30 NATURAL HISTORY FOCUS Atlantic Productions
attacking a monkey, which requires rigging multiple light- and action-sensitive cameras in the forest canopy. CREATING THE CRETACEOUS One thing that has set Atlantic apart from other natural history producers is its in-house CGI team, Zoo VFX. Zoo’s work includes bringing pterosaurs to life in Flying Monsters 3D , recreation of the primordial oceans in First Life , and animating the exhibits in the BAFTA Award-winning Natural History Museum Alive . “Zoo has an incredible skill base that rivals all the Hollywood studios like ILM or Pixar, but they’re used to working with things that are utterly factual,” says Geffen. Atlantic has both experience in wildlife documentary and CGI expertise in turning scientific theory into reality. It was this combination that got the attention of the Field Museum in Chicago when it wanted a large-scale animated presentation to accompany the new display of one of the world’s most famous fossils. Sue is the largest Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever found, as well as the most complete. Her new 5100 sq ft gallery opened in December 2018. The gallery features large screens projecting vignettes of Sue’s life, all animated by Zoo in collaboration with palaeontologists – incorporating the latest theories about T. rex anatomy and behaviour. “It was a year’s process,” explains Emily Smith, Atlantic’s director of business development and museum partnership advisor. “We worked with their palaeontologists to build every detail of these dioramas based on the current scientific understanding of how those creatures would have moved and the environment in which they would have lived, Sue particularly, of course. There's new research around the gastralia – the bones that help her breathe around the bottom of her belly ribs – and that informed how we then created her in CGI.” The Atlantic animations are each rear projected at a custom resolution of 600x2160 pixels onto six large screens, each one measuring 125 by 270cm, along
BONE OF CONTENTION
TheZoo-animated exhibitat theField MuseumshowsSue theT.Rexhunting, eating,drinking - andpooing
a 7m gallery. The scenes include Sue’s typical morning – waking up, having a morning drink and a munch on a dead Ankylosaurus, before performing her morning ablutions and walking off into the forest – which is a big hit with children. In another scene, Sue stalks a herd of Edmontosaurus. In another, there is the classic face-off with a Triceratops (if you’ve forgotten what a Triceratops looks like, see the cover on the previous issue of FEED ). The Zoo team also worked with the museum to simulate the gait of an Edmontosaurus, using actual fossil footprints. Utilising the placement of the feet and the length of the stride, the Zoo
team and their scientist collaborators used their CGI Edmontosaurus to accurately model what the dinosaur’s real walking would have looked like. It took around 30 run-throughs to get it right. The animations are accompanied by soundscapes also created by the Zoo team – atmospheres and animal sounds designed to evoke the Cretaceous Period. “We started off using living creatures that would have been very similar, like a crocodile,” says Smith, “and then doing acoustic modelling to make the voice box much larger, simulating what a T. rex might have sounded like. Again, that was working closely with the palaeontologists.” “Zoo is very clever at taking things that scientists give them and figuring out how those things could actually work in real life,” says Geffen. “Obviously, we don't know exactly how dinosaurs did things, but by working through different scenarios, then reworking them with the scientists, the museum gets a new understanding of how dinosaurs lived. They’re not just animators and effects artists, they’re people who can come up with
WEWORKEDWITH THEIR PALAEONTOLOGISTS TO BUILD EVERY DETAIL OF THESE DIORAMAS BASED ON THE CURRENT SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING
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