2010-10-05

T-Rex for The Learning Channel

To finish up this last run of dinosaur postings, here's a stop-motion T-Rex that I was contracted to do in 1996. The late Gairy Bialke did the sculpt over an armature by Jamie Haggerty which was molded and cast by Mark and Melinda Kendrick. I did the finish, which was quite extensive - lots of build-up work on the arms, teeth and tongue, then the paint job.


It was animated against bluescreen and sent to a company in L.A. for use in station I.D. for The Learning Channel. I've actually never seen the finished piece, so if anyone has a link to it please let me know.

You can see this T-Rex animated briefly, as the raw element and then composited into a cityscape by John Barrick, at the end of my old commercial demo reel.



This is the sculpt done by the late Gairy Bialke over the armature, which you can see below.


Jamie Haggerty whipped this out quickly for us, unfortunately we had to cut a few corners - the ankles were wire which was difficult but we didn't have time to redo it.

4 comments:

  1. This great stuff Webster! Would love to see the animation footage!

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  2. Click on the link and after it loads up, it's right after the bird in the "clips" section at the 6-minute mark.

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  3. Sweet man! I've always loved the work you did on this piece. Stop mo Dino's rule! I've never seen the armature or the sculpt version till now. Fantastic! The paint job rocks! I like the apparently smaller teeth that were used for the final puppet. Gary did a great job sculpting as always. This would have been a ton of fun to work on. This is probably one of my favorite stop-mo puppets and I'd love to see you re-make him again. Hopefully we don't have to wait until you retire. Thanks for finding all of these pics and sharing them here man! Really cool!

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  4. Thanks Mike! I think my take on this dinosaur - to make him unique - was that he was an old, wrinkly t-rex.

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