Getting Personal - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 61

Paul's early death prevented this i lm being made but, from the short, exquisitely animated
pilot, it was clearly going to be a hysterical, moving and very personal i lm. Arnold was a
dinosaur whose taste for cocktails, make-up, high heels and the i ne things of life innocently,
but ultimately brought about the extinction of the dinosaurs. There were moves to get the
i lm made after Paul's death, but it simply would not have been the same. Paul's animation
is astonishing, being complex and clear at the same time. You understand exactly what the
movement is about and what the character is thinking. His many years of working on series
such as The Wind in the Willows and Truckers at Cosgrove Hall probably gave him the ability to
focus on only what was important. There is no clutter in his animation, an aspiration for us all.
I can only imagine what great work Paul would be directing now.
I have never animated a dinosaur (although working with dinosaurs on the previz for the recent
Kong was great fun), other than a pterodactyl made out of potato chips for a commercial in
which the creature chased a live-action boy and wrestled him for his potato chips … hmm,
thinking about that, that's odd, even by our standards. Even though it was a totally imagined
shape it was fun working out how the thing would l y with that anatomy.
A crispy pterodactyl.
To animate a dinosaur, giving the impression of necessary size, would be a challenge. Looking
at Willis O'Brien's footage for The Lost World , there is some impressive movement, but little
account of the mass and scale of the creatures, betraying them as miniatures. It's hard to
believe that these huge creatures could l ick their long necks and tails from side to side in
the passing of a few frames. A small model needs only a few frames to move its
head an inch or so, but when multiplied to the imagined size of a dinosaur this
movement equates to i fteen feet or so, and needs more time and thus more
frames to suggest the creature's scale. A recent commercial spooi ng One Million
Years BC had a stop motion dinosaur doing exactly these quick movements. I hope
this was a loving homage, not just weak animation, as it did advertise that it was a
tiny model.