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Planet Dinosaur
Topic Started: Sep 15 2011, 11:14 AM (3,610 Views)
lamna
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So have any of you chaps seen Planet Dinosaur yet? I think it's pretty good, top notch CGI and it's not just something else riding coattails on Walking with Dinosaurs. Rather than being a fictional wildlife documentary, it pauses the action every now and then to explain how we know that Spinosaurus ate sawfish for example. It works really well, and is much more interesting that your typical Discovery Channel "45 minutes of talking heads and 15 minutes of cheap CGI".



I'm sure parts will make super-dinosaur nerds cringe. Johnfaa's probably already writing a nasty story about how horrible the pterosaurs are*, and they call a dinosaur Iguanadon, rather that one of those new bullshit genus**. Then again, the info on the BBC site about Hatzegopteryx looks pretty accurate, saying it hunted on the ground on all fours.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/bbc_planet_dinosaur_timeline_download.pdf

*I didn't notice anything wrong, but if there is anything not on the bleeding edge, he'll know about it.
**Seriously? They are changing I. atherfieldensis to Mantellisaurus? What happened to original always keeping it's name? It's Pluto all over again. Go turn everything upside down in a field nobody cares about science. We were having fun.
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Russwallac
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OOH! NOW I have too see this! :D
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lamna
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I don't know when it's coming to the USA. If you do some faffing about with your browser you can fool BBC iPlayer into thinking you're British and it will let you watch it now.
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Holben
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I watched it, on iPlayer. It's much better than your standard dinodoc.
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nyaaa! iPlayer doesnt work in spain. I'll have to now wait a good while for it to come out in You-Tube D:<
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T.Neo
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Oh god no, this is horrible. The quality of the animation is more than a decade on from Walking With Dinosaurs, but the art design is absolutely horrendous. No effort to make these organisms look like real creatures, now they just look like cartoon characters.

Also, why are they mispronouncing diplodocus? And why the hell are they talking about "pterodactyls"?

Good grief, welcome to the devolution of the presentation of dinosaurs to the public. Is this the £40 million project they've been talking about? What a waste.
Edited by T.Neo, Sep 15 2011, 01:01 PM.
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lamna
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Because it's a trailer to get people to watch the show, and some people do pronounce it that way. Look at the spelling, no "plod" in it.

I'm sorry if something on a major TV show has to be at least a little bit populist, but welcome to the real world. It's much better than your standard Discovery Channel guff.

No idea what you mean by cartoonish though.
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I just wish they wouldn't use the word killers every five seconds.
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lamna
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I don't really notice that sort of thing. Life's better when you can brush past that stuff.
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Yeah, all I want is to see some dinosaurs doin' their thing. I really don't care about narration or minor mistakes (after all, even WWD showed utahraptors in Europe). Give these guys a break!
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T.Neo
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Quote:
 
Because it's a trailer to get people to watch the show, and some people do pronounce it that way. Look at the spelling, no "plod" in it.


It's a stupid pronounciation. :|

And the letter-string "plod" definitely does appear in the name Diplodocus, if I'm not mistaken.

Quote:
 
I'm sorry if something on a major TV show has to be at least a little bit populist, but welcome to the real world. It's much better than your standard Discovery Channel guff.


Yeah, welcome to the real world where people present things in a way that leads people to believing in nonsense.

Better than stuff on the Discovery channel? Debatable. I don't know, I don't think I've ever watched anything this nonsensical before on Discovery, but maybe that's because I made an effort to avoid them.

Even WWD was populist, and it caught a good deal of flak for it. But it was nothing like this, this is like it was made by Micheal Bay.

Quote:
 
No idea what you mean by cartoonish though.


They are totally cartoonish! They look wrong, they move wrong... they look like plastic toys, or something out of a Disney film.

WWD's animation was done in the 1990s and those creatures look better than these things. That's saying a lot. This has the benefit of 10+ years of CGI advancement but they fail to use it convincingly.

Add to that the fact that WWD made use of real environments, which bolstered its believability a lot. This... notsomuch. Maybe, I dunno. There are some things in there that look totally absurd (but then they're possibly supported by fossil evidence, in which case, fair enough).

Quote:
 
I just wish they wouldn't use the word killers every five seconds.


Seconded.

Killers!

Giants!

Vicious!

Seriously, just stop. They're awesome animals, you don't have to rebrand them monsters to present them to an audience.

Quote:
 
I really don't care about narration or minor mistakes (after all, even WWD showed utahraptors in Europe).


Never give these guys a break. Ever. I love WWD but when I think about Utahraptors in Europe it makes me cringe.
Edited by T.Neo, Sep 15 2011, 02:45 PM.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa0U7cvS6Ag
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lamna
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I'm just not seeing it. They do move the camera round a lot, but they didn't seem cartoonish to me.

But then I've actually seen the show, so I can't really judge it like you can.
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Kamidio
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T.Neo
Sep 15 2011, 01:00 PM
And why the hell are they talking about "pterodactyls"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterodactyloidea

I'd expect that kind of dumbassery from someone new to pterosaurs. But for you of all people to ask such a stupid question is unacceptable.

You've lost your edge.

EDIT: And another thing. Would you rip a caveman a new one for painting some deer solid black? No, you wouldn't. It's called stylized art. So hush your mouth or prepare to criticize anything remotely unlife-like. EG: almost everything.
Edited by Kamidio, Sep 15 2011, 04:10 PM.
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lamna
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I didn't know you could make valid points.

Sometimes Fakey, it's almost like you're a real boy.
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