Rediscover the Living Animal
The process of bringing the dinosaurs back to life together with the world they lived in. Palaeontologists have spent 150 years trying to reveal the behaviour behind the bones-
- Looking at the bones and how they fit together.
- Looking at the articulation of the bones to find out the mechanics of the joints; to start piecing together how the dinosaur behaved.
- Looking at other objects found with the skeletons; fossilised leaves, plants, bugs, eggs and bones of other animals; prey and predators.
Some of the dinosaurs were huge animals that you would have never expected to fly, but it was found that they were structured with huge strong yet hollow bones. Palaeontologists can tell behavioural traits from the length of bones, degrees of joint movements.
They also looked back at other attempts to recreate dinosaurs in the past. There are lessons to be learned from these previous attempts.
“This is Crystal Palace Park in London...the statues are a solid reminder of the mistakes of the past”
In the 19th Century there was nothing to go on, a few teeth and bones here and there, it’s not surprising mistakes were made, Heads were the wrong shape, thumb spikes were mistaken for horns. Over time ideas change and more dinosaur skeletons were found, more complete meaning that ideas about shape and form of dinosaurs could evolve. Even in the 1920’s they made some amazing achievements but the ideas were still very inaccurate.
Talking about a video- “The Brontosaurus shouldn’t bend its neck...the T-Rex should not be standing up”
“Making dinosaurs true to how they were meant using up-to-date skeletons”
“Science has progressed enough to get the basic shape correct”
Sculptors then build the dinosaur up from the bones up, bones give a starting point, for example looking at a dinosaur skull you can see surface markings on the bones which show where muscles were attached which in turn shows how the jaw works meaning they can start to flesh out the skull. Areas with no teeth show openings for blood vessels, if lucky sometimes skin/scale impressions can be found, showing the skin is flexible in that area.
Colour is something very unlikely to be found, so far no colour pigments have ever been found preserved in/on skeletons however it is fair to suspect dinosaurs used colour in aspects of their behaviour, blood vessels and capillaries showing that a stegosaurus’ spikes blushed to help to cool down, ward off predators, Impressing mates etc.
Tie together the fleshy structures from other parts of the dinosaur and you begin to understand how it might have looked. Remote controlled animatronics were made, working models which were painted and given hair follicles etc for close up scenes. Some hand sculpted and painted models were created to be scanned into the computer with a laser.
Next they looked at the environment and where the dinosaurs lived.
When excavating dinosaur skeletons the palaeontologists are also learning about their habitat collecting fossilised leaves; to begin with they are buried in rock and need to be taken to the lab to uncover them. Some plants are identifiable straight away, sequoias, redwood trees, monkey puzzle trees.
This then tells the scientists about the climate that the dinosaurs lived in; it was much warmer back then and there was no freezing at night. There was also no grass at all as it couldn’t survive in the climate.
Animators talked of trouble figuring out how to show the weight of the dinosaurs, there are no existing creatures with similar movement to use as a reference.
They did however look at real life animals-
- Studying how their way of life affects how they move,
- Studying how the surrounding environment affects the way they move,
- Studying how their body affects how they move,
And then relating this to dinosaurs and how their environment affects them.
Some examples of obtaining influence from real animals are-
- The study of elephants. They can use their movement and distribution of weight; they always have three feet on the ground to support themselves however an elephant is a relatively smart animal whereas looking at a diplodocus’ brain size compared to body size; it could never move with the same level of fluidity as the elephant.
- The comparison of a pterosaurs and an old man with crutches. The animators actually took it in turns to try and act out walk cycles with crutches to get a better understanding of the movement, testing different styles to save animation time and have discussions about what each thought worked well.
To work out the dinosaurs’ method of eating they went through a trial and error process with the animatronics, acting out different movements to see what worked best. To figure out what the dinosaurs ate was a similar process to discovering the environment, looking at fossilised dung, finding distinctive markings to work out plants, small bones of other creatures etc giving the palaeontologists a glimpse into the diets. The crew then made a strange slushy mix involving sawdust and water to reconstruct the dinosaur poop.
When working on carnivores it was also necessary to work out how the animals hunted. They did this by studying the hands, feet and heads, horns, teeth and claws to see what ‘weapons’ were available to them, finding out what was their strongest asset to attack with. To find out what their prey was another study of skeletons, finding markings showing scratches bite marks, to show who ate who. Dental putty impressions were made of groves and holes in the skeletons to find out about the tooth/claw that made the mark, the impressions could be compared with different assets of dinosaurs to see what predator there was. This could also help to show behaviour and mannerisms of the predators, showing how they ate their kill.
Another aspect to help figure out how the dinosaurs might walk was finding fossilised footprints. The palaeontologists found a whole fossilised beach which had been turned on its side over time, where a large amount of footprints were visible. The footprints can show the walk cycle of the dinosaurs, also whether they moved in herds.
They also talked about how the palaeontologists learned from the animators, after working out the dynamics of certain joints and the animator creating the skeleton in 3D it often turned out that the movement thought to be true was not actually possible, also seeing the animation of the dinosaurs shows them their work in action and really puts it all into context. For example the diplodocus; at first it was thought that the long neck was to reach leaves at the tops of trees rather like a giraffe. Looking closer at the bones by building a 3D model bone by bone made them realise that the neutral position of the neck showed it couldn’t rear up and the neck was actually designed to browse low to the ground sweeping back and forth across the forest floor.
The crew also needed to find locations suitable for shooting that would reflect what the world was like back then. The makers also decided to film all the environments live with no CGI effects, all the splashed, dust clouds, foot prints etc had to be simulated by the crew. The 3D models were then laid over the top of the video footage, with editing of breaking light, adding shadows and environment interaction with the models and colour matching.
There was no mention of actual rigs, the documentaries just went straight into talking about animation, I think this is probably because this program is aimed at people who are amazed by ‘Walking with Dinosaurs’ and are interested in how is made, however not specifically people who understand a lot about the animation process, basically talking in layman’s terms. Not a lot of people watching this will be very interested in the actual rig.
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