Friday, August 8, 2008

Fort Worth Omni Theater pre-opening breakfast gala and mini-movie review: Dinosaurs Alive!

DAMN executive producer.

By John P. Meyer

As reported by content partner West and Clear, Fort Worth's Omni Theater will reopen this weekend, while construction continues on the remainder of the upgrades to the Museum of Science and History.

We were privileged to attend a special breakfast and pre-opening show this morning (Aug. 8) featuring one of the new IMAX movies making its debut in the updated Omni: Dinosaurs Alive!

Museum Dir. of Public Affairs Steve Anderson welcomed us to the members-only special event (also attended by a smattering of press); Anderson had promised to save us a muffin if we arrived late for the breakfast buffet. Fortunately, the traffic from Big D to Cowtown proved manageable during rush hour, and we didn't have to test him on that score.

The Omni closed its doors last September. While it will now resumes operations, it'll be Sept. of '09 before the renovation of the rest of the facility is completed.

When the new wings of the museum come online, Steve tells me that a dinosaur articulation project currently being worked jointly by SMU's Shuler Museum and the FWMSH will be moved here from its current work area at the Shuler. Folks will be able to see the paleontologists working on the skeleton as they tour the other exhibits.

Steve expressed his deep happiness at the imminent reopening of the Omni doors, relating that - even with the windows and doors boarded up and construction tape stretched across the walkway - people desperate for an Omni show have been hopping the tape and trying to get in for the entire year that the facility has been closed.

New to the Omni is a digital (as opposed to analog) sound system; flashy and colorful cove lighting displays; and a carefully-tuned aural environment that assures folks seated anywhere in the tilted, over-arching dome auditorium will hear the same perfectly balanced sound as a person seated right in the middle. (Furthermore, those in the far corners won't be able to hear the ratcheting of the industrial-size projector, as I did from my perch right next to the center aisle.)

Oh, and Kevin - never fear, the stomach-dropping helicopter flyover of Fort Worth is back. (Though the music has changed, if I'm remembering correctly.)

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The Dinosaurs Alive! film is 40 minutes long (or 2 1/2 miles if you stretch it out from end to end, as we are informed by our perky tour guide Hillary) and offers an entertaining and romantic primer on the history of dinosaur hunters, fleshed out with some on-site expeditioning in the company of current paleontologists in the field. By "field" I refer to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, followed a bit later by the magnificent sandstone badlands of Ghost Ranch in New Mexico.

Interspersed throughout the film are animations of dinosaurs as they might have appeared in life, produced at the render farms of Digital Artists Montreal Network. (That's right: DAMN.) These computer whiz animators have done previous productions for the Discovery Channel, and for this film they worked closely with scientists at the American Museum of Natural History to get the fleshing out and walking around of the beasties as close to the projected reality of their formerly living selves as possible.

We encounter fierce feathered Velociraptors in the Gobi and a slew of Coelophysis (Coelophysi? Coelophysises?) in New Mexico, along with several new varieties of dinos that have been recently identified - one from bones lying ignored for nearly a century in the catacombs of the AMNH.

Following the eye-opening, mind-expanding, wrap-around movie, we were enlightened - if not exactly thrilled - by an insider's explanation of the dinosaur animation process by DAMN executive producer Peter Skovsbo, who flew down from Montreal for the occasion. We were treated to such computer animation buzzwords as "storyboard," "pre-vis," "blocking" and "compositing" (ZZZzzzz...).

Skovsbo closed by sharing with us the difficulties of operating in the middle ground between the film directors, who are interested in dramatic dinosaur action sequences, and the paleontologists, who are more concerned with accuracy in relation to the fossil evidence. (Even the dino scientists, it turns out, seldom agree on the details.)

Welcome back, Omni Theater!

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