----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, October 03, 1999 2:39
AM
Subject: News from The Bristol Museum's
Walking With Dinosaurs event
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
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