Contrary to what many non-Texans may think, the middle of Texas is hardly the middle of nowhere. Finding and filming the right locations to capture a prehistoric look, despite being surrounded by civilization, was no small challenge. Locations manager Mark Jarrett spearheaded the hunt, securing locations that exceeded all hopes and expectations.

From Hamilton Pool to Enchanted Rock and from the Longhorn Caverns to a white lime quarry, the filmmakers spliced together diverse locations to create a seamless prehistoric world completely untouched by modern humans. And where location scouting ended, production design, costume design and prop procurement began.

Production designer Chris Stull and property master Byron Thomas were tasked with designing and dressing the sets, including the camps of the three warring tribes: the Moonagongoons, the Binadraks, and the Gynocropilites, the all-woman Amazon tribe.

“The Moonagongoon Tribe is the slacker tribe,” says Stull. “They just have simple bone tools. The Amazons hunt small animals, like deer, but were cannibals too, so all their sets and environments were filled with [male] human body parts. The Binadraks hunt large animals.”

Stull adds, “You can’t go to Wal-Mart and buy anything for this movie. We had to make all the furs and the little structures. And we had to collect all the bones.”

Thomas and Stull used five different kinds of foam to construct the various props required by the film, including a cave wall, two saber tooth tiger skulls, assorted tusks and a mammoth’s skull. And to differentiate between the tribes, a rough color scheme was employed.

“The Binadraks were very dark whereas the Moonagongoons were browns and ambers. The Amazons were dark but they also used a kind of white wolfy motif.”

Costume designer Alysia Raycraft worked closely with Adam Rifkin in planning the wardrobe of the three tribes and the main characters. They referenced a variety of movies, from QUEST FOR FIRE (1981) to MONTY PYTHON’S LIFE OF BRIAN and ONE MILLION YEARS, B.C., in their planning.

“The Moonagongoons are sticks and feathers and leaves,” says Raycraft. “The Binadraks are bones and fur and more bones. As a starting point, we conceived of the Binadraks as predators and of the Moonagongoons as prey.”

From the broad strokes of color palettes and concept sketches to the considerable tasks of outfitting hundreds of extras and addressing the detailed nitty-gritty of the lead actors’ costumes, the size of Raycraft’s job was truly mammoth.

With the cast, locations, costumes, and sets in order, all that was left was for the cameras to roll. Completing the look of the film by providing masterful cinematography as well as supervising the nuanced visual effects that would follow principal photography, the production was fortunate to enlist the talent of world-renowned cinematographer Scott Billups. Billups, whose lengthy resume is a collage of feature films, documentaries, books and lectures, brought an expert’s touch to the lighting and camera’s complexities that assembled the building blocks of the production and post-production process.

Copyright © 2008 National Lampoon & Town Lake Films