dinosaurs

Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience: a review

Posted by hil

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I finally caught up with Walking with Dinosaurs: the Live Experience during its season in Adelaide. The dinosaurs are absolutely fabulous; huge realistic reptiles with fluid movement, thunderous roars, grunts and lowing, and where appropriate, menace. To achieve this live on such a grand scale is impressive, and represents a great pooling of skills in the Creature Design and Build Team: design, engineering, mechanics, skin and sculptural fabrication, technical management and direction. I loved the vegetation that grew up around the arena, and flowered brilliantly; the stage elements that sprouted trees or in turn became volcanoes; and the lighting.

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The show is a documentary in the round, or a live newsreel. A paleontologist provides commentary throughout the performance, taking the audience through the various ages of the dinosaurs, pointing out their features, and making the odd joke. Although I saw the need for this as a device to make the show cohesive, and as a way of giving an idea of the sheer size of the creatures, I found it annoying to be ‘educated’ constantly, especially when at times he had to almost shout to be heard over swelling music. Although the dinosaurs threaten each other and have great stand-offs, and at times are wonderfully fierce, the show lacks the emotional content that I think marks great theatre or puppetry; we are instead essentially watching a passing parade of specimens, and observing how they behave.

Perhaps, though, it’s just me, as I am dispassionate about dinosaurs, while the phenomenal popularity of the BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs documentary series suggests most people are not. The producers picked up on that popularity as the impetus for the live show. They know where their audience is – families, especially those with kids aged about 4 through 12 – and everyone coming out of the stadium seemed happy. I imagine it will continue its success overseas, and I believe there is a second round of dinosaurs now going into production.

More links:
891 ABC Adelaide: Walking with Dinosaurs: Some details and pics about how they are operated :)
SMH: walk among the giants, but hold tight!: Short interview with the puppetry director, Mat McCoy. (cool to see your move to direction, Mat)
‘Making of’ pages from the program: 1, 2
Babushka’s WwD Flickr photoset: some backstage close-up photography
Hangingpixel’s WwD Flickr photoset
YouTube WwD videos
The Age video report: behind the scenes glimpses; Angela Dufty, one of the drivers, explains how they are controlled. (try IE if it won’t play on Firefox)

Previously:
Walking with Dinosaurs: the Live Experience: new slideshow
Workshop footage,
Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience

Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience: new slideshow

Posted by hil

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(Photo credit: Craig Sillitoe)

Today’s online Sydney Morning Herald has a slideshow of new photos by Craig Sillitoe about the making of Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience with a narration by their Head of Creature Design, Sonny Tilders.

Previously: Workshop footage, Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience

Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience: Workshop footage

Posted by hil

Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience (see previous post) has released two videos of their awesome dinosaur puppetry:

Footage from the workshop
Torosaur v. Utahraptor

And here are a couple of stills from their newsletter.

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Steg
in the workshop. if you want an idea of HOW BIG this shows going to be, check out the size of the person working on the BABY brachi in the background (seen through Steg’s legs) … remember, he’s the BABY!

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Ankylosaurus in the workshop. To the right you can see one of the utahraptors in the making. There are two now in their final makeover stage and will be ready to wreak havoc with our first utahraptor who was one of the stars or the walking with dinosaurs launch, facing off with Torosaurus. (You can see someone behind the dino’s head, as an indication of scale)

I can see how you would come to call them affectionate things like baby Brachi and Steg if you were working on the build. I dare say they would have come in for a lot of swearing too! With only about five weeks till the first show in Sydney the makers must be under a lot of pressure.

Erth’s roaming dinosaurs

Posted by hil

Erth‘s impressive Gondwana dinosaur puppets have been doing some roaming street theatre gigs. Here are some photographs of them at WOMAD, Adelaide’s world music festival, in March. These were taken by John King, and are used with his permission.

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(copyright: John King)

At Flickr, Georgie Sharp also has two cool photos of her encounter with them. I think they also roamed Melbourne during the recent Commonwealth Games.

Updated links 2015

Gondwana

Posted by hil

Due to popular demand the National Museum of Australia has scheduled some extra performances of Gondwana by the Sydney company erth Visual and Physical Inc. You’ll have to be quick to book, as the last performances are this coming weekend.

Gondwana

The puppets are fantastic, as you might expect from erth, and with Bryony Anderson on the making team (I don’t know who else was on the team) . Some are wonderfully satisfyingly HUGE. Others have delightful characteristics, such as the Leptictidium’s twitchy nose. With one exception – the crocodile-y animal – the creatures moved beautifully. I loved the fine movements of the Meganeura, a gigantic primative dragonfly, and the Ammonites. One of the smaller dinosaurs shared a similar and effective design to some of the puppets in ‘The Lion King’, such as the warthog: the puppeteer visible in the middle, with the neck and head built out the front, and tail out the back. The baby Dryosaurs were just plain cute. And the inflatable lanscape and original soundscape were cool, too.

At the performance I saw the accoustics were dreadful. It was hard to hear any of the narration.

Its an interesting task to seek to satisfy both traditional theatre audiences as well as museum audiences. For the theatre goer, there was drama in seeing the creatures brought to life so well, but little story development aside from evolution. For museum audiences, which I assume are those whose interests are mainly historical and scientific – and there has been great attention paid to scientific accuracy in developing the show – there might be some unease about the artistic licence that allows the Liptictidium, a relative late-comer and ‘visitor from the Northern Hemisphere’, to appear through each era as a link throughout the performance.

The program leaflet gave lots of scientific detail. It would have been good if it had also credited the directors, performers, makers and production team, and given us some detail about the puppets.

Gondwana is the first of three shows which will be developed over the next three years. The second will cover time after the dinosaurs, and the third the present time and future of Australia. I’m looking forward to the next installment.

Update: Here are a few links:
Dinosaurs given new life
Interview with Phil Downing, Musical Director of Erth

Update 2015: broken links. Some photos of the puppets are at Erth > gallery > museums > scroll down. They are inaccessible for linking.