by Paul Fischer
Digital Dinosaurs Brought to a Virtual Reality by Paul Fischer
Forget Titanic. It's Disney's Dinosaur that may end up as the most expensive film ever made, but it's all up there on the screen, and believe the hype: There has never been anything quite like this before. Paul Fischer talks to the actors and filmmakers who helped bring this astonishing film to life. (and all images link to custom made wallpapers from the film!)
The opening sequence
of Disney's exhilarating prehistoric adventure, Dinosaur, defines from
the
outset, what this digital epic is all about. In the tradition of Moses and his
rescue from the Nile, we first watch breathlessly a giant egg out of which baby
dinosaur Aladar is ultimately hatched but first snatched from its nest by a swift
Oviraptor, passed through dense forests from species to species, sent floating
down rivers like Moses, sent flying over jagged creeks and lush marshes, before
finally landing and being rescued by little monkey-type creatures, the lemurs.
As spectacular as the opening of a Bond movie, it's also far more inventive and
visually thrilling than anything we've seen on screen.
When the film's voice talents first came on board this massive undertaking, they had no idea what to expect, literally. Playing the protagonist dinosaur is veteran character actor D.B Sweeney (Memphis Belle, Spawn), who jokingly admits to wanting to do Dinosaur "so I could have my own line of toys and it exceeded my expectations." No joke, really. After all, the actor says, he's been "doing these speaking toys for about 5 months and it's amazing what's now feasible." Of course, doing the speaking toys is not all that motivated this diverse actor in bringing lead dinosaur Aladar to life. "I also wanted to be the character for my young nieces, whom I knew would be excited if I was the voice of a dinosaur." But Sweeney admits he would have been happy doing anything in the world of Disney animation, "Because you are immortalized to young people. Sometimes as an actor the projects that you work on are taken care of or not given the proper release. You know that when you're on a Disney animated film, it's going to find a wide audience and people are going to take very good care of it."
His
Aladar, a kind of prehistoric Moses as it were, was a different creature when
Sweeney and the rest of the film's voice talents came on board the project. "Massive
is the operative word", Sweeney says smilingly. "I had no idea how huge and elaborate
Dinosaur was going to be," he says, the only actor to work on the project
over the five-year stretch. As with all animated features, be they conventional
or computer-generated, the actors record their dialogue first, then be recalled
every three months for about four hours a day. "In the beginning there were only
sketches; we didn't even have a script, it was all top secret." He was given some
lines to say, was initially videotaped, and the character began to be visualized
based on both those early readings and the videos. "They were basically using
my facial expressions as a template for the dinosaur that they were going to build."
Sweeney, whose last on-camera appearance was in the short-lived TV series Harsh
Realm, insisted that the character change from "the Godly, one-dimensional and
overly pure character we began with four years ago. A lot of the evolution that
I was involved with over time was putting different shadings in order to make
the character seem a little bit more 'human'.
The closest to a 'villain' in Dinosaur is that of Kron, the aggressively brusque iguanodon whose group-leader status is challenged by Aladar as the herd tries to find the idyllic nesting ground. Here he's played by veteran character actor Samuel E. Wright, better known as the very different voice of Sebastian in Disney's The Little Mermaid. Wright was as surprised as anyone to find himself lending his remarkable voice to the gruff Kron. "Are you sure I can do this", he recalls asking the film's producers. As with Sweeney's insistence on humanizing Aladar, Wright also maintained his desire on giving extra depth to Kron. "Initially he was the quintessential Disney anti-hero", Wright recalls. "I realized that it's just not in me to play a mean guy, so I went to the producers and suggested that perhaps he has issues to deal with." Having explained in depth what he felt those issues were, he was given free reign to "give Kron some distinct shading, make him multi-faceted, soften him and make him more overly driven, rather than just make him the villain."
For
a Disney animated film, Dinosaur is not only uncannily realistic, but that
realism has made the film more violent than one would expect. While adhering to
Disney's philosophy of thematically exploring the nature of family and home, in
this prehistoric world, it's not all goodness and light. "We didn't want to be
gratuitous, but we wanted to point out the stakes are high to live in our dinosaur
world," says 36-year old co-director Ralph Zondag, who had previously co-directed
We're Back: A Dinosaur's Story for Steven Spielberg. "We definitely
wanted to make it edgy," agrees Co-director Eric Leighton, a stop-motion
animation expert who was Oscar-nominated for his effects in The Nightmare Before
Christmas. On a technical level, the cinema has never experienced anything
quite like Dinosaur. Over an 18-month period, a second unit film crew shot
live-action scenes around the world, including swamps in Florida, plains in Venezuela,
a Hawaiian Island lake region and even the coastline of Australia. Mixed with
those live-action backgrounds are computer-generated images of the lemurs and
the many dinosaurs, such as iguanodons, styrachosaurs and the tyrannosaurus rex
of the later Cretaceous period, the carnotaur. Add to that 1,300 separate-effects
shots. (There were less than 200 in Jurassic Park).
While
the landscapes seem real enough (and many are), looks can be deceiving. Many of
the skies and most of the grass ended up as digital images, all computer enhanced,
for in this world of digital animation, it's because you need control, explains
visual effects supervisor Neil Eskuri. "The grass is very important. With
CGI grass, the dinosaurs can move how you want them to move, leave footprints
behind. Controlling grass or the elements is crucial." Over four years in the
making with a final budget of around $200m, Dinosaur became a kind of computer-generated
work in progress. Software was being continually developed while the film was
in production. It was 1994 when producer Pam Marsden and directors Ralph
Zondag and Eric Leighton, most with theatre experience, were hired to work on
the then unscripted, highly secretive dinosaur movie. But Disney wanted to turn
this into something more than just a one-off digital family movie; they wanted
to take the technology that was being invented, and integrate it into a separate
digital facility, and so the Secret Lab was born, and both it and Dinosaur
were created on the fly. "It was a new way for us to grow together and learn together"
says Zondag. "What we ended up with was this bizarre, hybrid combination of live
action and animation. We'll have to get a new name for it," he adds. As well as
the technology that has since been integrated into other Disney projects.
After five years, Dinosaur's now exhausted filmmakers will finally discover from moviegoers if there really is a lot to be overwhelmed about. Whatever the box office, (which is predicted to be as large as our dinosaurs) this Dinosaur is a unique movie going experience, one that its creators feel will change the shape of animated cinema for years to come.
