\u2019s History of the Emirates, talks about the three-part series narrated by Jeremy Irons.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/anthony-geffen-brings-ancient-history-to-life\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"TVREAL\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2019-12-11T14:00:57+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2019-12-12T14:09:13+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/12\/2017\/07\/2019-12-10-History-of-the-Emirates-Anthony-Geffen-1219.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"600\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"298\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Alison Skilton\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Alison Skilton\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/anthony-geffen-brings-ancient-history-to-life\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/anthony-geffen-brings-ancient-history-to-life\/\",\"name\":\"Anthony Geffen Brings Ancient History to Life - TVREAL\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2019-12-11T14:00:57+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2019-12-12T14:09:13+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/#\/schema\/person\/f590d4d1481b8cce2a066e89197c7550\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/anthony-geffen-brings-ancient-history-to-life\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/anthony-geffen-brings-ancient-history-to-life\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/anthony-geffen-brings-ancient-history-to-life\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Anthony Geffen Brings Ancient History to Life\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/\",\"name\":\"TVREAL\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/#\/schema\/person\/f590d4d1481b8cce2a066e89197c7550\",\"name\":\"Alison Skilton\",\"description\":\"Alison Skilton is an associate editor of World Screen. 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