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The dino guy: West View native gives life to 'Dinosaur's' most ferocious creatures
Friday, May 19, 2000 By Scott Mervis, Weekend Editor, Post-Gazette
If only that dino DNA had worked back in Jurassic Park, the makers of "Dinosaur" could have just grabbed some animal trainers -- very brave ones -- and filmed their movie right on that little island.
But, alas, 65 million years post-extinction, the only dinosaurs alive today are being hatched from desktop computers.
By people like Don Waller -- West View native and graduate of the Art Institute of Pittsburgh North Hills High School, class of '74.
When he's sitting at his PC, Waller is a master of dinosaur DNA. He got the raptors to attack in "Jurassic Park" -- stunning movie-goers accustomed to a lumbering Godzilla -- so it was only natural that Disney would give him the call for "Dinosaur."
Waller happily took his place as an assembly line worker in the
new Disney computer animation studio in Burbank. He was one of 45 animators whose job was to bring the dinos to life with an ordinary mouse and a program called OptImage.
"The way the Disney process works," Waller says, "it's an assembly line method. One artist will create, sculpt the character in the computer. The animators will animate the character. Another group that will put the skin on and do the rendering. Another group will do the lighting, that kind of thing."
The making of "Dinosaur" began six years ago with a crew traveling the world to photograph sites that looked like they could be populated by dinosaurs. Those live-action backdrops were then scanned into computers, as the first group of artists worked on shaping the skeletons of the creatures.
Beginning in 1996, Waller spent three years making the dinosaurs move. What he saw on his computer screen was not what kids will see on the movie screen. For one thing, the dinos didn't have that scaly skin -- just a smooth plastic-like coating.
"We animate that way because when the model has the skin on it, it requires so much memory that it really slows the system down. With a simpler form, we can move the model a lot faster. The most important thing in animation is to save time. So we can play it back fast and change it."
Waller, who worked the stop-motion animation on "Robocop II" and created the monsters for the TV show "Hercules," likes to work on bad guys, and for this one, gave life to the hungry predators that are most likely to scare the kids.
"I prefer to do the dinosaurs that act like natural dinosaurs, not the speaking ones," he says. "I like to do the carnivorous, attacking dinosaurs -- the oviraptors that steal the eggs and the carnotaur attack in the desert. I prefer to do the villains, and they were the real villains in the film."
According to Waller, the animation process was similar to that of "Jurassic Park" in 1993, only more fluid and glitch-free. They had a bit more freedom not having to work the dinosaurs in with humans and, in general, opted for a film that looked like more like a moving painting more a photo-realism piece.
When all was said and done, Disney spent $127.5 million on "Dinosaur," logging about 3.2 million computer-hours of work and piling up 70,000 CD-ROMs for storage space.
So, what does the animator think of the end product?
"I'm really proud and pleased with our technical achievement," he says, a little nervously. "They had done an original first story, which we may have all liked a little better, and then it was changed during the course of the production. But it was very rewarding to me, visually."
In fact, visually, he doesn't think they it can get a whole lot better than "Dinosaur."
"I think we've pretty much reached the peak of getting stuff to look to real for an audience," Waller says. "We still need to have the story. I think the story is the most important thing for an audience to enjoy a film. It can't just all be special effects, it has to have a heart and soul. The special effects have to be enhancing elements of the heart and soul."
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