Dinosaur Planet: BBC One

NathWraith

NathWraith

NathWraith

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Hey guys,

Watched Dinosaur planet on BBC One last night and really enjoyed it!

Had a search and couldn't find any other threads about it.

Was looking forward to the series loads! :D

So anyone else going to be tuning in?
 
I watched it (loving the BBC HD goodness!) and thought it was very good. Nice to see it being tied to hard science and also steering away from the "usual suspects", i.e. T-Rex, Triceratops etc.

My only complaint is that the use of only CGI, as opposed to the real backgrounds used in Walking with Dinosaurs, has removed some of the "depth" (for want of a better word) from the visuals. For example, I thought the desert scenery was a bit lacklustre. Nonetheless, I'm very much looking forward to the rest.

Did anyone watch the folloiwng program on BBC4? That was pretty good too. Tying up myths with primitive fossil discoveries. Quite a good watch actually.
 
Nail on head there checib. The CGI doesn't look any batter then WWD as the backgrounds arn't real anymore, which means that WWD actually looks a little better.
 
Isn't it called Planet Dinosaur :p

It was good to see some of the actual facts they used to determine how the different species lived. The CGI didnt look that great though, like the previous posts said. One thing that really annoyed me was all the fake zoom and close-up panning. I know it's suposed to make you feel like your in the action with all the animals, but it just made the CGI and experience look even more unnatural.
 
Wzd said:
Isn't it called Planet Dinosaur :p

It was good to see some of the actual facts they used to determine how the different species lived. The CGI didnt look that great though, like the previous posts said. One thing that really annoyed me was all the fake zoom and close-up panning. I know it's suposed to make you feel like your in the action with all the animals, but it just made the CGI and experience look even more unnatural.
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This.

I felt the CGI looked very low-FPS in some parts (mainly the slightly silly up-close shots), whereas in WWD it was portrayed as any other wildlife program, which gave it a sense of reality.
 
I thought the actual dinosaur animations was very good and the creative camera work like adding depth of feel looked great, but like others have said the CGI backgrounds kind of ruined it a bit.

I found it hard to scale the dinosaurs too, they need to chuck them alongside a car or something.
 
Wzd, it is indeed. Dinosaur Planet was an American dino series. That also used real backgrounds, most of the time, and looked more realistic half the time.

One thing that kept distracting me in PD was the constant use of little floating particles that drift past the camera. Either it was suposed to indicate a recent volcanic eruption (perhaps like the unnecessarily and unexplainedly gloomy sky that hovered over the desert) or someone just thought it looked cool in Finding Nemo and decided to copy it wholesale.
 
One of the tag lines for Planet Dinosaur is that we are living in a "golden age of paleontology". I think this is actually true as the shear amount of important information being released is staggering (e.g. the above new article). It kind of makes me wish I'd gone in a different direction after uni. *Wistful sigh*
 
I do agree about the scaling. I didn't feel like I was watching a 17m spinosaurus hunt 8m fish!

Needs more scenery. I think the CGI is better than WWD but the movement of the Dinosaurs seems a lot more scripted? Not quite as natural looking. Looking forward to the next episode though!
 
The CGI model work is fine actually, it's, as always, the movement. It's why Jurassic Park and their sequels nailed the dinosaurs so well and they look so much more realistic. So it's on the shoulders of the animators really
 
I was quite underwhelmed by this for the same reasons. The scale definitely didn't come across, the landscapes were sparse and I think that was a part of it. The models looked good still but a bit unnatural moving. I get a bit annoyed by camera splashes and lens flare - they don't make sense in gaming and don't make sense in this either. The script also irritated me, they must have used the word killer 2000 times! That said, I will watch again cos I like Dinos!
 
robgmun said:
The CGI model work is fine actually, it's, as always, the movement. It's why Jurassic Park and their sequels nailed the dinosaurs so well and they look so much more realistic. So it's on the shoulders of the animators really
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Yeah but then that's also the difference between big movie budgets and resources compared to a small documentary.

Maybe another decade or so before documentary CGI can reach Jurassic Park levels?
 
Phatjayunoi said:
Yeah but then that's also the difference between big movie budgets and resources compared to a small documentary.

Maybe another decade or so before documentary CGI can reach Jurassic Park levels?
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Not true, it's all down to talent not money. WWD was much more realistic then this series and that's 10 years old! It was down to the real environments, which meant less rendering time, which meant more time could be spent on animating the dinos better. WWD had much better and more natural movements then DP, my 3 year old nephew is dino nuts at the moment and i pulled out my old WWD DVD set, i haven't seen it in years and i was surprised and at well it still looks.

Also the real environments meant the CGI artist had a much better and realistic background to work against, so they could chroma key the colors better in a much more realistic way. DP looks a bit cartoony
 
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