Eric Leighton There were two big technical disappointments. It was basically Ralph and my job as Directors to ask for anything and Pam Marsden’s job as Producer to slap our hands and say “no.”

Some of the things we lost were “geometry wrinkles.” One of the cool things that happen as real elephants move their limbs is that new wrinkles appear at joints and in folds. But it was just too expensive and time-consuming to generate in the computer. 

The final version of the Velociraptors.

We had also designed some gorgeous stuff with feathers. The Velociraptors were actually designed with feathers.  But at that point in time the computer folks were unsure if they could do it, and the studio didn’t want to get married to a process that they weren’t sure they could deliver on budget.

A William Stout design sketch showing a feather "frill" on the Velociraptor.

E.L. Very late on in the production we developed a technique called “Live cam.” It was successful and cheap, but it was too late to use in the film. Ironically, it also turned out that there was a less expensive way to handle the feathers, but it was also too late to use it.

D.I.G. What characters did you feel closest to?

R.Z. For myself, I love characters that have great change in them, not only cool to look at, but also have a serious character arc like Bruton, He believes in survival of the fittest, but ultimately he sacrifices himself for the weak. I find it interesting to see that change happen.

E.L. Two characters I just love in the movie are the Oviraptor and the stygimolochs. There are some scenes with them that were cut. They were  in scenes of the herd suffering. There was a cut of  a stygi falling down

D.I.G. Is it true that the movie was originally longer?

E.L.  We actually animated 20-30% more than what you see in the final film. It came about when there were story changes that we would re-animate. Other times there were length issues so scenes were shortened.

R.Z. Disney allows you go and revise and review because you don’t go in with a locked script. On live action, you have a re-shoot budget, but on this film, over the number of years that we worked on Dinosaur, you make lots of changes

E.L. It’s expected that you’ll change things. No one is surprised by that.

R.Z. Buy we don’t really have the same latitude as in live action where it’s easier to get an actor to say a line a number of diferent way, but we did have some tweaking latitude.

D.I.G. Were there any other things that you particularly liked?

E.L. The meteor shower.

R.Z. The meteor shower has a neat unique surreal look. It was very difficult to do and it came out so well.

E.L. I generally like the opening of the picture. The "Welcome to Dino World" sequence.
You should see it digitally, that’s the really way to see it! From a little boy perspective I love the dinosaur fights at the end.

D.I.G. 5 ½ years is really a long time to work on a movie!

E.L.  We had a long prep in animation and a lot of it was brutal in terms of training. To break up the stress, the animators did gag shots, but you have to see them to really appreciate them.  One sort of cool computer gag had to do with developing inertia. It was the joke of “Inertia gone bad.” You can control the apparent weight of an object in the computer, and how long it takes for something to speed up or slow down.  So they’d take a dinosaur and “put it in motion.” You’d see flesh stretching out on legs until it was 20 feet long and then snapping back.   One bunch of guys did a computer simulations of the Disneyland Electrical Street Parade with all the dinosaur characters in the movie as the participants! Sometimes they’d put their own face onto a dinosaur, and one of the funniest things was making South Park mockups with characters that were actually dinosaurs!

D.I.G. What will you do next? 

R.Z. Take a nice holiday and a break. Take a little time off. Both of us were on it for 5 ½ years. I don’t want to jump right into something new. 
 
 

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2. Nightmare Before Christmas - Halloween Town