UNITED KINGDOM: Dinosaurs are back - with 'Walking with Dinosaurs - The Arena Spectacular'

Record ID: 811360

  • Title: UNITED KINGDOM: Dinosaurs are back - with 'Walking with Dinosaurs - The Arena Spectacular'
  • Date: 19th March 2009
  • Summary: CUTAWAY OF YOUNG STUDENTS WATCHING
  • Embargoed: 3rd April 2009 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: United Kingdom
  • Country: United Kingdom
  • Topics: Light / Amusing / Unusual / Quirky
  • Reuters ID: LVA72LEBB2UKMTOQ26I4P420J0LI
  • Story Text: And enter the dinosaur. 65 million years after they vanished from the planet, they're back! Dinosaurs will once again roam the earth in a spectacular new theatrical arena show, which commences its U.K. tour in July 2009.
    "Walking with Dinosaurs - The Arena Spectacular" is based on the award-winning BBC Television series and has real size dinosaurs come to life.
    The show originated in Australia, and proved itself such a sensation, that the American tour was fast-tracked. It began just three months after completing its sold out engagements in Australia.
    Now it's coming to Europe with dates in the UK starting in July. Tim Haines, creator and producer of the original BBC series, which was seen by a worldwide audience of 700 million, serves as Project Consultant :
    "This is actually a theatrical experience. You come in and you have to be entertained. It has to lift you and make you excited and so it's a very different set of skills, putting on a show like this. It still gets the information across and it still is accurate but it's very much more a piece of showmanship."
    Since commencing its American Tour in July 2007, the show has sold out performances and broken records- generating $90 million US dollars in ticket sales to date and has been seen by almost two million people.
    A talented and experienced team of creative artists came together to produce Walking with Dinosaurs.
    Ten species are represented from the entire 200 million year reign of the dinosaurs. The show includes the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the terror of the ancient terrain, as well as the Plateosaurus and Liliensternus from the Triassic period, the Stegosaurus and Allosaurus from the Jurassic period and Torosaurus and Utahraptor from the awesome Cretaceous period. The largest of them, the Brachiosaurus is 36 feet tall, and 56 feet from nose to tail. It took a team of 50 including engineers, fabricators, skin makers, artists and painters, and animatronics experts a year to build the original production in a Melbourne Docklands workshop big enough to park a 747.
    The show depicts the dinosaurs' evolution, complete with the climatic and tectonic changes that took place, which led to the demise of many species.
    There are scenes of interactions between dinosaurs, and the audience sees how carnivorous dinosaurs evolved to walk on two legs, and how the herbivores fended off their more agile predators.
    The history of the world is played out with the splitting of the earth's continents, and the transition from the arid desert of the Triassic period is given over to the lush green prairies and forces of the later Jurassic. Oceans form, volcanoes erupt, a forest catches fire -- all leading to the impact of the massive comet, which struck the earth, and forced the extinction of the dinosaurs.
    Sonny Tilders, who designed and built the creatures has been, for the past decade, one of the major creative forces of the high-tech world of animatronics puppetry for film and television.
    Tilders said:
    "I haven't done anything like this before, certainly not on a scale like this before. None of us have, really. This is the biggest animatronics showin the world, I can say that with some confidence, and so for all of us who had experience in film animatronics, it was an absolute delight to be involved."
    He added
    "To be honest the skin is a bit of a secret but I can say it uses reasonably low tech materials and it's not cast. We actually fabricate the skin by hand. So it really is one of the keys to the success because if the skin was to heavy a lot of the lovely fluid movement would have been I suppose destroyed by having such a heavy thing to move."
    The puppeteers use 'voodoo rigs' to make many of the dinosaurs move.
    They are miniature versions of the dinosaurs with the same joints and range of movement as their life-sized counterparts. The puppeteer manipulates the voodoo rig and these actions are interpreted by computer and transmitted by radio waves to make the hydraulic cylinders in the actual dinosaur replicate the action, with a driver hidden below the animal, helping to manoeuvre it around the arena. Suited puppeteer specialists, who are inside the creatures, operate five of the smaller dinosaurs.
    'Walking With Dinosaurs' - The Arena Spectacle is coming to London's O2 Arena on August 5.
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