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tv production
that time forgot, where humans and dinosaurs co-exist peacefully.
Except that like in any alleged paradise, trouble’s lurking just round the next corner. As well as dangerous carnivores such as the T-Rex and the gigantic crocodile-like Mosasaur, there are also human rogues in Dinotopia, notably piratical Cyrus Crabb (David Thewlis).
Soon Karl and David, together with Marion (Carr) - whom they both fancy - and her father Waldo (Jim Carter), the Mayor of Waterfall City, find it’s a battle for the very future of this astonishing lost continent.
Scripted by Simon Moore (Gulliver’s Travels, Traffik) and direct-
inspiration – the port of Alexandria built abortively at Pinewood for the produc- tion of Fox’s Cleopatra.
According to designer Walter Martishius – who has been marshalling an army of art directors, builders, car- penters, plasterers and painters - Dinotopia, to air first on ABC in the States next year, is “the purest designed film I’ve ever done.
“There’s no architectural style we have to follow so it’s enabled me to really create an entire world and keep a design philosophy throughout. We are looking at a world which is essen- tially a period piece but just happens to have architecture which is 600 feet high and has creatures which co-habit with humans. What we built on the back lot is just a tiny, tiny bit of the entire city.”
The final visual splendour of both Dinotopia itself and its wide range of scaly inhabitants is currently being created on CGI by 70 specialists at Framestore, the London-based effects company which was responsible for the BBC’s award-winning Walking With Dinosaurs series.
Caught up in the very middle of all this creative mayhem is award-win- ning British DP, Tony Pierce-Roberts BSC, perhaps better known for helping to recreate rather more genteel worlds in Merchant-Ivory period pieces like A Room With A View, Howards End, The Remains Of The Day and, most recent- ly, The Golden Bowl.
Merchant-Ivory this isn’t, laughed Pierce-Roberts who was also returning to small screen cinematog- raphy for the first time in, he reck- oned, about 20 years.
There was at the outset, he revealed, the suggestion that Dinotopia might be a feature film too but, he added, “we can’t because the Framestore people have to work for a much finer resolution for cinema release than they do for TV. Consequently it would have cost a lot more and taken a lot longer. The sched- ule simply didn’t allow for it although at 25 weeks, for six hours of television, that’s still reasonably generous.
“A challenge? Even though it’s huge and has a large budget, it’s still always a challenge to do it for the money. You never really have enough money to do what you want. It’s also full of special effects. Virtually every shot we’re doing is a plate of some
kind. By the time I’ve finished there won’t be much I don’t know about sfx.
“As far as the ‘look’ was concerned, Marco, with a
background principally in commer- cials, was obviously very keen on the ‘look’ and we did endless tests of fil- ters and film stocks to achieve the ‘look’ he wanted.
“With Fuji, I’ve always liked the contrast ratio and we’ve been using some of the 400 on the interiors. The Framestore people especially liked it for its finer grain.
“In my naivety, I thought that as it’s TV we could have the one stock all the way through. They wanted the finest grain stock possible in any given set. That might, on some of the night work, have involved a lot of extra lighting equipment which the produc- ers weren’t going to accede to. So for
ditions we could, hopefully, get a couple of these in and they’d work for us.
“In the end we had just one, not the three I really wanted, for about five or six weeks and with it we were able to do a lot of enhancement and sun effects. If shooting from, say, six o’clock when it’s completely black, we’d use it to give a really good sun effect because you weren’t trying to overcome the ambient daylight. It would also give you lovely hard shadows.
“Having the Muscoe made a huge difference. It has 15 parabolic 6Ks and you can spot and flood each one indi- vidually and could light huge shots in 15 minutes easily. Having its own trail- er it’d only take about the same time to move it around.
“Since I’d used it last they’d also come up with a system of being able to put on wide angle adaptors, This spread the light even more – which,
ed by Marco Brambilla (Demolition Man, Excess Baggage), Dinotopia’s logistics are suitably awesome.
Shot over six months on nine stages at Pinewood, the production also boasts, in Waterfall City, one of the biggest sets ever constructed on the back lot in Bucks. Of its scale, one thinks back to Batman’s Gotham City.
But, perhaps more aptly, given the Egyptian influence of the latest construc- tion, film buff memories will instead hark back a full 40 years to another Egyptian
that, we used the 400 and 500 stocks. When we were doing other scenes, like day exteriors on, say, the Canyon City set, we used the 250 Tungsten.”
With its Caribbean setting, the idea was to have a “sunny look” to the production. The fact that shooting, both at Pinewood and on location in North Wales, coincided with the wettest autumn for 400 years, called for some drastic measures.
Said Pierce-Roberts: “Early last year I’d done a commercial in the States using a Muscoe Light – a big, big piece of lighting equipment on a crane. The beauty of it is that it’s all self-contained and so I asked them if they had one in Europe and they said ‘Yes, in Nottingham.’ In fact it turned out that they had eight of them which they were using to film one day cricket matches.
“’This could be just the thing’, I thought. If we were in dull, overcast con-
for night work, was brilliant.”
For what is arguably the most technically complex TV series ever
made – certainly one of the most expensive – it is interesting to note that, productionwise, the UK wasn’t even originally in the frame.
First Barrandov Studios in the Czech Republic then Babelsburg in Berlin were considered, then stages in Melbourne and Vancouver before pro- ducer Dusty Symonds (Sleepy Hollow) finally received some fortuitous news from Pinewood. A major US film had just been postponed.
“Suddenly,” said Symonds, “we moved from a position where we were looking at possibly ending up at all four studios in the UK, to one where we were able to bring it all into Pinewood.” ■ QUENTIN FALK
Dinotopia is originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
Photos from top: Cleopatra’s largest setpiece is now superceded by Dinotopia’s; above right (l-r): Camera Operator Dave Morgan, DP Tony Pierce-Roberts and First Assistant Director Edward Brett