Joining the ranks of Hollywood's all-time greatest and most impressive visual effects spectacles, Walt Disney Pictures' "Dinosaur" immerses moviegoers in a photorealistic world of wonders with its stunning blend of digitally enhanced live-action photography, special effects wizardry and computer- animated characters. With more than 1300 sophisticated individual effects shots, this cinematic marvel is one of the most ambitious and complex of its kind. A prime example of the film's unprecedented scope and scale occurs in the awesome opening sequence where the camera swoops through a herd of grazing dinosaurs numbering in the thousands. In all, the film's cast features more than thirty different species of prehistoric creatures ranging in size from the 12-inch gliding lizard to the 120-foot long, 100-ton Brachiosaur. Accompanying the visual thrills is a powerful and entertaining story of survival and adaptability with an Iguanodon named Aladar as the central character. To meet the demands of this enormous visual effects effort, Disney set out to create a first-rate digital studio from the ground up. Over a four-year period, the production not only established a facility that rivaled any in the industry but also had a milestone film to show for its efforts. At the conclusion of production on "Dinosaur," the digital studio joined creative forces with Dream Quest (Disney's award-winning effects house) to form a new entity called The Secret Lab (TSL). TSL is currently providing visual effects for a variety of films for the Studio ("102 Dalmatians," "Gone in 60 Seconds") as well as beginning work on other CG (computer graphics) animated features.
Bringing "Dinosaur" to the screen required 3.2 million processing hours and the film's total elements occupied 45 terabytes of disc space (the equivalent of 45 million megabytes) or 70,000 CD-ROMs worth of information with 100 million individual files. The Studio's "render-farm" consisted of 250 dedicated computer processors and another 300 desktop processors at the individual workstations. On average, 30,000 processing hours per week were devoted to rendering and compositing the film with a peak capacity of 60,000 processing hours. The "Dinosaur" software group wrote 70,000 lines of code, which translates to approximately 11,700 pages of text or a 25-volume set of encyclopedias.
According to Peter Schneider, chairman of The Walt Disney Studios, "'Dinosaur' brings Disney to the forefront of digital technology and sets a new standard for the integration of computer-generated imagery and live action. It also opens up whole new worlds of possibilities for our filmmakers. We are so proud of what our team has been able to accomplish and feel that TSL will continue to be a leader in this growing area of the industry."
Thomas Schumacher, president of Walt Disney Feature Animation, adds, "Dinosaurs have always captured our curiosity and this is a movie populated almost exclusively with them. You are in their world and for the first time they are not portrayed as monsters. They are thinking and feeling and protecting one another. Technically, it is a movie that could not have been made until now. We could have done it a lot of different ways, but nothing gives the integration — character to character, character in background and character in an environment — as the combination of CG characters, live-action backgrounds and sophisticated effects elements. When they run, they kick up dust; they cast shadows; they interconnect with the water. Having our own digital studio gave us the ability to create living breathing characters in realistic environments with the kind of detailed articulating facial expressions we needed to tell our story." Adding to the film's sense of realism, two live-action film crews traveled around the world over an 18-month period to capture the dramatic backdrops for this fable-like story that combines elements of science fact along with Disney's rich storytelling tradition. A computerized camera rig known as the "Dino-cam" was used on certain complex shots to approximate the dinosaurs' POV and allow the filmmakers the precision that they needed to add in the characters and effects. Back in Burbank, a team of digital experts used the tricks of their trades to art direct virtually every frame of the live-action photography and marry it seamlessly with the computer-generated dinosaur and early mammal characters. Breakthroughs in portraying skin and musculature on the diverse cast helped the characters to come alive as never before and gave an exciting dimension of credibility to their movements and actions.
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