Walking With Dinosaurs: The movie released in December 2013 was globally is presented by Twentieth Century Fox and Reliance Entertainment in association with IM Global. The film, A BBC Earth Films and Evergreen Studios production in association with Animal Logic, is the ultimate immersive, big-screen, 3-D experience for families. In 2011, Evergreen Studios hired WHPacific, Inc., to provide the latest in high-tech survey equipment and a professional team to work on the film.
Recent discoveries and a breakthrough in technology will introduce new and unique dinosaurs that are more real than ever before and put moviegoers in the middle of a thrilling prehistoric adventure, where an underdog dinosaur triumphs against all odds to become a hero for the ages.
Using traditional surveying practices such as GPS, as well as WHPacific’s new Optech Lynx Mobile Mapper, Dan Wobbe of WHPacific, worked closely with the producer, director, and film crew on remote film locations such as Denali, Alaska, and New Zealand. Wobbe, a seasoned land surveyor based in the Bend office, said that it took some time to figure out the process and how to maximize the technology.
Although LiDAR has been used in the film industry as an environment referencing tool in complex action scenes, and to help calibrate set extensions and background replacements, in the making of Walking With Dinosaurs over 90 percent of the locations were LiDAR scanned. “A lot of what we did we had to figure out as we went through it,” Wobbe said. “That included figuring out how to collect exactly what the crew needed in extreme conditions.
“Every shot had a number by location. The sequence tracking marker scans had to be correctly named, from the start of the shot to the moment they said ‘cut. It was painful when we were exhausted or in difficult conditions, like snow or complete darkness. But we had to get each shot right.”
In spite of the long days and challenges of the job, Wobbe spoke wistfully about the hours spent on the job and the camaraderie he shared with the crew, but mostly, he’s proud of what the survey crew accomplished using the tools of the trade to help create the magic that is animated film.
On site, the surveyors used a combination of survey grade equipment, including the LYNX Mobile Mapper, Optech ILRIS long range scanner, FARO Focus 3D scanner, Trimble R8 GNSS GPS, and Trimble S6 Robotic Total Stations to collect accurate points of the landscape, ensuring the smallest details in the shot, such as a blade of grass, were realistic. Specific target points were shot with LED lights, which were tracked by the rolling camera, while GPS geographically oriented the site in the real world. The captured data gave the animators the information necessary to correctly place shadows and other realistic details of scenes and characters.
Every few days, the data was downloaded and registered to the control points, then packaged and shipped to the WHPacific office where it was converted into polygonal models for the Australian production and animation company, Animal Logic. At their studios in Melbourne, survey data assists in combining live-action plate photography with digital visual effects. The large volume of data produced on site (over 800 shots) in addition to the detail, consistency, and accuracy of the data produced by the survey team was essential to creating the realism that makes Walking With Dinosaurs a groundbreaking 3D animation film.
