creatures after Haines spoke with the UK-based graphics company Framestore. Framestore had previously won Emmy Awards for their work on films such as Alice in Wonderland (1999) and miniseries such as Gulliver's Travels (1996). The head of Framestore, Mike Milne, at first turned down the project owing to its projected cost but later accepted since he realised that he would later regret it if another company took it up. Milne understood the concept of the programme and was able to bring down the cost of the animation considerably through flexibility and imagination. With Milne's assurance that making the programme would be possible, Haines pitched the idea to Bennett as a 6-episode series of 30-minute episodes and he called it Walking with Dinosaurs, at this time only intended to be a working title and deriving from Haines misremembering the title of the 1990 film Dances with Wolves. Pilot episode and funding The BBC liked the concept of Walking with Dinosaurs but were nervous whether a series of its scale was actually achievable. After also pitching the idea to BBC Worldwide, Haines was granted £100,000 to produce a short pilot episode. In the spring of 1997, Haines, accompanied by a single cameraman, travelled to a national park near Paphos in Cyprus to shoot footage for the pilot. Milne then gathered a small team to produce models and animations. The resulting proof-of-concept pilot, finished by the summer of 1997, was six minutes long. The only consultant so far brought in for the project was the palaeontologist David Martill, who offered his services on the pilot for free if he could then stay on as a consultant should the pilot succeed and a series be made. The pilot episode was marine-themed, revolving around a beached giant pliosaur, and based on the fossils of the Jurassic Oxford Clay in England (a setting later used for the episode Cruel Sea), a setting suggested by Martill. After concerns that the marine episode might not have enough "superstar" animals, Martill suggested the inclusion of the theropod dinosaur Eustreptospondylus. One of the major differences between the pilot and the later series was that it included partial x-rays of the inner workings of the animals so that they could be better explained. In the later series this was abandoned in favour of a more standard "natural history" aesthetic. In addition to the pilot, Framestore also produced stills and a shorter