"Dinosaur Planet": comments from one of the staff

["Thomas R. Holtz, Jr." <tholtz@geol.umd.edu>]

Greetings,

The TV documentary "Dinosaur Planet" has come and gone, but I just recently
got a message from one of the staff who worked on it (and who worked on
"When Dinosaurs Roamed America", which is where I met him first).  The guy
is Mark Dubeau, and was Art Director.  He said it would be okay to post
this.  So, without further ado, a message from the inside:
--------------
just wanted to let you know the only dinos i had anything to do with were in
these two shows of 'dinosaur planet'... 'white tip's tail' and the one about
the atlasaurs.  i had nothing to do with the other two.  the guys who
designed them knew little about dinos.  i would have stuck around, but the
line producer screwed me over and i couldn't finish the job.  hence, the
other two shows had quite interesting mistakes... especially the hadrosaurs.
however, they weren't dino fans, but just techies and such.  though i art
directed the first show in the same fashion as usual... i was denigrated to
something like 'creature designer'.

i had to fight to get proper feathering on the velociraptors and oviraptors.
i think i got it close.  i really enjoyed designing the aucasaurs and
initiating tests to get more realistic eyes.  alvarezsaurus was a challenge
as well.  i still do dino sculpts, and i miss designing dinos for shows (i
also did valley of the t.rex and chasing africa's dinosaurs as well as
mammalian stuff like 'what killed the mega-beasts?' and 'before we ruled the
earth)

if you don't mind i would like to formally apologise for any errors in the
other two shows... i should have stuck it out, but the writing was on the
wall.

feel free to post this where others can view it, i imagine they will
appreciate the insight.

-------------------

He added in a subsequent email that the experience wasn't all bad, but that
he did feel that they were often just rewriting episodes of "Walking with
Dinosaurs" or other 'dino-cliche's".  Ah, well, c'est la vie...


                Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
                Vertebrate Paleontologist
Department of Geology           Director, Earth, Life & Time Program
University of Maryland          College Park Scholars
                College Park, MD  20742
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/tholtz.htm
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~jmerck/eltsite
Phone:  301-405-4084    Email:  tholtz@geol.umd.edu
Fax (Geol):  301-314-9661       Fax (CPS-ELT): 301-405-0796