"Using actors to generate motions for these large nonhuman figures would have been extremely awkward and difficult to translate onto the models." The flexibility achieved through keyframing was especially important to the team of 14 animators who worked exclusively on the signature character Zippo, whose breadth of movements range from playing table tennis to gesturing with his glasses in a scholarly like manner to floundering in a mosasaurus-infested water hole. "We looked at motion capture but decided was more practical and gave us more freedom in determining the final look," says Alec Knox, supervising technical director. The character animation, like the textures, was also created from scratch. Once the textures were applied to the models, the artists fine-tuned them using Right Hemisphere's Deep Paint with Texture Weapons.
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The skin designs contained numerous color and pattern variations as well as subtle wrinkles and creasing over underlying musculature. The textures were hand-generated in Adobe Systems' Photoshop by an in-house team of specialized animal-skin painters. They also developed a number of proprietary plug-ins originally created for Walking with Dinosaurs, including an updated muscle deformation system to simulate muscle movement beneath the skin. To create the digital dinosaur models, the artists used Softimage 3D as their core modeling and animation platform. To ease these transitions, FrameStore-CFC worked with the Creature Shop during the design of the maquettes and their skin textures so their shapes and forms would appear seamless as the camera cut from live action to CGI and back. During close-up shots in this sequence, an animatronic created by Jim Henson's Creature Shop was interchanged with its CG counterpart, which was used in the medium-range shots. In particular, these involved the crocodile-like mosasaurus as it springs out of the water to attack the heroes and the infant dinosaur known as Number 26. And nearly all of them were created digitally, with a few exceptions in shots with an extensive amount of interaction with live actors. Of all those effects, the two biggest challenges facing McGee's team were the juxtaposition of the humans and dinosaurs, which required every shot to be scaled to exact proportions, and the elaborate digital extensions of the largest single set constructed in Europe.Īll but one of the dinosaurs in Dinotopia resemble actual species, though their expressive faces make them more stylized than photoreal. In other instances, the animators enhanced live-action scenes and backgrounds with 2D and 3D graphics. To complete Dinotopia, its largest project yet, FrameStore-CFC hired more than 70 animators and technical directors to create the show's 1700 effects shots, 1200 of which contain computer-generated content.Īside from generating more than 62 variations of 3D dinosaurs, the Frame Store-CFC team created entire CG environments and virtual people.
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It also pushed the technical capabilities of the FrameStore-CFC team, which had honed its skills for animating reptiles while creating the Emmy-winning Walking with Dinosaurs series two years ago. The production, which took 18 months to complete, was the largest ever filmed at London's Pinewood Studios, home to the James Bond films. Images courtesy Hallmark Entertainment and FrameStore-CFC. In an effort to restore harmony, the bickering brothers, aided by a multilingual stenonychosaurus named Zippo, embark on a daring journey to save their new homeland. However, dangerous human outlaws threaten this ideal world, as does the presence of deadly carnivores who lurk just beyond Dinotopia's capital, Waterfall City. The three-part miniseries brings to life the lost Dinotopian society that's ruled according to long-established principles of mutual respect. The Hallmark Entertainment mega-movie, which aired last month on ABC, is based on two books by author/illustrator James Gurney. "A large portion of the shots contained some type of integrated digital content," notes Mike McGee, the film's visual effects supervisor and creative director of London-based FrameStore-CFC. Successfully portraying this near-utopian society required a similar harmonious coexistence-forged by postproduction studio FrameStore-CFC (The Computer Film Company)-among the live-action and computer-generated characters, environments, and props.
In the lavish and technically complex six-hour television miniseries Dinotopia, two teenage brothers unexpectedly find themselves marooned on a fantastic lost continent where humans and dinosaurs peacefully coexist.