Win Free Walking With Dinosaurs Tickets

Posts: 1688 · Posted: Thu Apr 24, 2008 11:14 am

After years of planning, Walking With Dinosaurs came to life at Sydney's Acer Arena on January 10, 2007. The show has already proved itself such a sensation, that the North American tour was fast-tracked.

Ten species are represented from the entire 200 million year reign of the dinosaurs. The show includes the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the terror of the ancient terrain, as well as the Plateosaurus and Liliensternus from the Triassic period, the Stegosaurus and Allosaurus from the Jurassic period and Torosaurus and Utahraptor from the awesome Cretaceous. The largest of them, the Brachiosaurus is 45 feet tall, and 75 feet from nose to tail. It took a team of 50 - including engineers, fabricators, skin makers, artists and painters, and animatronic experts - a year to build the original production.

Variety said, "The dinosaurs are stunning, life-size and faultlessly nimble. In act one, the beasts parade into the arena gnashing and cavorting as a safari-suited paleontologist describes their attributes ... in the second half, the action cranks up, culminating in a spectacular clash as a T-Rex mom defends her baby from predators. Sonny Tilders' triumphant creature design ensures Walking With Dinosaurs is a truly spectacular spectacular. It is everything a dino-phile could want."

The New York Times said that in this show dinosaurs make "a thundering comeback after 65 million years."

Gloria Goodale of the Christian Science Monitor said, “When the dinosaurs start pouring out onto the stage, if you don’t have to stifle the natural flight response of any living breathing being, then it’s your pulse that needs checking.”

Newsweek called the show, "that rare entertainment beast that parents and kids can enjoy together."

It took 50 artists and technicians one year to build the show. The 15 dinosaurs were originally “hatched” by Tilders, the head of creature design, in a Melbourne Docklands workshop big enough to park a 747. For the North American tour, the only building large enough to house rehearsals for the dinosaurs – some as large as 36 ft tall by 56 ft long, was the Greater Tacoma Convention and Trade Center!

Artistic Director William May is known around the globe for co-producing shows with Malcolm Cooke for the past 30 years, including The Hobbit and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. He produced Marilyn An American Fable on Broadway and co-composed and wrote the musical Always for the West End.

Director Scott Faris directed Michael Crawford in EFX at MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, which at the time was the biggest stage production ever conceived, and was on the production team that created Siegfried & Roy at the Mirage Hotel. Faris directed the London production of Chicago, as well as productions of Les Miserables, City of Angels, Cats, Grease and the 2007 national tour of Sweet Charity starring Molly Ringwald.

Faris said, "We take the audience on a journey back in time and show them how the dinosaurs might have actually looked in their prime - huge, sometimes frightening, sometimes comical monsters - that fought for survival every day of their lives. Our dinosaurs move exactly like they are real -- with all the roars, snorts and excitement that go with it. The realism is mind-blowing!"

Sonny Tilders, who designed and built the creatures has been, for the past decade, one of the major creative forces of the high-tech world of animatronic puppetry for film and television. He was one of the lead animatronic engineers for Jim Henson’s Creature workshop on the Farscape series, followed by work on Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, Peter Pan, Ghost Rider and The Chronicles of Narnia.

Tilders said, "Many of the technologies we are using on WALKING WITH DINOSAURS – The Live Experience are borrowed from film. The computer software and hardware we have developed is based on the systems used to control animatronic creatures in feature films.”
"To make it appear that these creatures are flesh and blood weighing six, eight or even 20 tons, we use a system called "muscle bags," made from stretch mesh fabric and filled with polystyrene balls, stretched across moving points on the body. These contract and stretch in the same manner that muscle, fat, and skin does on real creatures."

"The puppeteers use "voodoo rigs" to make many of the dinosaurs move. They are miniature versions of the dinosaurs with the same joints and range of movement as their life-sized counterparts. The puppeteer manipulates the voodoo rig and these actions are interpreted by computer and transmitted by radio waves to make the hydraulic cylinders in the actual dinosaur replicate the action, with a driver hidden below the animal, helping to maneuver it around the arena." Suited puppeteer specialists, who are inside the creatures, operate five of the smaller dinosaurs.

Warner Brown wrote the script of "Walking with Dinosaurs - The Live Experience." He is an accomplished writer whose works include the book of the musical Flickers on Broadway, the screenplay of Nijinsky for Regent Entertainment, the musical The Black and White Ball, which features music by Cole Porter and The Truth About Light, written with composer Jimmy Roberts. Other credits include a new version of Half A Sixpence for the West End in 2008, Garbo – The Musical with music by Jim Steinman and Michael Reed, playing in Europe, and the plays and musicals Scandal, The Biograph Girl, Six for Gold, Cinderella, Talullah for a Day and Dance for Life.

The score of WALKING WITH DINOSAURS - The Live Experience is by James Brett, additional writer, orchestrator and conductor of 20th Century Fox’s Alien vs. Predator and Miramax’s Ella Enchanted. Brett helped create the groundbreaking collaboration between Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony as assistant Musical Director alongside Michael Kamen; the album sold 5 million copies worldwide.

The sets and projections are by the internationally renowned designer Peter England, a frequent collaborator at Opera Australia and the Australian Ballet. He designed the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, was a co-designer of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games Closing Ceremony, designed three City of Sydney New Year’s Eve Celebrations and was a finalist in the international design competition for the Pentagon Memorial in Washington DC.

Lighting Designer John Rayment lit the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games; Hong Kong’s original A Symphony of Light, a massive cityscape permanent lighting display involving over 18 buildings; Singapore’s 2002 National Day Parade stadium event; and Singapore’s Marina Bay annual New Year’s Eve Countdown display. Rayment also works frequently at Opera Australia and has lit 30 productions for Sydney Dance Company.