Prehistoric Beast

April 18, 2011 1:11 PM

"Prehistoric Beast" (1984), a film by Phil Tippett

Via Dinosaur Tracking. Be sure to check out the rest of Tippett's YouTube channel.

posted by brundlefly (8 comments total)

Some context, from Wikipedia:

Prehistoric Beast was only released in specialized animation festivals, but it convinced Robert Guenette and Steven Paul Mark to request Tippett's skills in order to transform it in a full length documentary. They then asked Tippet to realise new sequences with other dinosaur species, and the Prehistoric Beast material was added to the new one, resulting on Dinosaur! in 1985.

Shot using go motion.
posted by brundlefly at 1:30 PM on April 18, 2011

oooooooooooh! I know what I'm watching tonight.
posted by onhazier at 2:01 PM on April 18, 2011

No time to watch right now, but I feel safe in saying this is going to be great. If anyone's wondering what Phil Tippet has done, he did the stop-motion animation of the Tauntaun and the Imperial Walkers in The Empire Strikes Back.
posted by marxchivist at 2:18 PM on April 18, 2011

Not to mention ED-209 in RoboCop, among many other things. Tippett Studios still does a lot of work, but it's all CG now (as far as I know).
posted by brundlefly at 2:22 PM on April 18, 2011

Bumping the puppet     *sniker*
posted by meandthebean at 4:45 PM on April 18, 2011

Dinosaur! is one of the first -- if not the first -- TV shows I remember watching, and probably bears a lot of responsibility for my interest in paleobiology. The VHS tape we have it recorded on has long since become nigh unwatchable, of course, and was a grainy mess for years before that. Definitely bookmarking this for a trip down memory lane tomorrow -- thanks, brundlefly!
posted by bettafish at 4:47 PM on April 18, 2011

For want of a better video clip, Tippet's first use of go motion at Industrial Light and Magic in Dragonslayer (1981) gave us Vermithrax Pejorative, still the best film dragon. There's several nice behind-the-scenes production pictures at the Spanish Puppets and Clay Stop Motion Blog, including the go motion rig and crew.
posted by cenoxo at 9:37 PM on April 18, 2011 [2 favorites]

Quotes from the Phil Says: footer on the Tippett Studio home page:

• "The fact of the matter is, the way you arrive at that place- and you can talk to anybody about this, who is a legend or pioneer or whatever- is they just got lucky and they blundered into things. They turned around and people liked the stuff they did. You just got lucky, you got lucky a bunch of times. But in the course of a career or a lifetime, you see this time and time again, in anybody's life, there are peaks and valleys."
• "We're in a little bit of a fantasy stage with this digital stuff where we say, Well you can do anything you want ...to a certain degree, its about doing an engineering reality check."
• "There are 800 galley slaves pulling oars beneath the decks of [a VFX] performance."

All it takes is a whole lotta work and not a little money.
posted by cenoxo at 10:20 PM on April 18, 2011