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RE: Follow-up: the truth about killer dinosaurs
But this is basic Darwin. There's a competition between T.Rex's built
for the media, and it's not a competition between models and scientific
reality. What's operating here is a natural selection where viewers are
food, and that favours the more monstrous whether you're looking at
T.rex or Gerry Springer.
The only thing that will change that is an audience which values
intelligence and accuracy above sensationalism.... and rather oddly, it
occurs to me that this is exactly what the current dinosaur programmes
are encouraging - people are becoming more educated because it's great
fun watching T.Rex attacking a Triceratops, and once the dinosaurs in
competing shows are of roughly equal monstrousness, the public idea of
what's believable ought to shift towards what behaviours make sense
rather than what the monster looks like (as it has in the
palaeontologist community over the last 100 years).
I think I may have changed sides in the middle of that somewhere...
There's another dimension which is that animators and modellers are
artists, and even if they're trying to represent truth accurately, all
their training and experience tells them that their job is to create
characters, and that truth, believability and fact are all very
different concepts.
Christian Darkin
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-dinosaur@usc.edu [mailto:owner-dinosaur@usc.edu] On Behalf
Of Luis Rey
Sent: 31 August 2005 09:17
To: David Krentz
Cc: John Hunt; -Dinosaur Mailing List-
Subject: Re: Follow-up: the truth about killer dinosaurs
But... what is there in an accurate T. rex that doesn't spell
"monster" in any lay people's mind?!
Why then does it have to be "even more monstrous" as to make it
completely unreal?
And, although I agree that this might have been the case in Jurassic
Park (yes, you are right: quoting Michel Trcic, they forced his model
to be only 60% accurate because they wanted a 'monster') I doubt this
was the case for WWD, where the animals were supposed to be "accurate
dinosaurs in their own environment"... the aim of WWD was "giving
certainty to people..." (in actual words of the producers, personal
communication) not having a Disney adventure.
In what way having the wrong anatomy for the back of the head of T.
rex and the attachment to the neck would make it more monstrous? I
don't see WWD T. rex as more commercial than Jurassic Park's and... I
even prefer Jurassic Park's T. rex head.
So what I see (and have seen) in many programs afterwards is that you
can certainly be accurate and entertainingly monstrous, without
science suffering so much in the process. Even Dinosaur Planet was
vastly superior... and definitively: in the Disney movie Dinosaur I
could read superior anatomy than in in a lot of WWD...lack of
feathers, caricature velociraptors and iguanodon's lips notwithstanding!
On 31 Aug 2005, at 07:32, David Krentz wrote:
> 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
>>
>
Luis Rey
Visit my website
http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~luisrey