Walking With Dinosaurs

After a much acclaimed BBC series, the spectacular stage adaptation of Walking With Dinosaurs — The Arena Spectacular stopped off at London’s O2 for its European premiére.

    With an initial tour in Australia, a two year tour in the US and a worldwide audience of approximately three million to date, the UK leg expected to add an extra 500,000 to that already impressive number.

    The prospect of watching these 15 life-size creatures roam across the stage at up to 20 miles per hour had me intrigued from the offset.

    I spoke to Sonny Tilders, the creative director who heads up The Creature Technology Company — the organisation responsible for the design and creation of the dinosaurs.

    He explained: “The show has a fairly simple structure as we rely on scale and spectacle to entertain; it’s similar to the BBC series. We make sure that no dinosaur appears in the wrong era — it has that sort of chronological element.

    “Fortunately for us, the evolution of dinosaurs ends in a big bang — a giant comet — and some of the most amazing dinosaurs that ever walked the earth, such as the Tyrannosaurus Rex. This falls at the end of course, so there is a great natural climax to the show. It’s really effective.”

    With an initial working background of graphic design, Tilders worked in 2D and 3D before working his way up in a Melbourne-based company doing props, models and special FX.

    Already successful in both film and TV (credits include blockbusters such as Star Wars and The Chronicles Of Narnia), bringing such a scale of animatronics into a theatre environment provided him with a very different challenge and is ultimately what made Walking With Dinosaurs possible.

    Tilders continued: “After nine years working in Melbourne I was getting bored of the work and nothing was exciting me. I then noticed some of the animatronics coming to Australia, when previously it just wasn’t.

    “Animatronics is basically high-tech puppetry that generally involves some sort of electronic and survey-controlled or actuated sort of axes. These can vary from, let’s say, a head that’s full of 40 motors, full lip synch and facial expression, to the other extreme where we have these creatures, the biggest animatronic puppets in the world, which have 25 axes of movement.

    “We still have details like eyes and blinks, but we have a whole raft of different actuators, from air through hydraulics for the larger actuators.

    “Animatronics was dwindling a bit in the film industry because computer generation [CG] is so dominant, so all the technical challenges were disappearing. We were making much simpler things that could be augmented by computer generated graphics afterwards, but then this came along.

    “When you make a film you’ve got this picture frame that you can park everything behind, which we don’t have here; you’re very rarely asked to make a complete creature, too.

    “You’ll make a head or you’ll make a foot but then the wider shots, certainly these days, will be CG, so we had to make these entire creatures and all that beautiful movement and make them walk around the stage and be their own autonomous units. That was probably one of the bigger leaps.

    “On top of that we also had longevity to think about. These creatures have to be durable not only for the show, but to pack down and fit into containers, travel on rough roads, unpack — that was another big leap for us. Thankfully, we learned a lot of this from the American tour.”

    I asked Tilders how he went about achieving his original brief for this spectacular; to design 15 life-sized dinosaurs from scratch. He described the process to me: “It really only took a year for the first build [the US build] with an empty workshop, because all of the guys at The Creature Technology Company were all freelancers before this.

    “We spent time creating the team, getting the space, figuring out how the hell we were going to do it. A lot of open-ended R&D was needed as we had to nail the principles of skin and movement, as well as designing the individual things, then we had rehearsals at the the show end of it. We had about nine to 10 months. The second build benefitted from that experience because of the way it was booked; we had the luxury of time in a way.”

    With each of the larger dinosaurs weighing approximately 1.6 tonnes, the weight of a family car, the show requires 27 trucks (supplied by Transam Trucking).

    Tilders explained: “We have two major principles in creating the dinosaurs. The really big ones are robotic hydraulic numbers and the smaller ones are single performer suited numbers.

    “The big ones, which are Indian elephant-sized upwards, we refer to as a ‘three hander’, because they take three people to operate. We have one person in the chassis, the driver. They go forward, back, left and right but they don’t actually do any puppetry; their walking is fed off their speed and direction, which is all pre-programmed.

    “It moves all the body parts also; just as we walk, we transfer weight forward and back. It engages all the axes of movement throughout the whole body for a walk cycle.

    “We have two other performers who generally sit up by the lighting or tech desk because they need that good line of sight. They operate the live body functions through a remote control, and we call these ‘Voodoo Operators’.

    “That goes through our custom control system down through to the creature and through a variety of what we call ‘expression mixes’. We have a lead voodoo operator who does all the live body functions and alongside the lead we have the auxiliary voodoo, who does the eyes and the blinks, but more importantly, the jaw and the sounds.

    “These rigs are designed to give a really intuitive operation and there’s a keyboard of sounds designed for each dinosaur — the roars, screams, whimpers and thumping sounds. So that ‘three hander’ makes one dinosaur live and breathe.

    “The smaller dinosaurs are controlled by what we call ‘the suits’. These are five fit young guys who wear either a raptor suit or a baby T-Rex suit. They have a system inside that controls the head, the jaw, the whole body. They trigger their own sounds through an onboard system and they run around like mad things!”

    Tilders’ goals stretch much further than this show alone. He and his team are ambitious about achieving more groundbreaking success in the near future.

    He continued: “The parent company is called Global Creatures. I run the Creature Technology Company which is the workshop puppet making side and Malcolm [White] is the technical director for the production arm, The Creature Production Company.

    “They have a US and a UK entity and various others around the world; it’s supporting the plunge that we’ve made and it’s now clear that this type of technology could be used in many other shows, so the workshop has built this other entity around it which is much bigger.   

    “It’s now all about finding shows that use this kind of technology andwe’re developing King Kong next — it gets underway next March.”

SCENERY
The show’s set was built by Stage One after being asked to provide an automated representation of Pangaea (the first ever continent).

    This consists of three stage trucks, each of which are armed with a winch driven telescopic mast and controlled by two drive motors and two slew motors. They begin the show dovetailed together and come apart in three pieces over the duration to represent a different Mesozonic era — one driver is designated to each part. This is all done through Stage One’s renowned motion control system, Qmotion.

    Stage One also built two large bespoke trusses for the show, the ‘Orni’ and the ‘Iris’. The ‘Orni’ is positioned very high to support one of the largest flying creatures ever known to man, the Ornithocheirus. The attached hoists move the creature very realistically via Qmotion and a pre-programmed animation programme that is fed into Stage One’s show software, nextQ.

    The 28m long ‘Iris’ truss, positioned at the back of the arena, incorporates three roller blinds and four Qmotion controlled motorised tracks, enabling four Tormentor Panels to track on and off stage allowing the dinosaurs to enter the arena.

    Adding yet more realism to the set, Stage One produced approximately 100m of ground row, which surrounds the perimeter of the stage representing rock. Much of this work was done traditionally — several moulds were designed using hand created patterns and each piece was finished off by hand. The company also created a further 100 openings for emerging plant life within the ground row.

    The large purpose-built floor is designed by Tait Towers. Considering its size, set-up time is a fairly rapid four hours, mainly due to it being made up of magnetically held together five foot panels, eliminating the need for any locks and catches — you just lay it down.

    There are also some nice subtleties to the set, such as inflatable flowers and confetti cannons scattered around the perimeter of the stage, providing a good contrast to the roars and grunts of the dinosaurs.

    Two video screens hang L/R of the stage, streaming live images throughout the show; these are supplied by Californian company, Screenworks NEP.
   
PREPARATION
This show cost around £10 million to build and put into the first venue, with UK Rigging handling rigging for the UK tour. I spoke to Malcolm White about the work that went into making this happen and the unusually staggered production rehearsals.

    “I think the show looks great here in the O2,” said White. “The height makes a huge difference to us. Unusually, we cover the whole arena, so there’s a lot of use of décor and shape so it really helps us create the moody feeling.

    “We did initial rehearsals in one the hangars at Stage One in Tockwith. Then we went to Newcastle Arena where we did a straightforward technical rehearsal — we hung the lights, hung the PA, focused and plotted.

    “Finally, we went into Liverpool where we had all the dinosaurs and all the creative team and rehearsed there for about 10 days. Funnily enough, before we’d even performed at a venue, we had already done three load-ins and three load-outs, so it was all good preparation.”

SOUND
Clair Brothers provide the 270° configured PA system, comprising i-3 line array hangs with additional L3s and FF2s. Playback is controlled and activated through a Stage Research SFX system, LCS Matrix 3s and MOTU Mark 5s.

    Audio engineer Randy Weinholtz works from a Yamaha MC7L at FOH which sends 32 outputs to the loudspeakers.

    Sound designer Peter Hylenski explained: “Most of what we rely on is from the playback systems. All the dino samples are playing back from the Mark 5 sampler that is being triggered from the voodoo operators by their little two octave keyboards.

    “The music and the sound effects play back through the SFX system and that also generates our timecode clock which creates a time base for the show so the stage management can call from that and the departments can lock in when needed.”

    Unsurprisingly, there is no monitor desk; the only microphone used on stage is the Sennheiser HSP4 cardioid headset mic, worn by Dominic Rickhards, who plays ‘Huxley’. Amusingly, however, the dinosaurs are on IEMs of sorts.

    Hylenski explained why: “The dinos have onboard sound systems so they’re actually being transmitted to and from, in certain cases, our systems.

    “We broadcast on Sennheiser in-ear monitors essentially to the dinos. We use these to reproduce locally the sounds that the dinosaurs make. The voodoo operator presses the key, and that’s coming into our desk and into our system, so it tracks the dinosaurs as they move around the arena floor, but we also broadcast that same sound wirelessly to the dinosaur.

    “That’s reproduced locally in the dinosaur sound system which is made of bits and pieces of car amplifiers and smaller drivers to give us a source location to the dinosaurs as they move around.”

LIGHTING
The sizeable lighting rig consists of around 400 fixtures, including Vari*Lite VL3000s and VL1000s, Martin MAC 2000 spots and profiles, and High End Cyberlight Turbos.

    The lighting designer is John Rayment, whose previous lighting credits include the Opening and Closing Ceremonies at Sydney’s 2000 Olympic Games.

    “It’s a fairly demanding show,” said Rayment. “Ultimately, I’ve created environments in the air and in the space that these creatures can inhabit, so I have taken you on a journey and changed the moods.”

    The lighting supplier is Chicago’s Upstaging Inc. and the console is a grandMA, operated by Jason Fripp.

    When asked what his main challenges were for a show of this proportion, Rayment replied: “I just had to respond in light as appropriate. It’s a bit like contemporary dance — the creatures need a large floor space to work in.

    “I’m very fortunate to have a designer like Peter England [set & projected image designer] who designs floors that have a change of personality depending on what I do with them. He had to create a parameter and an image base at the back for which I drew my initial responses and then filled it all in.

    “As we’re not just dealing with floor space — we’ve got creatures that are 13m high, for example — I have to fill the whole volume. I use more lights than many major concerts. That enables me to texture over the top, to create layers.

    “Basically, I can have a whole rig doing one thing and then you might see a second rig waiting to seamlessly come in and do something else.

    “We had to change eras, dynamics, geography, ecology — all those had to be represented in light. Then there’s the basic theatrical stuff. For example, act one should end romantically. Whilst it’s true to the location of the creatures, it also has a theatrical effect.”

SENSE OF SCALE
The show begins with the lone figure of the narrator (played by Dominic Rikhards), a contemporary palaeontologist called Huxley, centre stage. After a brief introduction of himself and of Pangaea, he takes us through the three major periods that the dinosaurs lived through: Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous.

    With Rikhards on stage next to the dinosaurs, you get a true sense of the scale of these incredible creatures; he is dwarfed even by the smallest of the raptors.

    He also adds a comedic element to the show. One particularly memorable scene saw him stick his hand into a pile of dinosaur dung and pull out a beetle; this had a lot of the younger members of the audience in fits of laughter!

    As well as adding fun to the proceedings, Rikhards manages to provide an easy to understand historical education as the show moves from one period to the next.

    Inevitably, the creatures didn’t disappoint either! Throughout the show, they grew bigger and more impressive. The way they moved was mind-blowing and the array of sounds was stunning. I was astounded at not only the detail of their flesh (made from a unique lightweight ‘stretch mesh fabric’ that Tilders created), but how real they actually appeared as they moved around the arena.

    Although the giant Brachiosauras stands at a mighty 36’ tall and measures 56’ nose to tail, most of the audience (including myself) were excitedly awaiting the appearance of the mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex.

    When the time finally came, Rickhards had us on the edge of our seats, preparing us for the arrival of one of the largest carnivores of all-time.

    As he shouted ‘T-Rex!’ there was a short silence, then out jumped a baby T-Rex from backstage; the audience laughed as it let out a pathetic yelp.

    Seconds later, however, there came the full-size version to protect her young from a pack of hungry predators. This was without a doubt the highlight of the show; the roars were genuinely frightening and the creature really did look menacing.

    By this stage, the show was drawing to a close. All that remained was for the big comet to come down and hit the earth, destroying all of the dinosaurs forever. The light and sound teams nailed this scene perfectly, creating an emotional finale.

    As we bade farewell to the dinosaurs, we were reminded that their closest descendents, the birds, are still very much with us today. Leaving us an impression that the dinosaur legacy lives on, this was a fitting end to a hugely enjoyable show.
TPi