The Best Wedding Crasher Ever

Even though the arteries of the internet are clogged with musical proposals, embarrassing engagement photos and wedding flashmobs there is at least one recent wedding gimmick on the web that is fresh and hilarious.  This has got to be the most creative (and I can only imagine the most requested of wedding photographers) bridal party shot of all time. My only question is this - how'd they get that T-Rex to pose like that?

Read more about the now-famous photo here.

In Japan, the Raptor is Alive and Well

The raptor chase scenes in Jurassic Park are as terrifying today as they were in 1993 when the film first came out. Remember shaking along with Lex and Tim, huddled in the kitchen as the giant beast used highly evolved brains and natural hunting abilities to stalk them?

Can you imagine what it would feel like to see that 10 foot tall creature (which is really a Jurassic Park myth, since in real life a velociraptor was about 3 feet tall) come barreling around a corner craving your blood? 

I bet this guy can.

A Dinosaur Fundraiser

While chronicling the presence of dinosaurs in our modern world, I occasionally contribute to the trend. Aside from the dinosaur image that holds a prominent place in my apartment and the army of small figurines that swarm my cubicle at work (I'll follow up with posts documenting these), I recently performed an experiment that measured how popular our extinct friends really are.

I'm training to run the Chicago marathon this year and am raising money for the Red Cross. My original goal was $1500, and I spent a couple months repeatedly emailing my friends and family, sharing inspirational stories of the Red Cross, Facebooking and Tweeting the link to my fundraising page out across the universe. I was feeling pretty good about my efforts. In about two months of promoting my page, I raised 800 bucks (I have super nice friends). 



With three and a half months left until the big day, I felt confident that I would meet my goal.

Then, on the last Friday of July, an ex-colleague of mine who I haven't seen in 5 years messaged me that she saw my link. She said she'd be happy to donate, but in return she'd like me to draw her a dinosaur. Although I've never been much of an artist, and I think she was being sort of silly, of course I said yes. I could definitely draw a dinosaur for a donation to the Red Cross.

In fact, the more I thought about it, I wondered if it would be a good way to raise a few more bucks. I signed into Facebook and updated my status. I offered a personalized dinosaur drawing for anyone who donated to my "Do It For The Dinos" fundraising campaign which would go on for only five short days. I expected a couple more donations.

 In that five days, I received more than 30 donations, totaling $1025 (bringing me to $1825 -- 122% of my goal)

Over a thousand dollars raised in 5 days because friends, family members, and barely acquaintances wanted to get their hands on some limited edition dinosaurs drawings. Because people love dinosaurs (especially anthropomorphic ones). I have completed drawing half of those 30-something requests, and have given most of them to their new owners. The campaign is over, though I could be persuaded to do some more drawings for the right size donation.Here are some camera-phone photos documenting a few of my favorites.

All images are copyright JScribe "Do It For The Dinos" Red Cross Fundraiser

Jurassic Park 3D - Better Than Ever?

Twenty years after it first hit the big screen, Jurassic Park is trending again thanks to the re-released 3D version of the film. Although I'm not sure we used the word trending in those days before Twitter.

Not only were many of us too young to have seen JP in the theater in 1993 (it was rated PG13, and rightfully so), but seeing it in 3D was a dream we never thought would come true.  I have to say, the movie doesn't let us down for one second. Because JP wasn't created to be 3D, it doesn't have any of the purposeful, gimmicky flaws of many 3D films. Nothing arbitrarily comes flying out of the screen toward the audience, the 3D just enhances the beautiful landscapes of Isla Nubar, and makes those clever raptors even more terrifying and life-like. 

I was excited to see these incredible creatures in the large scale of a movie theater (my last screening of JP was on my 17 inch TV), but I wasn't prepared for the sound. The cacophony of a raptor annihilating that poor bovine bait is almost nauseating, and T-Rex's might roar actually shakes your bones in theater surround sound. The original music by John Williams makes your heart practically beat out of your chest. Williams also scored plenty of other film favorites like the Harry Potters, Star Wars and Indiana Jones.

I have written on this site about what the original JP meant to me, but I was shocked to say how much of this film stands up 20 years later. The graphics are incredible, and the warnings of Ian Malcolm about playing God with Nature have never felt more important.

Jurassic Park was ahead of its time in its unflinching support of dinosaurs-as-birds theory, which we now look at as a certainty. Early on,  while Grant and Sattler dig in the Badlands, the team actually laughs when Dr. Grant suggests it. As a modern day audience, we laugh at their ignorant laughter. In the time since the original films, we've also learned a lot more about dinosaurs (many of them would have been fuzzy, if not feathery), and the film may not always be accurate, but there isn't a moment when it doesn't entertain and excite.

Go see Jurassic Park in 3D - It doesn't get much better than this!

Breaking Dino News !

We've known that Jurassic Park IV has been on it's way for a while now, but the news just broke that a director has been chosen for this film. Deadline reports that Colin Trevorrow has been tapped to direct the newest installment!

Trevorrow directed the 2012 film Safety Not Guaranteed, which won the Independent Spirit Award for best first feature film.  It was also nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the powers that be would be wise about choosing a director for what could be an epic masterpiece, but we will have to wait and see.

The current scheduled release date for JP4 is July 2014. Mark your calendars!

A Prehistoric Mockbuster

Film rental service Netflix offers dinosaur lovers a plethora of choices from animated to animatronic, from classic to laughable. I keep my Netflix queue loaded with random dinosaur films. I try to watch the movies that are important to the cannon of dinosaur films – from early contributions such as The Lost World and King Dinosaur to films that altered the genre like The Jurassic Park series. I also add kid’s films like Land Before Time or We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story. Some of these films are amazing, and some are not – but that’s why I like to see them all.  I’m interested in how these films reflect culture, science and other films.

In my mailbox last week I found a movie called 100 Million BC and did not instantly recognize what it was.  The envelope revealed that the 2008 film was made by The Asylum, a production company known for their “mockbusters” – low-budget action films with poor acting and dialogue, often named similarly to recently released films, ostensibly to capitalize on their popularity. Whether I Netflixed it with that knowledge or not didn’t matter. I was excited to check it out.

The movie actually has a couple redeeming factors – it’s fast moving and fun, with a premise based on time travel (it’s a little vague about how the time travel works, as most films trying to tackle this topic are).  The acting is certainly terrible, as are the special effects, but it’s a nice surprise to see Steven Keaton, er, Michael Gross playing our aging super-genius out to make good on the errors of his past.

This film also has a few fun plot elements. It opens with modern day hikers stumbling upon some prehistoric cave paintings. Its unbelievable enough that the paintings include images of dinosaurs (unless you believe that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, and then its totally plausible), but also with the hand scrawled phrase “Rita Hayworth as Gilda.” We find out that the messengers most certainly were 1950s scientists sent back in time 100 million years via some early time travel experiments. The paintings prove for the first time that the time travelers survived the trip.

100 Million BC also falls back on (or pays homage to, depending on how you look at it) some classic dino-film movie tropes. You probably won’t be surprised to find out that some way, some how, there’s a glitch in the portal and a terrifying T-Rex is transported to the urban center of an American city. Calling to mind 100 Million other movies.  Like I said, we can give them a little credit and say that the decision was a purposeful hat-tip to films that came before them, but its just as likely that the attempt to make a quicky direct-to-DVD dinosaur action movie lead to a little laziness in screen writing.

It's not a life-changing film, and Spielberg would likely not have his attention held, but it is a fun 85 minutes. It also reminds us that even today dinosaur special effects are an art, and can be pretty painful if left in the hands of folks just trying to capitalize on the love we all have for dinosaurs.

The Vision of Charles Knight

The dramatic, large scale paintings in Chicago's Field Museum have always intrigued me. So many of the pieces looked like they are created by the same artist, but they range from landscapes to mammals to dinosaurs and some are absolutely massive in size. I finally started doing my research (including locating the wall-mounted identification plates near each piece) and found that my suspicions were correct - several of the pieces at the field were created by an artists named Charles R. Knight. Knight was an  American natural life artist who used his passion for nature and biology, a sharp eye for detail and a stellar imagination to create drawings and paintings of prehistoric creatures.

Knight's Elotherium at AMNH

Born in 1874 in Brooklyn, Knight could be found recording images from nature in his journal at an early age. Although legally blind (due to a severe astigmatism and a boyhood eye injury), Knight saw with the help of specialty eye-glasses, but often worked only inches from his canvas. As a young man in New York, he attended art school, and in the 1890's was commissioned to complete a restoration of the extinct pig Elotherium from a set of fossil bones for the American Museum of Natural History (right).  The folks at AMNH were impressed and soon Knight was creating depictions of extinct beasts (including human ancestors) for museums around the country.

It was in 1926 when Knight was asked to paint the 28 mural series that graces the walls of my beloved Field museum chronicling the history of life on Earth. Although the artist of many landscapes and prehistoric mammals, many of his pieces are famed for depicting Dinosaurs as active and fast-moving animals - many years ahead of this method of thinking among paleontologists. Knight's depictions were often based on basic biology, fossils and a lot of imagination, so some of his beasts turned out not to be entirely historically accurate. The accuracy of his 1897 depiction of Brontosauruses (Brontosauri?) was later debunked when Brontosaurus was found to have been land dwelling (Knight depicted the animals in water) and also not tail dragging. Considering the first complete dinosaur skeleton in the United States (Hadrosaurus Foulkii) had only been discovered in 1858, most of Knight's depictions were far ahead of his time.

One of those helpful informational plaques at 

Field.

The world lost Knight in 1953, but his legacy continues to grow. Earlier this year, Scientific American published a piece called Time Traveler: The Art of Charles Knight in advance of Richard Milner's new book, "Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time" which was released by Abrams in March. Quickly following the article SA posted a slide show of Knights work (here).

Want to learn more? On the Field's multimedia site you can find a collection of all of their Knight pieces. You can also find a compilation of his work for the American Museum of Natural history here. Smithsonian's Dinosaur Tracker Blog has a great piece here about the more personal side of Knight's career and creativity by the excellent Brian Switek.

Although old-school paintings of dinosaurs might not seem as impressive as the CGI we have today, we have to remember that Knight was working in the later half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. During this time, understanding of dinosaurs was limited, fossil hunting was still a bit like the wild west, and the true study of dinosaur behavior and habitat had barely begun. Knight's work was akin to a Ray Bradbury novel - exploring a far-flung locale, describing worlds in which no man had ever walked. The world of the dinosaurs was as foreign as the Martian landscape and the vision of Charles Knight helped bring this unbelievable world to life, and continues to do so for museum-goers today.

Source: http://www.charlesrknight.com/