globeandmail.com: Prepare to be amazed
07/30/2007 01:16 PM
FREE-RANGE DINOSAURS
Prepare to be amazed
Arena-rock, old-style - Walking With Dinosaurs: The Live Experience heads for Toronto on a whistle-stop
tour
DEIRDRE KELLY
JULY 28, 2007
Attention, citizens! A bulletin of Godzilla proportions! If you feel a rumble in the ground this week, do not panic. It's not
an earthquake. It's an invasion of animatronic dinosaurs. Intelligence has it that the prehistoric giants roar and run, and
thrash tails that are almost 20 metres (or 65 feet) long.
The good news is they don't eat - not humans anyway. Being robotic puppets, their main diet is mostly axle grease and
electronic power.
Walking With Dinosaurs: The Live Experience, an arena show featuring 15 sinuously moving dinosaurs, is apparently so
spine-tinglingly realistic it makes Jurassic Park feel like a garden stroll.
"The dinosaurs are remarkable and amazingly natural-looking," says Matthew McCoy, puppetry director of the $21million special-effects extravaganza that thunders into Air Canada Centre for a five-night performance run starting
Wednesday, Aug. 8.
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"The show has creatures that are free-roaming with rippling muscles and skin that moves. We even get them blinking
their reptilian eyelids," he says.
Based on the award-winning BBC series that featured a paleontologist thrown back to the time when the beasts
dominated the Earth, the live show features 10 species representing the 200-million-year reign of the dinosaurs.
Included are Tyrannosaurus Rex from the Cretaceous period, Liliensternus from the Triassic period, and Plesiosaurus,
Stegosaurus and Allosaurus from the Jurassic period. The largest of them, the Brachiosaurus, is 11 metres tall - roughly
the height of a three-storey building - and 26 metres from nose to tail.
It took a team of 50 - engineers, fabricators, skin makers, artists, painters and animatronic experts - a year to build the
original production in Australia, where the show debuted in January. Created as a travelling production, it launched a
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07/30/2007 01:16 PM
two-year, 100-city North American tour that started in Tacoma, Wash. The dinosaurs travelled three weeks from
Australia by sea, and for the road tour are journeying from city to city packed into 27 tractor trailers.
It is both a scientific exploration of how the dinosaurs lived, moved, ate and finally died (likely from a meteor shower 65
million years ago) and "a complete theatrical experience," says Mr. McCoy, an Aussie who worked on a cult Australian
television science-fiction series called FarScape.
Peter England designed the sets of inflatable trees and volcanic rocks, as well as projections seen on a giant screen
framed by vicious-looking teeth. Warner Brown penned the script that artistic director William May and director Scott
Faris harness into a quick-paced, 90-minute show.
But it's the dinosaurs themselves, ranging from the size of a chicken to the bulk of 10 bull elephants piled one on top of
the other, who are the, um, biggest stars of the show.
Their creator, Sonny Tilders, an animatronics designer who also built the creatures for Star Wars: Episode III and The
Chronicles of Narnia (and a self-confessed dino nerd), explains how their prehistoric presence comes vividly to life
through 21st-century know-how.
"The dinosaurs are complex robotic machines that required us to develop new ways of controlling the computer-driven
hydraulics that move the body parts," he says.
A puppeteer in the stands manoeuvres a "voodoo rig," basically the dinosaur in miniature, to move the creature's arms,
head and tail. Each metre-long rig sends radio signals to a specific dinosaur. One tiny flick of any part of the smaller
replica creates an even bigger splash of movement in the bigger creature.
"It's a lot of responsibility," says Mr. Tilders. "You don't want any wrong moves because these are quite heavy
machines."
Attached to the dinosaur's legs is a motorized sled (hidden by mist and lighting), in which a driver guides the behemoth
around the arena. Another puppeteer operating a joystick controls the ticks and roars and snorts, while also
manoeuvring the eyelids and lashes and jaws.
Making the dinos' skin ripple was a challenge. Mr. Tilders said that, after experimenting, he eventually came up with the
idea of "muscle bags," essentially latex bags filled with bean-bag beans, which enable the skin to wobble and stretch just
like the real thing.
But how did he know where to create sag or tautness?
Because no one has ever seen a dinosaur in the flesh - paleontology is the study of bones - Mr. Tilders and his team
went to zoos in their native Melbourne to observe elephants.
"Fantasia it isn't," emphasizes Mr. McCoy. "We've been very thorough in our research.
"We watched how the elephants moved around their enclosures, and we had them go at different speeds to see how the
skin wobbled, and we also looked at the skin itself, its texture," says Mr. Tilders. "Even though elephants are mammals and we are creating reptiles - the cracks and folds and rolls of their skin were still informative to us."
The creators studied the head movements of birds and transposed those observations to the creation of the Utahraptor,
for instance, a fleet-footed bipedal dinosaur that stood about 2 metres tall (6 feet) and roamed the Earth between 121
and 127 million years ago.
"I think why I love this job so much - and not to sound too highfalutin - is it embraces a Renaissance mindset," Mr.
Tilders says of the combination of observed detail, technological wizardry and problem-solving involved.
"It brings together the worlds of science and technology, of art and performance. That's the appeal of making creatures
like these. In the workshops, we were artists and scientists and engineers and welders working side by side.
"The results of all that synergy you see in the show."
Driving a dinosaur
It takes three puppeteers to operate the animatronic Brachiosaurus in Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience one to move it around physically onstage and two offstage to control its body movements by remote.
Offstage, one puppeteer manipulates a "voodoo rig" (a miniature spinal version of the dinosaur with the same joints and
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globeandmail.com: Prepare to be amazed
07/30/2007 01:16 PM
movements) that transmits signals to make the dinosaur replicate its actions. This controls the dinosaur's big head and
tail movements. Another puppeteer uses a joystick to control the dinosaur's finer motions such as eye rolling and jaw
movement. Puppeteers also control the dinosaur's growls, roars and other sounds using a keyboard.
Onstage, one puppeteer rides in a vehicle disguised as a rock beneath the dinosaur (pictured here under a T. Rex) and
steers it around the stage. He is able to see through a painted mesh windshield. The dinosaur's feet don't actually touch
the ground. They move along tracks mounted on the side of the vehicle. The dinosaur is suspended above the vehicle by
a support pole.
BRACHIOSAURUS
11 metres high
26 metres long
GRAPHIC: TRISH McALASTER/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
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