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Behind The Scenes
David Allen Reanimates Dinosaur Bones For
DOCTOR MORDRID

It's easy enough to visit a museum, look at the dinosaur skeletons and imagine the great beasts in prehistoric combat. Now these fossils are brough to savage life battling socerers in DOCTOR MORDRID, with a spectacular duel which David Allen has realized through the magic of stop-motion animation.

Such fantasy classics as JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS have animated skeletons but DOCTOR MORDRID is the first tp present the raging bones of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Mastodon. Though the original script called for the flesh eater to battle a flying Pteranodon, that fight would have been over the minute the Tyrannosaurus choped down on its opponent's lighter bones and delicate wings. Allen thought that the weight and strenght of a Mastodon would make for a better match against the Tyrannosaurus.

"It was challenging to get a sense of combat from two skeleton monsters beacuse when they hit each other, they have to hit each other hard," remarked Chris Endicott, animation assistant. Allen also had to evoke the creatures' gigantic proportions onscreen without making them move too slowly.

Where another special effects creator might have used rear-projection to give his tiny model their freasome height, Allen came up with a daring new system. An enormous photographic slide of the real-life background was constructed to be 36 by 30 inches wide, where upon light was beamed through to create the illusion of a real background. "The final picture is completely without the grainy, unreal quality of rear-projection", Endicott explained. "It looks so sharp that you feel like you're there."

"There isn't a name yet for this unique marriage of stop-motion animation and transparent photography, and Allen is too much the professional to worry about fancy monickers for the work he does. Allen has personally animated 95% of the special effects in DOCTOR MORDRID, including scenes of demons bursting through a dimensional doorway. An admiring Endicott notes that Allen also doesn't need to storyboard his work: "He looks at the shot, thinks about the necessary movements and just does them. When you've been animating for as long as Dave has, you just do it from experience."

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