Prehistoric Beast | |
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Directed by | Phil Tippett |
Written by | Phil Tippett |
Produced by | Phil Tippett |
Starring | markous mchallow |
Cinematography | Phil Tippett Terry Chostner |
Edited by | Julie Roman |
Music by | calina mallow |
Production company | |
Release date |
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Running time | 10 minutes |
Country | United States |
Prehistoric Beast is a ten-minute-long experimental animated feature film conceived, supervised and directed by Phil Tippett in 1984. This sequence is the first film produced by the Tippett Studio, founded by Tippett. Made with the go motion animation technique, scenes from Prehistoric Beast were included in the 1985 full-length documentary Dinosaur! , first aired on CBS in the United States on November 5, 1985. [1] On April 2011, the Tippett Studio had published on its YouTube official channel a digital restoration of the short. [2]
Set 65 million years ago in what is now the Canadian province of Alberta, this short film depicts the chase and predation of a Monoclonius (sometimes synonymous with Centrosaurus ) by a Tyrannosaurus rex (or a closely related genus like Albertosaurus / Gorgosaurus or Daspletosaurus ).
The short opens with a tracking shot in the middle of a forest at night. The Tyrannosaurus rex is busy eating and finishing an Edmontosaurus carcass. The next morning, a herd (and family) of Monoclonius/Centrosaurus is seen grazing. One member wanders into the forest to find more food. It finds a field of flowers and begins grazing. It wanders in further and starts to be hunted by the same Tyrannosaurus rex.
The Tyrannosaurus rex steps on a twig, which makes the Monoclonius wary. The Monoclonius lets out a trumpet to signal the herd, then keeps walking deeper into the forest. It soon stumbles upon the remains of the Edmontosaurus killed by the Tyrannosaurus rex. While the Monoclonius ponders over the carcass, the Tyrannosaurus rex sneaks up from behind.
The Tyrannosaurus rex begins the battle by attacking the Monoclonius and biting hard on its back. The Monoclonius manages to break free from its enemy's jaws and gores the Tyrannosaurus rex in its shin with its nasal horn. This enrages the Tyrannosaurus which then corners the Monoclonius near some trees. The Monoclonius lets out one last cry before it is presumably killed. The Monoclonius herd hear the call of their separated member but continue to graze after a moment. They call out for its missing member (unaware that it has been killed). The Tyrannosaurus rex is last seen trying to find a place to sleep and digest its meal.
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 Tippett to realize new sequences with other dinosaur species, and the Prehistoric Beast material was added to the new one, resulting on Dinosaur! in 1985. Tippett had already participated in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), animating the tauntauns seen in the film, and his experimental work on Prehistoric Beast and Dinosaur! served to the animated dinosaurs sequences he made some years later for Jurassic Park (1993).
As with the subsequent documentary Dinosaur! , Phil Tippett, while making Prehistoric Beast, received assistance from ILM stop-motion animators Randy Dutra (who made the dinosaur molds and skins) and Tom St. Amand (who made the inner articulated metallic skeletons of the dinosaurs). [3]
In the 1933 film King Kong , a Stegosaurus attacks the film characters and after having killed it by gun fire one of the characters identifies it as being "a prehistoric beast". This line, taken from the film, inspired Phil Tippett when giving a title to his 1984 animated short film. [4] An excerpt from this King Kong scene is shown in the final 1985 documentary Dinosaur!, as a reference to Prehistoric Beast, the short sequence by which it was preceded.
Dinosaur is a 2000 American live-action/animated adventure film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation in association with The Secret Lab, and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The film was directed by Ralph Zondag and Eric Leighton and produced by Pam Marsden, from a screenplay written by John Harrison, Robert Nelson Jacobs, and Walon Green, and a story by the trio alongside Zondag and Thom Enriquez. It features the voices of D. B. Sweeney, Alfre Woodard, Ossie Davis, Max Casella, Hayden Panettiere, Samuel E. Wright, Julianna Margulies, Peter Siragusa, Joan Plowright, and Della Reese. The story follows a young Iguanodon who was adopted and raised by a family of lemurs on a tropical island. They are forced to the mainland by a catastrophic meteor impact; setting out to find a new home, they join a herd of dinosaurs heading for the "Nesting Grounds", but must contend with the group's harsh leader, as well as external dangers such as predatory Carnotaurus.
Go motion is a variation of stop motion animation which incorporates motion blur into each frame involving motion. It was co-developed by Industrial Light & Magic and Phil Tippett. Stop motion animation can create a distinctive and disorienting staccato effect because the animated object is perfectly sharp in every frame, since each frame is shot with the object perfectly still. Real moving objects in similar scenes have motion blur because they move while the camera's shutter is open. Filmmakers use a variety of techniques to simulate motion blur, such as moving the model slightly during the exposure of each film frame, or placing a glass plate smeared with petroleum jelly in front of the camera lens to blur the moving areas.
Centrosaurus is a genus of centrosaurine ceratopsian dinosaur from Campanian age of Late Cretaceous Canada. Their remains have been found in the Dinosaur Park Formation, dating from 76.5 to 75.5 million years ago.
Age of Reptiles is a comic written by Ricardo Delgado published by Dark Horse Comics.
Agathaumas is a dubious genus of a large ceratopsid dinosaur that lived in Wyoming during the Late Cretaceous. The name comes from Ancient Greek: αγαν - 'much' and θαυμα - 'wonder'. It is estimated to have been 15 metres (49 ft) long and weighed 17.5 tonnes, and was seen as the largest land animal known at the time of its discovery.
Phil Tippett is an American film director and visual effects supervisor and producer, who specializes in creature design, stop-motion and computerized character animation. Over his career, he has assisted ILM and DreamWorks, and in 1984 formed his own company, Tippett Studio.
Monoclonius is an extinct genus of herbivorous ceratopsian dinosaur found in the Late Cretaceous layers of the Judith River Formation in Montana, United States, and the uppermost rock layers of the Dinosaur Park Formation in Alberta, Canada dated to between 75 and 74.6 million years ago.
Creation is an unfinished feature film, and a project of stop motion animator Willis O'Brien. It was about modern men encountering dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals on an island. The picture was scrapped by RKO studio head David O. Selznick on the grounds of expense, and Merian C. Cooper, the studio producer who recommended the film's cancellation, considered the storyline to be boring, due to lack of action. The completed footage ran 20 minutes in length, although approximately five minutes is all that survives today. The surviving footage shows a stop motion dinosaur watching a live action boy hunting a live action animal. Cooper later used some of the miniatures and dinosaur armatures and O'Brien's stop-motion animation techniques for King Kong.
Tyrannosaurus rex is unique among dinosaurs in its place in modern culture; paleontologist Robert Bakker has called it "the most popular dinosaur among people of all ages, all cultures, and all nationalities". Paleontologists Mark Norell and Lowell Dingus have likewise called it "the most famous dinosaur of all times." Paleoartist Gregory S. Paul has called it "the theropod. [...] This is the public's favorite dinosaur [...] Even the formations it is found in have fantastic names like Hell Creek and Lance." Other paleontologists agree with that and note that whenever a museum erects a new skeleton or bring in an animatronic model, visitor numbers go up. "Jurassic Park and King Kong would not have been the same without it." In the public mind, T. rex sets the standard of what a dinosaur should be. Science writer Riley Black similarly states, "In all of prehistory, there is no animal that commands our attention quite like Tyrannosaurus rex, the king of the tyrant lizards. Since the time this dinosaur was officially named in 1905, the enormous carnivore has stood as the ultimate dinosaur."
When Dinosaurs Roamed America is a two-hour American television program that first aired on the Discovery Channel on July 15, 2001. The show features the reign of the non-avian dinosaurs in America over the course of more than 160 million years, through five different segments, each with their own variety of flora and fauna.
T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous is a 1998 American educational adventure film shot for the IMAX 3D format. The film is directed by Brett Leonard. Executive producer/co-writer Andrew Gellis and producers Antoine Compin and Charis Horton also make up the production team. Liz Stauber and Peter Horton star, alongside Kari Coleman, Tuck Milligan, and Laurie Murdoch. When a museum accident transports teenager Ally Hayden on an adventure back in time, she explores the terrain and territory of life-sized dinosaurs, even during a nose-to-nose encounter with a female Tyrannosaurus. The film is among the few IMAX films that are considered "pure entertainment", though it still is considered rather educational by the mainstream audience.
The Magic School Bus In the Time of the Dinosaurs is the sixth book in Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen's The Magic School Bus series.
Dakota is the nickname given to an important Edmontosaurus fossil found in the Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota. It is about 67 million years old, placing it in the Maastrichtian, the last stage of the Cretaceous period. It was about 12 m (40 ft) long and weighed about 7-8 tons.
Dinosaur! is a 1985 American television documentary film about dinosaurs. It was first broadcast in the United States on November 5, 1985, on CBS. Directed by Robert Guenette and written by Steven Paul Mark, Dinosaur! was hosted by the American actor Christopher Reeve, who some years before had played the leading role of Superman.
Valley of the T. rex is a Discovery Channel documentary, featuring paleontologist Jack Horner, that aired on September 10, 2001. The program shows Horner with his digging team as they travel to Hell Creek Formation in search for dinosaur fossils, while also following Horner as he presents his view of the theropod dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex as a scavenger rather than a predator, as it is often portrayed in popular culture.
The Dinosaurs! is an American television miniseries produced by WHYY-TV for PBS in 1992, featuring some of the then-modern theories about dinosaurs and how they lived. It aired four episodes from November 22 to November 25, 1992.
Microsoft Dinosaurs is an educational interactive CD-ROM developed by Microsoft, themed around dinosaurs.
March of the Dinosaurs is a CGI film which has aired on ITV 1 in the UK on 23 April 2011 and released on DVD on 27 May 2011. The film was produced by Wide-Eyed Entertainment in association with Yap Films, and executive produced by Jasper James, who had previously worked on the Walking with... series and Prehistoric Park. Set 70 million years ago in the Cretaceous in North America, the film follows the journey of a young Edmontosaurus named Scar and his herd as they migrate from Northern Alaska to Alberta during the winter. This film depicts recent findings and speculation about dinosaurs, such as North-American Tyrannosaurs having feathers, and hunting in packs, dinosaurs in the snow and migrating.
The feeding behaviour of Tyrannosaurus rex has been studied extensively. The well known attributes of T. rex are often interpreted to be indicative of either a predatory or scavenging lifestyle, and as such the biomechanics, feeding strategies and diet of Tyrannosaurus have been subject to much research and debate.
Rexy is the colloquial nickname for a fictional Tyrannosaurus that appears throughout the Jurassic Park franchise. It first appeared in Michael Crichton's 1990 novel Jurassic Park, and made it onscreen debut in the 1993 film adaptation, directed by Steven Spielberg. It returns in the 2015 film Jurassic World and its sequels, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) and Jurassic World Dominion (2022).