Re: Follow-up: the truth about killer dinosaurs

[Justin Kennard <justinkennard@adam.com.au>]

Sadly  Reality on screen often looks fake, so dinos moving and interacting
properly and realisticly translate to being fake cos people have preconceved
notions  about what is real and what is not.  My favorite example of this is
watching one of those bang crash movies where you see a figher jet shoot a
missile.  You see the nice smooth flight trail and smoke trail of the
missile  and we think it looks good.  The reality is that a missles flight
while directed is very erratic (size shape aerodynamics wind ya know the
whole chaos theory stuff)  and when you see it on film  looks like an
amiture attempt at special effects.

so I guess while we know that the Trex could do this and couldnt do that....
let the general population have the "Lies to children" that we learned the
truth about. (for more information about lies to children see "Science of
Diskworld"
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Christian Darkin" <christian@darkin.demon.co.uk>
To: "'-Dinosaur Mailing List-'" <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2005 6:17 PM
Subject: 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
>
>