I learned two things from Jurassic Park:
One: Never trust a man who wears a straw fedora
And two! Puppets are the best way to depict dinosaurs on-screen.
CGI makes up only 5 minutes of dinosaur screentime in Jurassic Park.
The rest is good, old-fashioned animatronic puppetry,
and that’s why the movie still looks so damn good.
In films and TV, puppets are a whimsical way to capture the strange, the adorable
and yes… the extinct.
But you don’t see a lot of real puppets in games.
With one major exception:
[ANCIENT FLUTE AND DRUMS]
NOT RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH: This… is Dinotopia.
SIMONE: The 1995 Dinotopia adventure game.
That I will not shut up about.
Dinotopia is based on a book series by author and illustrator James Gurney.
His publisher wanted to capitalize on the book’s success — it had cracked the
New York Times best seller’s list.
And what would be hotter than turning it into a game?
A few months ago I made a video about that game and how it was made.
One of the biggest challenges they faced was
making a game about talking dinosaurs look good.
Computer graphics at the time were… eh!
But the books have full page oil paintings of a magical world
that is where I will go when I die.
Plus, Jurassic Park had just come out, igniting a DINOSAUR CRAZE in the youth of America.
And the youth wouldn’t settle for crappy dinosaurs when they had seen these magnificent
puppets!! [Raptor squeals and collides with storage shelves]
The most advanced games of the early 90s used full-motion video, or FMV
— scenes filmed on-camera with real actors.
The home computer technology of the time meant the videos were massively compressed
but the result was still more sophisticated than computer graphics.
The die was cast: Turner Interactive needed real fake dinosaurs.
RASPY VOICED BRONTOSAURUS: I can’t talk!
You didn’t seen my voice anywhere, did you?
SIMONE: So, this little adventure game used the same puppetcraft that Stan Winston Studios employed
in the Jurassic Park films — just without the backing or budget of a major studio.
The fact that they pulled this off is incredible.
ANDRE FREITAS: That probably should have been a $400,000 project easily because of the manpower
and all that stuff we did.
SIMONE: But Turner Interactive gave this maestro of puppets, Andre Freitas, just $85,000…
...for 10 puppets.
ANDRE: And I could not even know why I agreed to do that.
But I was so hungry for work.
Now, Freitas has worked on multiple Marvel movies and on gore-heavy projects like Zombieland
and The Walking Dead.
But in 1995, he was the head of a new studio, taking on jobs that ranged from making movie
props to sculpting statues of wealthy peoples’ children.
So he jumped on the chance to make dinosaurs.
The process began with models: Freitas sculpted each dinosaur out of clay or plastiline,
a re-usable modeling clay.
The sculptures are used to make molds, which are in turn used to bake foam latex
for the dinosaurs’ skin.
For puppetry, few materials are better than foam latex.
It’s what sits under the Muppets’ felt exteriors, and on the dinosaurs in
Jurassic Park.
It can appear hard or soft.
It can stretch and move realistically, and it can be molded with high levels of detail
— like the wrinkles of skin in this raptor’s neck.
ANDRE: I had to cut out this entire section, make another one out of the thing and add
a gusset under it, almost like a sack of skin.
You have to manipulate and do other things to the skin, or create puppets of space in
them, so the puppets have freedom to move.
SIMONE: Different molds were made for the puppets’ fiberglass skeletons.
The skeletons hold the animatronics that make the puppets move.
Between the skeleton and the foam latex skin is a layer of fabric that stops the puppet
from basically ripping itself to shreds.
ANDRE: These fiberglass ribs on the puppet itself, they can act as blades and they can
cut the skin.
So we have to put fabric over the surface of them, and link them together with elastic,
and skin them together with a fabric, so this doesn’t act as a saw to slice through the
skin when you’re working with them, and you’re doing all these extreme motions.
SIMONE: Any skin that needs to move can’t be too thick.
The dinosaurs’ eyelid skin, for example, has to accordion back into the skull
if the dinosaur blinks.
And the brows have to lift and flex.
ANDRE: So there's all this cosmetic stuff that goes on just beyond putting everything together.
Or sometimes you have to put KY or a lubricant on the eyes so it doesn't stick.
SIMONE (OFF SCREEN): Did I hear you say that, uh, [voice full of disbelief] KY personal
lubricant was what you use…to…
ANDRE: We have done that, or vaseline, or something like that.
Freitas also had to hide the puppets’ mechanized guts.
Some exterior controls, like rods, could be edited out in post.
But webbing was put inside the puppet’s mouths so that we can’t see all their insides.
These puppets are basically giant puzzles, made of knives and rubber.
As a final touch, the puppets were hand-painted.
Freitas was conscious of Gurney’s detailed oil paintings when he was designing them.
Andre: We were also just trying to convey an artistic image of transmutating
James Gurney’s work into tangible objects.
That's why all the paint jobs on them kind of look blurry and kind of splotchy looking.
Because what we were trying to do was mimic the painterly quality of his work.
SIMONE: These puppets have basically spent the last 20 years roasting in the heat in Freitas’
Atlanta studio.
ANDRE: This is the old skin.
I pulled it off a long time ago, but it's dried out on here.
And this puppet… basically what you call this is the underskull.
And then this is the skin that goes on there, but this skin is all dried out.
It fits on top of there if it was in its perfect shape.
SIMONE: But in the footage of the game, you can see their vibrant colors, and appreciate their details
— from the rough texture of the Stegosaurus’ plates to the translucent skin
of your dimorphodon buddy’s wings.
For Freitas, shooting the puppets… provided its own set of challenges.
Because of the paltry budget, some puppets had to do double duty: like the raptor that
plays Enit in the opening scene, which was later repainted purple to become this scammer
in Pumice Town.
This pair of stegosauruses … is just one stegosaurus, shot twice and transposed into
the scene.
Just like the Lindsey Lohan puppets in The Parent Trap.
Dinotopia was shot on blue-screen at Turner’s studios in Atlanta, and the dinosaurs were
piloted by puppeteers from Atlanta’s Center for Puppetry Arts.
Which is convenient, except that they were used to working with more responsive hand-puppets,
not these totally sick robots.
ANDRE: They're used to Kermit doing this.
And when you give them cable control and stuff they’re not used to… people that don’t
use cable control, and servo and radio control, they tend to feel like if they push the levers
more dramatically, they will get a stronger performance.
But really what happens that stretches the cables and it damages the puppets.
SIMONE: The puppets were heavy, and couldn’t be brute-forced.
They needed anywhere from 2 to 6 puppeteers to control them, depending on the size of the puppet.
For context, the giant Spinosaurus in Jurassic Park III — which is FORTY-FIVE FEET LONG
— had eight puppeteers.
ANDRE: This is one of the velociraptors.
And this is direct rod linkage, where you're behind him and movin this — but you're doing
all the movements.
And there's someone else controlling his side-to-side head movement, his blink, his lips, and opening
and closing his mouth.
So with the tandem combination of movements, and the twisting and turning, you’re getting
whatever movement you want out of the puppet.
SIMONE: Direct rod control is one of the most straightforward methods of puppetry — if you’ve seen Muppets,
and imagine you have. [are you looking at one now?]
this is basically just a bigger, less responsive version of how the Muppeteers move Elmo’s arms.
Direct rod movements are paired with cable control — a system where cables are flexed,
in this case with a mechanical lever, to create organic-looking movement.
Cable controls are what puppeteers used to move the Xenomorph’s tongue and jaws on
close-ups in Alien.
CARLO RAMBALDI: Open the mouth…
second cable, the tongue coming out of the mouth.
And another cable to open the small…
mouth of the tongue.
SIMONE: This raptor’s mouth movements were also done with cable controls.
ANDRE: And then for the eyes, there are servo motors, which are the little motors you use
in radio control cars and airplanes.
And they're inside, and they create the side to side, the up and down, and the blink movement
of the eyes.
The game’s cutscenes have aged like a mosquito encased in amber, which is to say:
really well.
That’s yet another thing it has in common with Jurassic Park, which is still the King
[Mr. DNA Drawl] of the Dinosaurs, almost 30 years later.
(ROARRRRRRR)
Dinotopia was one of the most high-effort, one-of-a-kind games to come out of the brief,
weird FMV craze.
Real puppets added life to the game, and captured the aesthetic of the books that
I grew up loving.
Dinosaurs are cool and I want to live with them, and through the magic of these puppets,
that dream is attainable.
SIMONE: What if instead of hosting videos I make a puppet of myself?
Cuz I think I want to be a puppeteer or a clown.
TARA (on Zoom): I could actually see you in this industry. I don't know why.
SIMONE: [Honking Laughter]
That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me.
TARA: Now I feel bad for you
SIMONE: OH NO!