Re: Follow-up: the truth about killer dinosaurs

[David Krentz <ddkrentz@charter.net>]

Well,  I know how designing a dino can go wrong.  The T.rex from WWD  
looks like the worst case of design by committee I've ever seen.  Any  
artist can tell you that there is extra pressure when creating  
everyones favourite dinosaur.  The expectation of what our worst  
fears look like is a hard one to capture.  Even though it is an  
animal, and not a monster, people in entertainment look to it as 'the  
money-maker'.  Therefore, the money people all have a say...as does  
the producers ex-wife's brother in law's goldfish.
  After a while it all falls apart.  On Disney's Dinosaur the  
carnotaur (notice i did not call it a carnotaurus?) would have been  
more silly if myself and a few others didn't create one model for the  
money people to look at one slightly different one for those of us  
that cared!
  No one cared about the background dinosaurs like the styracosaurus  
and pachycelphalosaurs, so they turned out alright!
  What I've found is that  designing the girl and the monster in any  
movie are the hardest assignments.  We all have a different version  
of what scares us, and what attracts us.
One of our directors on Dinosaur wanted the 'raptors' to be super  
beefy and muscular.  He himself was muscular and someone who was  
stronger than he was scary to him.  To me I thought a skinny raptor  
was scary because starving desperate people must scare me.
  In my own opinion on movie dinosaurs, I thought the Jurassic Park  
T.rex was really well designed.  It was caricatured enough to be a  
monster and an animal.  Thanks Mike Trcic!!!

 David Krentz


On Aug 30, 2005, at 11:03 AM, Luis Rey wrote:

> On 30 Aug 2005, at 09:38, John Hunt wrote:
>
> > Not sure why Luis was thankful the animation was not from WWD.  It  
> > really
> > needs a makeover to keep up with the latest finds - mainly adding  
> > feathers,
> > but the WWD T. rex was much more lifelike than the new one, and  
> > had also not
> > just been to the dentist!
>
>
> Can't agree, I'm afraid. First I would always advocate diversity  
> and keep away from cliches (and WWD could become a cliche very  
> easily) so any new reconstruction  seen from a different artistic  
> point of view is almost always refreshing (unless it is deadly  
> wrong, and despite the long strides, wide skull and some minor  
> defects in the animation, the T.rex from "The Truth of the Killer  
> Dinosaurs" looked pretty decent to me).
> Secondly,  It has always been difficult to me to understand how - 
> after so many good specimens and perfect, completely restored  
> Tyrannosaurus skulls and anatomical treaties-  a professional can  
> still get it wrong. And that is exactly what they did in Walking  
> With Dinosaurs: get the back of the skull (including the area of  
> the temporal fenestrae and the muscular attachments of the lower  
> jaw to the skull) completely >wrong<. The T. rex there is a   
> chimera: the proportions are not quite right and the attachment of  
> the skull to the neck looks also completely artificial.
> To me, the general look of the WWD T.rex is more like a  
> sophisticated, glorified version of one of the vilest T.rex puppets  
> ever to star in a publication (namely "Tyrannosaurus, On The Trail  
> Of The Ferocious Meat-Eating Dinosaur", Dorling Kindersley 1992).  
> The WWD team took a while to get their dinosaurs completely  
> right...  the Allosaurus from "Ballad of Big Al" was pretty decent   
> at last.
>
> Luis Rey.
>
> Visit my website
> http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~luisrey