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