Environment Render Test

Final Bull Male. I love the butterfly blue patch. The females are green/ brown like crocodiles. The males having to work a lot of magic for breeding rites.

I kept asking Angie to make him fatter. I like the idea of a very well fed mature Bull Dimetrodon.

Angie Rodrigues built many dinosaurs for Dead River. She is great, I love working with her. Most of it is me asking for a dinosaur sending her some images I like and then her saying here you go. Its always awesome! She'll send me color ideas and progress pics. It's a fun process.

I've always liked the Dimetrodon. Its crazy overbite. This one I have enjoyed getting built. The two images from books I had as a kid were the foundation.

One of the issues that came up early in development was if I was going to be scientifically accurate. I decided that I wanted to animate whatever Dinosaur that I liked instead of worrying if they lived at the same time. That decision open up the project.

DEAD RIVER DINOSAURS TRAILER

In this blog Im going to document the progress of this film. The art, the work, the puppets, the environments as they get built and designed. 

I like the idea of combining a Dinosaur film and a Western. Making the Dinosaurs the characters. In my research I found so many real life examples of animals fighting to survive and to breed and raise their young...

This film will be an attempt to tell a dramatic story about Dinosaurs through music and pantomime. Its been done correctly twice. Once in Walt Disney's Fantasia and by Phil Tippett's stop motion short Prehistoric Beast.

Phil Tippett's prehistoric Beast has been a major influence on me and this project. I've had the pleasure of working with Phil and that has been a major part of my development as an animator and a filmmaker.

Dead River Dinosaur Trailer

For the last twenty years I have worked as an animator for feature films. I decided to compile a library of characters to animate, I was either going to do classic Monsters or Dinosaurs. Realizing that I would never get sick of animating dinosaurs I turned to Dead River 

The film is a collection of some real life drama that happens when parents protect their young. In the setting of the Dinosaur storybooks I read as a kid. 

you can check out the trailer below

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4YONXIA81w