In China
in 2001, researchers found a fossilized dinosaur covered with feathers from
head to toe. By 2003, this fossil had come to life and was immortalized on the
small screen, in the Discovery Channel’s production Dinosaur Planet.
Working backward from other fossils found in close proximity to the feathered
creature, a team of animators, filmmakers and paleontologists created a story
that follows one young dinosaur in her daily struggles to survive in the harsh
desert environment of Mongolia, 70 million years ago — a snapshot of the
life of a female Velociraptor named White Tip.
Two Tyrannosaurus rex dinosaurs
encounter one another in an episode of Walking With Dinosaurs. As scientists
discover more about T. rex and other dinosaurs, their portrayal on-screen
becomes even more accurate. Courtesy of Evergreen Films.
Bringing creatures to life that have been extinct for millions of years is no
small feat. It takes a collaborative team of animators and still-graphic artists,
sculptors, writers, directors and paleontologists working over many months.
And making a product that is not just entertaining but is also educational is
an even more challenging assignment, requiring scientific input every step of
the way.
Although dinosaurs have graced the screen since movies and television were invented,
only since the advent of computer-generated imagery, or CGI, have the creatures
become more realistic. The release of Jurassic Park in 1994 marked the
first dinosaur production to use live-action backgrounds and CGI, says Kent
Stevens, a computer scientist at the University of Oregon in Eugene, who has
developed software designed to re-create the biomechanics of dinosaurs.
Jurassic Park “really nailed” the use of live action and animation,
but it was meant purely for entertainment, Stevens says. The movie’s release,
however, resurrected “dino-mania,” he says. And in the meantime, scientists
continued to discover new fossils.
Thus, in 1996, BBC set out to create a documentary-style dinosaur series, and
Walking With Dinosaurs was born. Released on television in the United
Kingdom and United States in 1999, it was followed up by Dinosaur Planet
and later by other smaller productions. The multi-step process of creating Walking
With Dinosaurs (a six-hour series) and Dinosaur Planet (a series
of four hour-long shows) took 18 months and more than 100 graphic artists for
each production, not to mention dozens of paleontological experts and production
crew members.
Creating the characters
The first steps in producing a “paleoreconstruction” are to create
blueprints for the dinosaurs and for the story, says Francois Garcia, head of
production and film development at Meteor Studios in Montreal, the studio that
created the animation for Dinosaur Planet. To generate the storylines,
writers and creators of the programs start out researching and talking to paleontologists
to learn about interesting discoveries in the fossil record, says John Copeland
of Evergreen Films in California, who was producer of Dinosaur Planet
for the Discovery Channel. They use this background research to create stories
and a “cast of characters around each fossil find for each episode,”
he says.
For example, some of the characters surrounding White Tip, the feathered dinosaur
in Dinosaur Planet, include two fossilized dinosaurs found entwined in
sandstone, Copeland says. One was hunting the other and had taken a bite when
both were suddenly buried, paleontologists think, and then fossilized by a landslide.
“We put together a series of three fossil finds and fabricated an interwoven
story,” Copeland says, and thus created “White Tip’s Journey,”
one of the episodes of the series.
Once the writers and producers have decided which dinosaurs to follow in the
stories, they again consult paleontologists to create the look of the actual
dinosaurs, Copeland says, which are then sketched by artists. Together with
the storyboard, the sketches create the blueprint.
Back in the studio, designers model the size and shape of the dinosaurs, some
with virtual models and others with clay. At Meteor Studios, each creature is
first digitally created as a wire-framed model that is accurate in size and
shape — it’s the canvas onto which the artists will paint color and
texture later. At FrameStore CFC in London, the computer animation studio that
created the animation in Walking With Dinosaurs, freelance sculptors
create models out of clay, says Mike Milne, director of animation at FrameStore.
When that step is finished, the models are scanned top-to-bottom and put into
a computer in 3-D, he says. “Modeling the shape and size is perhaps the
least controversial part of creating a dinosaur,” Milne says, “because
so much is known about the musculature, the skeletons and the mass of the creatures.”
Adding in color and texture (such as skin patterns), however, incorporates “a
lot of speculation,” Milne says, and “usually involves a fairly heated
discussion.” The movie producers want the creatures to look spectacular,
he says, but paleontologists are more cautious because few skin impressions
have been fossilized and found, and no colors have been — or could have
been — fossilized.
“We know the colors and textures are largely made-up and are probably a
little bit remote from what they actually looked like,” says David Norman,
a paleontologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom who worked
on Walking With Dinosaurs. “But that doesn’t bother me unless
the commentary gives the clear impression to the viewer that this is exactly
as they looked in life,” he says. The productions, Milne adds, just aim
to get it as plausible as possible.
Reconstructing
the behaviors and movements of the giant creatures can also be problematic,
says Scott Sampson, a paleontologist at the Utah Museum of Natural History in
Salt Lake City who was involved in Dinosaur Planet. Graphic artists build
in muscle structures and a predetermined set of movements that are established
by the paleontologists, says Garcia of Meteor Studios, such as whether and how
a dinosaur walks or runs, how high the neck and tail can move, and how its jowls
move when it eats.
Paleontologist Scott Sampson was intimately involved in the making of Dinosaur
Planet. He and other scientists advised producers throughout the filmmaking
process on the scientific information about the dinosaurs, from how they moved
and what they looked like, to where they would have lived. Courtesy of the Discovery
Channel.
All of the movements and behaviors are created by animators, Milne says, but
“we’re at the mercy of the directors and paleontologists — we
construct the motions they tell us to.” Whereas writers and animators are
most focused on the artistic end of things, the paleontologists are most concerned
about scientific accuracy. “The end result is often a dynamic tension,”
Sampson says.
For example, for one of the episodes of Dinosaur Planet, Sampson and
the other paleontologists told the writers what sorts of behaviors, including
mating and eating, each dinosaur could plausibly portray. The scientists recognized
the difficulties of creating characters out of dinosaurs with no facial expressions
and limited intelligence. However, when they got the script back, “and
the writers had portrayed the animals feeling and reacting in ways only humans
do,” Sampson says, “we told [the directors] ‘no, that won’t
work,’” and everyone went back to the drawing board.
Still, for the most part, says Stevens of the University of Oregon, the relationship
between the scientists, producers and animators is congenial. “They gave
us the chance to participate, to get it right,” he says. “And we definitely
had some influence in rearranging body postures or behaviors” that were
not appropriate.
The scientists do not get the final say, however, says Norman of Cambridge.
Sometimes, he says, the producers do not consult with paleontologists on particular
activities and instead make choices for artistic reasons that end up being “completely
unreal” — he’s thinking of a particular scene in Walking With
Dinosaurs in which a Triassic Archosaur is shown urinating “copiously”
in a manner inconsistent with paleontological knowledge. “By the time we
‘experts’ are made privy to what has been done … it’s simply
too late.” And then, he says, “I get calls from peers after they’ve
seen the show, saying ‘what on Earth were you thinking?’ And it’s
embarrassing. But in the end I just have to shake my head and move on and try
to learn lessons for the future.”
Creating a world
Creating the
landscapes onto which the dinosaurs will roam, or “backplates,” is
also an involved process, Garcia says. For the four hours of Dinosaur Planet,
producers spent close to two weeks in the field filming these live-action shots.
The challenge, Copeland says, is that the environments in which the dinosaurs
lived do not exist anywhere on Earth today. For example, grass did not exist
during dinosaur times, and it is hard to find anywhere on Earth with the right
climate that doesn’t have grass.
A crew for Evergreen Films is shooting the “backplates” onto which
dinosaurs will roam in an episode of Dinosaur Planet. Present-day Costa
Rica serves as a modern backdrop for Cretaceous-aged Romania. Courtesy of Evergreen
Films.
“I sweat so much over the accuracy of this,” Copeland says, “but
Kirk [Johnson] and the other paleontologists are pragmatic about it.” Johnson,
a paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, and other scientists
told Copeland where he could find environments that were close to the paleoenvironments,
in terms of climate and foliage. Costa Rica provided the setting for ancient
Romania, New Mexico the setting for ancient Montana, and California provided
settings for both ancient Mongolian deserts and tropical redwood forests of
South America.
During the live filming, the producers also create “interactions with the
environment,” Copeland says. For example, the crew walks around kicking
up dust clouds and splashing around in water. Later, via computers, dinosaurs
are put in place of humans to make those motions.
Once the characters are in place and the backdrop is set, the world begins to
come together. The creatures are plotted onto the backplates, and the visual-effects
specialists incorporate all the elements that show the dinosaurs interacting
with their environment, Garcia says. Then, each individual scene is carefully
illuminated to match the natural lighting in the background, “giving the
impression that the animal really exists in that environment,” he says,
including shadows under the dinosaurs as they’re walking and light shining
through where trees part.
Additionally, during this process, called rendering, the computer programs and
artists jointly “layer” the scenes — all in an effort to make
each scene look as real as possible, Garcia says. The final step, called compositing,
is where all the elements are finally combined to create “a perfectly integrated
image,” he says.
The entire process of creating dinosaurs and bringing them to life is “labor-intensive,
but very interesting,” says Milne, who has been occupied with dinosaur
stories since production on Walking With Dinosaurs began in 1996. Since
then, the process has not changed much, though “the computer graphics have
improved in speed and sophistication,” he says, “allowing us to do
more complex animations in less time.” And, he suggests, over the next
few years, things will probably get even faster and more sophisticated, allowing
for increasingly realistic-looking scenes.
In the end, Sampson says, programs like this are hard to do well. Walking
With Dinosaurs and Dinosaur Planet are decent, he says, but better
if the criteria is entertainment rather than education. His main complaint is
that programs about paleontology tend to “give the impression that we somehow
filmed these animals interacting at a waterhole 75 million years ago.”
Without injecting any science, he says, the take-home message for viewers is
misleading — that paleontologists have figured out all the details of the
world of dinosaurs. “An approach that conveys some of the unsolved mysteries
and pathways of investigation is equally fascinating,” Sampson says, especially
for kids, “who need to know that there’s a lot more to discover.”
“We’re in a golden age of dinosaur discovery,” Copeland says.
“Paleontologists are finding things we never thought possible,” such
as the recent discovery of well-preserved soft tissues from a Tyrannosaurus
rex (see Geotimes, May 2005). As more discoveries
come about, and more is learned, he says, the stories are going to get better
as well.
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