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Posted: Mon, January 14, 2002
Tyrie Behind the Tyrannosauritwales.com meets Max Tyrie, lead animator of Walking With Beasts and Walking With Dinosaurs. Do your Thursday evenings suddenly feel dull and empty? You’re not alone. Over 8 million viewers tuned in to Walking With Beasts last year, the much-anticipated sequel to Walking With Dinosaurs, that brought a bit of bite to our winter viewing. A brilliant wildlife documentary,Walking With Beasts showed us the life-cycles of prehistoric animals in incredible detail, with all the insight of documentaries on today’s fauna. But let's not forget the beast factor. What we witnessed were weird and wonderful creatures that we had never seen before. We shared intimate moments with an australopithecus, we hunted with a smiladon, and a host of magnificent mammals moved, mated, battled, gave birth and chewed their way across our screens. Walking With Beasts wa
s no ordinary documentary. Walking With Beasts was an epic.
But how were these amazing creatures made to walk and breathe so convincingly before our eyes? How were they brought to life in such vivid detail? itwales.comwas lucky enough to catch up with Max Tyrie, the Emmy-winning lead animator on Walking With Beasts and Walking With Dinosaurs, to find out how animation made the beasts walk again...
I reckon my favourite beast has got to be smilodon, the sabretooth cat. Episode 5. Fantastic! The animation on it is really great. We had loads of footage of the big cats. Even though the smiladon is not a tiger, we were looking at footage of tigers -- just heavy, chunky cats. Some of the sequences are fantastic. It’s my favourite episode. It really has a strong story aswell.
ITW: Apparently mammals are more difficult to animate because of their complicated movement and their gestures. From an animator’s point of view, are mammals more difficult than the dinosaurs?
Absolutely. We didn’t really realise these problems until we started. The first one being that, in the case of dinosaurs, no one knows what they look like at all. All people have to go on is Jurassic Park, and that’s total fiction. But suddenly we’re doing these new creatures, like a smiladon. We could have got a lion, spray painted it and put plastic teeth on it and that would have served a purpose, but it’s not too practical. People know exactly how a lot of these creatures move, so as animators we had to spend a lot more time getting it spot on. There were loads of things that didn’t quite look right simply because you know what these creatures look like and how they move, because of their similarity to animals in the world today.
ITW: So what was the easiest to render: scales, fur or feathers?
Scales - because you’re just relying on a texture for a creature, you’re not having to model individual scales. So on dinosaurs it’s just one surface. You just paint the scales on there.
Fur is really complicated, but there are packages that you can buy, and that we worked out for ourselves. But it’s very time-consuming, and a real headache. Feathers? We had to make that up from scratch. There is no software that does feathers. But we write loads of tools, and this is our edge, what makes us the best.
ITW: You had close contact with scientists when you were creating the animals, but were you quite creative with them too? Did the scientists let you have a bit of fun with them?
We sit with the palaeontologists for a long time while we’re gong through the cycles of each creature. But we also have enough palaeontologists, and such a range of different opinions, that, whatever we decide is best, we can just say, ‘Actually we’re going to go with Mr. Johnson over there’. That helped us out loads, especially with the smilodon. The palaeontologists were amazing. They look at the skeletons of the animals, and they judge from the holes in skulls, and features like that, how the muscles and the tendons worked. Then they produced sketches, really brilliant images. They were such a great help to us.
ITW: How about the model makers? How did they fit in to the process?
The sculptors build the models, the skeletons, and work out how they would have stood, what their gait would have been. Then the model is scanned -- it’s like a supermarket bar code scanner, the same principle. You just shine the laser on the model and it calculates the distances. This information is fed into the computer, and you end up with a body modelled in 3D to work with.
ITW: And what’s the animation process from this point?
The 3D model we have on the computer is a chopped-up, segmented, high-resolution model. We begin animating by making it walk. We spend a bit of time on this, we used the walk to really build up the creature’s character. Then we animate them running and being stationary and just relaxing. All other animations stem from that. The important thing is that we’ve got their characters. Then we added the fur or the feathers. We gave the creatures personalities as much as we could. This series is based far more on personalities.
ITW: One thing that strikes you about so many of the sequences is how real they look. What would you say is the key to realism in animation?
That’s the million dollar question! Getting things to sit in scenes correctly. Lighting -- when you’re on a shoot, taking lighting reference, using whiteboards to get the direction and colour of the light. All the light bouncing off the floor, such as the green of the grass. It’s knowing all these things and putting them all in at just the right moment. It’s the details, definitely.
ITW: Are you a perfectionist?
Not at all. I’m quite the opposite, I get in a lot of trouble for cutting too many corners! On projects this size -- 3 hours of film in 18 months, with 20 people working on it -- it’s hard to be a perfectionist. In a Californian film house you’d have two or three hundred people. So we just have to work out ways of cutting corners where people don’t notice. We try and use the same bit of animation as much as possible. All these tricks -- just to get the programmes out.
ITW: So have you heard from the Jurassic Parkbunch? What’s their verdict?
Some of the guys who worked on Walking With Dinosaurs are now working at Industrial Magic. We had one guy who worked on Walking With Dinosaurswho is now working on Jurassic Park 3. We’ve only ever heard good things from them. They think it looks fantastic. They couldn’t understand how we managed to do that much in such a short space of time.
ITW:It is incredible how hot on the heels of Dinosaursthe new series was. The deadlines must have been daunting. How much of it was sweat and tears and how much was fun?
It’s always fun even when it’s a real nightmare. We all enjoy what we do. It only tends to get really hairy at the end. FrameStore is a great place to work. It’s a good team, and we all get on really well. But it only took 18 months to complete Walking With Beasts, which is pretty intense.
ITW: At the end of the day, what are you most proud of in the series?
Just getting the project done -- the feat of getting that much animation to broadcast standard, and getting it finished, getting it to look good, and getting it out the door. We were never sure what kind of reception Walking With Beasts would get, because dinosaurs are really cool, rock and roll, brilliant, interesting, amazing creatures. But with this stuff, we’re introducing people to things they’ve never seen before. Walking With Beastswas much more difficult than Walking With Dinosaurs. We had to pretty much double the size of our team to get it done. And there were many more technological difficulties. But on the other hand, Walking With Beastswas definitely more fun. There are more characters in it.
ITW: One thing that’s more noticeable in this series is the use of documentary techniques, especially in the way it’s directed. Was this the intention, to make it more believable?
Yes. We followed the trends of natural history film-making a lot more. There are a couple of shots in there where we really go for that style -- using wide-angle camera shots, getting close-up distortion, tracking back on the back of a jeep, things like that. And using boulder cameras, like those moving boulders that chased lions around in those recent documentaries. Luckily, we had all the BBC footage for reference, which is an amazing resource. We even put in some time-slice photography like in The Matrix!
ITW: The biggest fans of your programmes are definitely children. Do you think Walking With Dinosaursand Walking With Beastswill inspire a new generation of animators?
None of us really expected the success of Walking With Dinosaurs -- we were blown away with it. If Walking With Beasts is half as successful, we’ll be over the moon. It’s great to hear people just talking about you. We get loads of kids sending in drawings of dinosaurs -- that’s the best thing. I don’t think we realised as well how much it was oriented to children when we were making it. We just thought we were making natural history programmes. When you sit back and watch them you think, well, this is a good programme as well. It’s not just informing, it’s quite good fun.
ITW: And these programmes really have been based around good stories.
Max: Definitely. Walking With Beasts has had really strong storylines, that was one of the main aims. They’re meant to get you more involved with the characters, to be more entertaining, really.
It looks fantastic, astonishing. The software they use is a really good package -- something we’re moving into more. So I’ll be excited to see what people graduate, and the quality of work coming out. We’re always looking to take people on. Events like this are great fun to do. Before I got involved in the industry I used to love coming to those things and just learning about new techniques. It’s important to help everyone -- informing them of new techniques. It helps raise the standard in the whole industry.
ITW: Finally, you’ve covered the dinosaurs and you’ve covered the beasts. Is that it on the prehistoric front for you?
Actually there’s talk of doing the sequel to the Walking With series, which would be ‘Prehistoric Monsters’ or something like that. This would include all the big beasts, and the pre-dinosaur stuff -- big crocodiles -- but it’s just talk. This is the best bit now we’re at the end of the project. Everyone does start to brainstorm -- which is how we got Walking With Beasts in the first place.
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ITW: You studied animation near here, at the University of Glamorgan. What do you think of the animation you’ve seen at Swansea Animation Day from the Swansea Institute students?
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