October 5, 2007

Sea Monsters in 3D

National Geographic’s film 3D IMAX documentary film Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure opens today. Check the website for showings in your area, to view the movie trailer and to download cool kid’s activities related to the subject.

Filmmaker Breathes Life Into ‘Sea Monsters’

National Geographic’s Lisa Truitt is a veteran producer of Imax films, and her latest project, “Sea Monsters 3D: A Prehistoric Adventure,” opening Friday at the National Museum of Natural History, was her biggest challenge yet: re-creating the underwater world of Cretaceous Period marine reptiles.

“Sea Monsters” follows a young fictional Dolichorhynchops (called a “dolly” for short) who journeys from her shallow-water birthplace to a dangerous ocean teeming with huge sharks, giant fish and fierce predator the Tylosaurus.

The idea for the movie came from a December 2005 story in National Geographic magazine that explored the creatures of the Cretaceous seas. Truitt and her fellow filmmakers scoured fossil records, looking for evidence of “interactions that had happened between species,” she says. One fossil became the starting point of the “Sea Monsters” tale: “The Tylosaurus’s fossil with the Dolichorhynchops in its belly gave us a point around which we could build the story.”

That discovery, as well as another fossil of a shark’s tooth embedded in a dolly’s rear flipper, propelled the dolphin-size reptile into the movie’s spotlight. “Though we can’t anthropomorphize it and make it lovable,” Truitt says of the Dolichorhynchops, “we wanted an animal that an audience could relate to and see as the heroine of the story.” Its appearance — a cross between a dolphin and a duck, with pointy flippers and a long beak — helped, too. “It’s as cute as marine reptiles get,” Truitt says.

Shot and created entirely in 3-D, the 40-minute film contains a lot of computer-generated footage, and Truitt says five animation houses in four countries worked on the film. But the filmmakers also needed to do old-fashioned camera work.

First came a shoot in the Bahamas. To get realistic-looking water for the ocean scenes, Truitt and her team needed footage of open water. Because modern-day sea life wouldn’t have existed in the Cretaceous Period, they could only use shots of fish-free ocean. “It was the strangest thing to film scenes of empty water for National Geographic,” Pruitt says. “To be saying, ‘Make sure there are no fish in the shot!’ was very ironic.”

Land scenes, depicting fossil excavation sites around the world, were shot in Kansas. Using photos of those actual sites, they “found places in Kansas that looked very, very similar. . . . It would have been really cost-prohibitive to have gone to Israel and Australia and all the various places that appear in the film,” she explains. “It’s funny because you get out there [to Kansas] and it’s all just flat farmland. But in the middle of these farms you find these gorgeous natural features” — such as limestone cliffs and red-clay flats — “that we ended up filming.”

Kansas is also a treasure trove of marine fossils, because during the Cretaceous Period, the Western Interior Seaway stretched from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico, with much of present-day Canada, Mexico and the western and southern United States underwater. Truitt says: “We’d be out there filming and find bones. One time we found a fish fossil right there in the rock.”

There was another reason she kept her eyes trained on the ground. Where giant reptiles once swam, now swarm dangerous reptiles of a different sort. “One of the locals said to us, ‘Oh, you’re filming in late spring? The ground moves out there,'” Truitt recalls. “We weren’t quite sure what he meant, but then we found out: There are rattlesnakes and copperheads all over out there.”Christina Talcott
Washington Post Staff Writer

Below are some reviews of the film.

Meet One Zen Monster

Hello, dolly.

“Sea Monsters 3D: A Prehistoric Adventure” features an improbably charismatic central character: a female Dolichorhynchops, “dolly” for short, that plied North America’s great inland ocean 250 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous Period. It’s during that watery time that much of “Sea Monsters” transpires, occasionally zooming back to the future to re-create the paleontological digs that have unearthed crucial evidence of prehistoric life.

And it was a wonderful life, as “Sea Monsters” tells it, full of danger and death, yes, but also wonder and Zenlike balance. Narrated by Liev Schreiber and set to music by Peter Gabriel, this Imax extravaganza, produced by National Geographic (and funded in part by the National Science Foundation), follows its little dolly from birth to her extraordinarily peaceful death from old age. The film, which is sure to spark passionate interest in young minds, keeps “March of the Penguins”-like anthropomorphism to a minimum, instead focusing on spectacular 3-D effects that make it seem as if the dolly and her slithery contemporaries are gliding overhead or, more terrifying, sticking their 17-foot-long necks out to get right in our faces.

In the tradition of what we’ve come to expect from National Geographic, “Sea Monsters” has been produced with taste and a strong sense of storytelling; although the main events are underwater, even the computer graphics depicting a multimillion-year timeline and a modern-day rock explosion are dazzling. It’s “Finding Nemo” with a “Wow!” factor of about 100.Ann Hornaday
Washington Post

“Sea Monsters” | It’s not your typical fish story

Kids (and grown-ups) with a thing for dinosaurs should see this thrilling IMAX 3-D spectacle about the 82-million-year-old creatures that swam about the world’s oceans killing, playing, surviving and generally being just totally cool to look at.

A 40-foot-long Tylosaurus (the T. rex of the deep) leaps from the pearlescent depths of immaculately computer-rendered waters directly into your face — its giant, toothy maw crunching on some hapless, flopping lesser beast destined for the gullet. In a few contrasting live-action segments, paleontologists unearth the bones of these creatures, some of which have undigested fossilized fish within their petrified bellies. Survival of the fittest, indeed.

With ample production help from the National Geographic Society, this gripping adventure narrative is undoubtedly as accurate as it is well-told.

Five special-effects companies in four countries had a hand in creating the stunning computer animation that makes up the bulk of the film. Whether the scene is of ghostly prehistoric jellyfish floating before your eyes or time-lapse scenes that depict millions of years going by in seconds, the results are consistently extraordinary.

The re-created scenes of scientists doing their work in the field are also fairly astonishing for their 3D-friendly framing and orderly sense of movement. Dirt stains on a car window or dust filtering through a paleontologist’s brush never looked so lifelike. Of course, there’s a science lesson in all this excitement, but that can take a backseat to the coolness of the high-tech fakery.

There’s lots of exceptional music written and/or supervised by Peter Gabriel that enhances the intensity, even though Liev Schreiber’s dry monotone narration often works against it all.

Still, if you want to see something that just screams, “Oh, wow!,” this latest IMAX 3-D feature is better than a lifelong angler’s best fish story.

“Sea Monsters 3D: A Prehistoric Adventure,” an IMAX documentary directed by Sean MacLeod Phillips. 40 minutes. Not rated; suitable for general audiences. IMAX at the Pacific Science Center.Ted Fry
The Seattle Times

Filed under Bigfoot Report, Cryptozoology, Extinct, Fossil Finds, Lake Monsters, Living Dinosaurs, Loch Ness Monster, Ogopogo, Reviews, Sea Serpents