Home  l  Gallery l  Behind The Scenes  l F.A.Q.s Guest Book  l  Anarchy Zone  l  CV  l Links  l  Contact Conal Doyle's 1912 novel The Lost World has long since entered into the public domain, which means that it can be brought to the screen by anyone who fancies taking it on. To be clear then, this Lost World is a direct-to-video production starring Patrick Bergin, not the BBC adaptation starring Bob Hoskins, nor (ho ho ho) Spielberg’s Jurassic Park sequel. I suppose its real reason for being was to try and steal a few box-office crumbs from the table of the 1997 Jurassic behemoth. Bob Keen was the director, so naturally his Image Animation company was in the frame to supply the practical creature effects. The first I knew about this was in the early days of raising capital for the project. One morning a big box of dinosaur kits was The pitch for Lost World II reaches a heady climax dumped on my workbench. Bob’s plan? He felt a few bonus dino pictures would help sell the Lost World script to potential investors, and so at his request the models were assembled, painted and then photographed in front of office pot plants (that is to say, ‘jungle foliage’). Um, yeah… just the slightest bit unconventional. But whatever works: the film got financed! By the time the film proper got underway I was off doing other things, but I stuck around long enough to sculpt this baby pterodactyl. In the story our intrepid adventurers blunder across a nest of pterodactyl eggs. One of the eggs gets cracked open and this thing comes flopping out. There was no rocket science to this one – just a plastiline sculpture over a wire armature, to be moulded in fibreglass and duplicated in silicone rubber for that fleshy translucent look. The wings were left off the sculpture to be fabricated separately out of sheet silicone. My first instinct when sculpting this was to go for an embryonic, half-formed look. Mr. Keen wanted something a little more horror-movie nasty, so the final result was this emaciated, “in the bath for a month” appearance. The happy little smile on his face is unintentional!
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