Nutopia’s latest mega-doc will be a 12-hour series for History detailing the building of the Pyramids, the construction of the Great Wall of China and the creation of Easter Island statues.

History said Mankind: The Story of All of Us would be its “most in-depth television series ever” and it is thought the budget runs to millions of dollars an hour. TX details have not been fully confirmed, but it will air as a six-night event in the final quarter of 2012.
The series follows the indie’ Emmy-winning America: the Story of Us for the same broadcaster and is part of Nutopia’s plans for “a sense of global scale and ambition that has hitherto rarely been applied to factual”, according to chief executive Jane Root.
History president and general manager Nancy Dubuc said the series would “redefine how history is told, how it’s watched, taught and how it is experienced”.

Dubuc said: “We are traveling to every corner of the earth in order to portray the heroic story of man. Mankind is a brutal fight for survival.

“The odds were against us at every turn – over 99.9% of all species of the earth have gone extinct. This series examines what is unique about us to have made humans the dominant species on the planet.”

Global approach
The series will use CGI and dramatic reconstructions in locations such as Shanghai, Cape Town and Morocco.
It will focus on landmark events and step changes, such as the birth of agriculture, the Vikings landing in America, and revolutions in military technology. Mankind will incorporate geology, astronomy, meteorology, and physics, and runs from the Big Bang to the modern day.

Ben Goold, who is just back from shooting in South Africa and will executive produce alongside Root, said the series would run chronologically but throw forward to draw links between history and contemporary times.
“It’s about the human stories behind history’s big tipping points and it takes a completely global view. People tend to learn the conventional history of the part of the world they grow up in, but this is about linking different regions.
“For example, we explore the time when there were two great empires, China and Rome, which didn’t know the other existed – and reveal the moment they meet.”

Hollywood epic
Goold said the plan was to engender the film with the feel of a Hollywood epic, and Root said she learned the value of event factual TV as controller of BBC2, citing the likes of Great Britons and Restoration.
“We’re about innovative, surprising, big TV, with high end visuals, and we’ve tried to shake up the production timescale. There used to be a sense it would take five years to make something epic like this, we’re doing it in two.”
The executive producers for History are Julian P. Hobbs and Paul Cabana.
Mankind The Story of All of Us still has several months of production to run and has just moved in to edit. The CGI is being developed in conjunction with a number of different companies

From Broadcast Magazine
4 January, 2012 | By Chris Curtis