Hi my name is Stuart Sumida, and I'm a paleontologist
who helps to build characters like the dinosaurs
you seen in Jurassic world, animated characters
from cartoons, creatures that you see like
dragons and visual effects films, all those
kinds of things- all because I am a scientist.
So when we look at the skeletons of dinosaurs
in the museum of course we see bones, of course
if you see a dinosaur or something like a
Dinosaur say a mosasaur in the water or pterosaur
in the air in a film how do we come up with
that?
Part of the answer is that we kind of scientist
who have a strong idea of how these animals
were built and how they met of work but then
those people have to work together with what
we call visual effects artist their fancy
word for a computer scientist who have artistic
abilities to help bring these things to life
and this is one of the great things about
the science of paleontology hope you understand
past life one of the things that happens with
visual effects artist who make movies like
Jurassic world record How to Train Your Dragon
or anything like that is that what they're
doing is they're taking the information of
how things are built and they're creating
those same things on screen the same way were
trying to teach you about how they look and
their past lives it takes a lot of collaborative
effort it is sometimes surprising the people
just how much science goes into making art
say something like zootopia or that was us
in other continents that looks like a cartoon
about a dinosaur on screen Jurassic world
someone had to come up with a way to visualize
those things for you working out to do is
figure out how it shaped that's done by a
concept artist 
in a way that we so that they could move in
a reasonable fashion.
as well.
And that’s then handed off to a Rigor and
the Rigor inserts a computer skeleton, like
the Marionette and the puppet, into this model
character with the help of again a scientist,
a paleontologist, like myself or some of the
other people who work on this films to help
to understand where the joints are.
If the arms going to swing a certain way we
have to know where that Pivot Point goes inside
of the model character.
That then gets handed off to an animator,
an animator is someone who has to understand
that the movement and make these characters
act on screen and they're all actors, animators
are actors behind the camera.
And then what happens is, They move them through
the scene bit by bit by bit to create a way
for these things to move.
Well once again, they have to work with the
scientist who has a reasonable idea how they
might have moved.
You can make the move anyway you want the
computer but for the audience to suspend their
disbelief or accept the way it moves and the
story that they're being told they have to
move in what seems like a realistic fashion.
So once again, we turn to the scientists as
collaborators with the artists.
Now, the scientists
Who help on these kind of films, know we're
not making documentaries, there are not really
dinosaurs alive today like in Jurassic world,
but if there were how would they move?
And that's where we come in, And one of the
great things is the kind of work we do we
help artists would you doing is creating a
collaborative Community where artists and
scientists work together.
One of the phrases we hear these days is - science
technology engineering and Mathematics STEM-
but the thing is is this stem, with all due
respect can be pretty boring.
How do you make it exciting -
You make it STEAM - you put in ‘Art’-
and when you do that visually it is exciting.
I know T-Rex did not live in the Jurassic
period of Jurassic Park or Jurassic world,
But if you can build a T-Rex that looks like
it moves correctly everybody is excited and
it brings people in.
It brings them into your story and I can tell
you, as a practicing scientist who works at
a University and teaches standard courses
like human and animal Anatomy that an entire
generation of scientists who were interested
in paleontology were inspired by these films.
These are not documentaries but they were
so excited that they went into the field.
And you know what, someone is going to look
at these films and be inspired not necessarily
be a paleontologist but look to science and
see what what science can do for society and
for the world.
So one of the things I love about dinosaurs,
as being a paleontologist, in fact, dinosaurs
have played a huge role in the history of
film and animation.
The earliest animated character ever was a
character named Gertie, Gertie the dinosaur.
Who was animated by a gentleman called , Winsor
McCay.
He was a comic artist and who did Sunday broadsheet
comics and Winsor McCay came up with this
idea of moving characters on screen.
Well you can trace something walking along
like an elephant is called rotoscoping but
you can't trace a dinosaur.
And so if he animated a dinosaur that he knew
that he could convince the public that he
had drawn it himself.
So that was very exciting that was the earliest
animation ever.
Barely 25 years later, the iconic Rite of
Spring sequence in Disney's Fantasia was on
screen and that was an enormous amount of
advancement i just 25 years.
50 years later Jurassic Park - the first film
that demonstrated that you must use computer
digital effects.
Let me tell you, it has been just as long
between Gertie and Fantasia as has been since
Jurassic Park came out to today's Jurassic
world film.
So we like to think about it as the evolution
of computer graphics on screen which is very
exciting.
And you can now do with your phone things
that the artist could not dream of for Jurassic
park.
Well In parallel to this, of course, paleontologists
are not only watching the technology that
we used to bring dinosaurs to you on screen,
we still continue to study the evolution of
the organisms themselves.
Dinosaurs go back as far as the late Triassic,
lived through the Jurassic and Cretaceous
and everybody says the dinosaurs went extinct
when the asteroid hit at the end of the Cretaceous.
Well the treestial dinosaurs did indeed, but
the dinosaurs are still with us today.
Because Birds evolved from dinosaurs.
So one of the great things that I get to talk
about when I am talking to students and interested
people that dinosaurs evolved from the primitive
ones, to the more advanced once finally to
birds and we get to visualize these things
for you with the technology that has been
evolving as well.
And one of the great things about the youth
of today is that they are very technology
savvy and they understand what I mean when
I say the technology is increasingly leaps
and bounce and then they're just as accepting
of the fact that changes taking place over
time with the animals and plants and other
things that lived at the time of dinosaurs
because lots of other things were there too
- the precursors of mammals, insects, bugs.
plants.
Reptiles that swam in the ocean, reptiles
that fly in the sky, all these things were
around and we study all of them and then we
bring them to you on screen and everyone gets
excited about it.
All right, one of the things that we see in
the history of animated dinosaurs is that
Gertie the earliest animated dinosaurs is
a big lumbering creature and that's even the
case in the Fantasia dinosaurs.
Of course as we go farther along to the Jurassic
Park and Jurassic world dinosaurs they are
much more active, they are much more agile
there much faster in some cases.
Because that’s what we have learnt in the
last few years.
Early on, we used to think that dinosaurs
were too large to be agile creatures will
in fact that turns out not to be the case.
Late 1960s, John Ostrom and one of his famous
students Bob Bakker, started to suggest that
you know dinosaurs looked a lot like birds
and they were probably quite active and agile
like birds.
They weren't suggesting the dinosaurs flew,
but they were suggesting that they could move
quickly and like birds, they're probably quite
intelligent.
And so over the years our concept of dinosaurs
has changed from these big slow-moving lumbering
creatures to creatures that had bright displays,
could move quickly and in many cases were
perhaps quite intelligent.
Similarly the depiction of those dinosaurs
on screen has also changed from the lumbering
slow debilitated dinosaur to something that
is intelligent enough to hunt, say like, what
you saw in the original Jurassic Park film
or to plan as a group as we seen in birds.
Of course we use the same ideas and something
like Jurassic world.
Everybody thinks a Jurassic Park and Jurassic
world are monster movies, are fantasy movies,
Well, they are in part but much of the story
that we put in to those films are based on
the ideas that we get from biology and based
on the ideas we get from science.
And that's one of the reasons its so exciting
to me as a scientist.
Well one of the great things about being a
paleontologist is that we have to know lots
of different things about animals.
So I teach a course on comparative animal
anatomy which means I need to know lots of
things about lots of different kinds of animals
including say Reptiles and snakes and mammals
and birds and all those kinds of things.
So among mammals for example, are mice, rats,
little rodents.
One of the films, I got to work on was Ratatouille.
Now, you don't want the creatures in Ratatouille
to look like a cartoon mouse or you don’t
want them to look like Mickey Mouse or Tom
and Jerry or something like that.
You want them to look like a unique character
and one of the things that the director of
that film Brad Bird said I need these things
to feel like a rat, otherwise the audience
won't think there's a rat in the kitchen.
They will think Mickey Mouse is in the kitchen.
So what we did we made sure that the main
character in the film and at all of his cohort
were shaped like rats even though later they
stood up on their high limbs, when they are
on their all fours they move like rats.
So when you see Remy in the kitchen you go
‘oh a rat in the kitchen’!
That’s what we needed you to feel.
I understand that he talks later and we know
mice don’t talk, we know rats don’t talk
but because we introduced him as a rat you
continue to follow him as a rat in the film.
And that’s the strategy we use in all sorts
of films where they're talking animals we
make sure you feel them as an animal so that
you think of them as an animal throughout
the story.
