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Hi all,
Just returned from the recent one day workshop hosted by the Bristol Museum in
conjunction with the BBC's new Walking With Dinosaurs documentary to be aired
monday.
The line up of events were as follows:
10:30 Welcome and introduction
to dinosaurs - Mike Benton.
A basic introductory guide to help everyone catch
up - aimed at an audience between 7 and 70 years and so was very
generalised. He did however show a nice slide of the Scipionyx intestines
enlarged - was, for me, more moving than the animation footage.
I caught up with Mr Benton after the lecture and he
happened to mention the imminent release of a second edition to Galton Sues and
Weishampel's The Dinosauria. Should be set for release in 2001-2002 by his
estimates.
11:30 Showing of film 1 - Tim
Haines
Attention anyone who wants to be surprised on
Monday (like anything I tell you could possibly give away everything) avert your
eyes: Having seen a diplodocus fart I can quite happily retire to my grave
contented with my lot - it was good seeing these animals perform the smellier
functions of life such as hatching, mating, defecating (1 tonne a day
apparently! any refs supporting this people?) as well as all the other things
you'd expect like fighting predators and of course eating. Speaking of
predators, I was pleasantly surprised by the allosaurus - it shook it's shoulder
girdle as a follow-through to shaking it's throat while bellowing - a piece of
dynamic action I hadn't predicted. As for other stars. the brachiosaurus
was surprisingly gracile for it's size and the Agnurognathus (apologies for
mispelling) is very sweet.
12:00 Bones to biology: how we
know how dinosaurs lived and moved - Mike Benton
Gave an overview on what we know about dinosaur
locomotion, metabolism, etc,... His main reference was the work of Donald
Henderson in his 1999 publication to Palaeobiology (Allen Press Ltd) Most
of the time he compared mathematical techniques of rendering locomotion like
this with artistic techniques as used by the Walking With Dinosaurs
team.
12:30 Demonstration of
dinosaur locomotion in Earth Sciences computer room - Any student that could
operate the machines
To see everything we did, visit http://zeus.bris.ac.uk/~gldmh/
14:00 Computer animation
creating an illusion - Mike Milne
Discussed the various techniques used to
synchronize the real camera taking shots of the backdrop with the computer
generated images that were supposed to move naturally within it - ie how to get
the shadows falling in the right places, where the light source was,
where exactly the CG foot was planted when the camera panned round
etc, Mostly they used the ball and pole technique to guage exact distance
on location. What ensued afterwards was a selection of edits how the
additional camera crew ran around making everything move so the dinosaurs could
truly interact - the result was straight out of the Monty Python archives to be
sure. Also included was an animator's rendering of an allosaurid lying on
it's side, grooming it's cloacca and a humerous animators day off joke with a
skateboarding coelophysis with helmet.
15:00 Making the series - Tim
Haines
Apparently not the most expensive documentary ever
made - just the most expensive per second. Only cost about as much as your
average costume drama although a costume drama lasts about twice as long.
It turns out that the licensing corporation only paid 1/4 of the budget for the
production of this and the rest from independant sponsors and commercial
retail etc. He raised some interesting points on what he thought we as a
mammalian group assumed about dinosaurs. He said that he wanted to portray
diplodocus as an uncaring parent to throw people's perceptions of all things
being nurturing caring parents. I feel this is (intentionally or
otherwise) claiming that Horner's work et al was somehow
always orthodoxy. Oh well. He made an interesting point
relating to the "sauropod's long necks being so to assist in entering
conifer forests for grazing where their bodies could not" thread that was
recently discussed on our very own dinosaur list: He implied that when
rendering the largest of the adult sauropods in giant tree environments typical
to their day, he physically couldn't make them fit so he had to bring them out
onto the plains. More food for thought I'm sure.
16:00 Film 2 - Tim
Haines
Again, if you don't want to know how it ends,
please skip now: The final episode loses it's documentary feel I think and
tries to go out with a bang of special effects and wowing wizardry - in all
fairness it succeeds but it is an odd jump of styles. Again nice to see
they thought of the messy touches with archosaurian ecology - they even made the
nostrils foam on a carbon monoxide poisoning victim. I was a little
dissapointed with T-rex - in short his tongue was all too obviously unreal and
his jaw hinge mechanism/lips were not as beautifully complicated - more like
King of the glove puppet lizards than anything else. Other dissapointments
were the flight characteristics of the pterosaurs and birds - I just didn't
believe that they were manipulating the air around them. It's a shame they
didn't have time to create a CG wind tunnel to test their fliers instead of just
looking at what looked right. I raised a question about whether the moon's
geology would have been different then - craters in different places etc.
Also, I wonder about the likelihood of Dromaeosaurus trying to prey on
triceratops (unless Lynxs have started killing elephants while I wasn't
looking).
Yours sincerely,
Samuel Barnett
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