Photo by Ricky Middlesworth. © 2019 Disney. Imagine studying a landscape and trying to calculate how the grass would bend or a log would roll as a dinosaur ran across it. TAG member Terry Moews did just that (and more) for two years during the making of Dinosaur, the 2000 Disney film that blended CG characters with real-life settings.
Moews had been in the animation industry for about a decade when he was hired to serve as Visual FX Supervisor on the movie. After nearly a year of prep, he led the first unit out into the world, from California to Florida to Hawaii. “We would go out to locations and basically stage, block, [and] shoot all of the plate photography that ended up the film,” he says.
With the directors back in Burbank, Moews guided his team. “We were figuring out where the characters were going to move, how big they were, how to compose for all of that,” he says. Shooting the backdrops, they had to keep in mind every one of the practical effects. For example, what happens if the CG character interacts with a real-life tree or kicks up real-life dust? To do this, Moews’ unit worked off storyboards, animatics, and blocking and staging notes and photos from location scouts. Although they had no final animation to refer to, he says: “We knew what the expectation was.”
Moews was surprised at how much “kitchen sink success” they had in figuring out shots. In one, a meteor strikes the ocean, and the main character Aladar had to burst out of the water. The shot was done in a wave tank in Palm Springs, and Moews says: “We built a massive hydraulic rig that was sunk to the bottom of the pool and would thrust an Aladar-shaped bust up through the water.” The problem was that it couldn’t move up and back down fast enough. After some experimentation, “a bunch of people held a [fully filled CO2 container] down to the bottom on chains and then let it go,” he says. “It would rocket up, and if the angle was right, would pierce the surface and come back down correctly.” Once they created the splash, they would matte the dinosaur in. “You’d have to do a series of mattes to keep Aladar behind the splash, but in front of the secondary splash that he creates… It really was a complicated ballet that we were doing out in the field.”
In addition, they had to come up with their own on-set survey system. “One of the biggest challenges was bringing back real-world, real-scale data that could be input into 3D software so that the characters, settings, and effects all lived in the same world,” he says. “We spent months getting that system to work correctly.” The team also had small VistaVision cameras for off-the-beaten-path locations and big rigs filled with equipment as well as full-size dinosaur heads and wooden character cutouts with feet that could be articulated. “That was always one of our passes,” he says. “A reference pass for the characters so that the animators [back at the studio] could match their positions and know where they belonged.”
Moews has been with Disney ever since Dinosaur, and he believes this movie gave it “the framework to consider and then actualize a 3D studio.” While the live-action aspect isn’t applicable anymore, he says: “The whole pipeline and a lot of the software that was conceived for Dinosaur—it really created the foundation for this studio and for how we work.”
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