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At the heart of the original concept for the Karoo Origins exhibition that Bruce Rubidge proposed was an animated vista that would show a waterhole in the late Permian Karoo, 255 million years ago, near where Graaff-Reinet is today. His idea was to create an experience similar to sitting and waiting near a waterhole in a nature reserve, to capture the contemplative excitement of waiting and watching for animals to appear. 

It’s a great concept that we immediately saw the potential of and quickly fell in love with as we developed the storylines and reconstructed the prehistoric creatures. 

But no concept can escape contact with reality, and the reality is that while visitors to a game park may be willing to sit for 30 minutes in the hope of seeing a pride of lions, no one wants to sit and look at a screen for 30 minutes waiting for an animated therapsid to walk into view. 

This presented several  problems. We had to create enough action to remain engaging without making the scene unbelievable. Since we wanted to include as many species as possible and show their behaviour this was more of a problem of structuring stories and performances in a seamless loop. This led to all sorts of complex narrative and structural problems to solve, that I will explore in another blog. 

In the end we had 23 animals in total in the scene, some herding, others in pairs and a few individuals. They weren’t all on screen at the same time, but we had to coordinate their movements very carefully to ensure that they reacted to each other at the right times and that the screen always provided some detailed performance for visitors to observe. 

The biggest challenge of this production was that it is a 6m15s a single shot that needed to loop perfectly. No cuts, no camera movement. Just one 6mx3m projection that a visitor can start watching at any point in the loop. 

And to save costs we made the decision, for better or worse, to skip previs. In the end I think it was the right decision, but it was not without consequences. We worked from an animatic, along with concept art, pose and expression sheets, as well as detailed plans of the staging we set up for the scene. We carefully plotted and replotted the paths the animals would follow in order to know where they needed to be at each stage.

To get this right within the extremely tight budget we pretty much worked straight ahead. By this I mean we started with our star, the gorgonopsian, Rubidgea atrox, who we affectionately referred to as Gorgi. She has the most screen time and interacts with the most other animals. So working against our planning documents we locked in her performance first, and then worked through the rest of the animals, shifting our plans to accommodate changes as we worked.

We all knew this would be challenging, but I don't think anyone in the team was prepared for how much flexibility gets lost when you cannot edit shots, either to reframe action or restructure your film. Everything needs to work right there in the frame.

It also impacted how we needed to structure things in order to remain interesting. For example, at one point a small herd of 5 massive animals, Kitchingonomodon,  walk down the hill in the background. This takes time! In a normal movie you could handle this in a few cuts. But our herd had to walk on screen, we needed to show every footfall. So we needed to make them interesting, but also provide some action in other parts of the frame to allow visitors to look around and find points of interest. 

In a way this picks up on the experience of camping out as a waterhole in a nature reserve, but condensing the experience to be enjoyed in minutes. 

One way in which it is not like being at a real waterhole is how close some of the animals come to the camera. Even in 4k smaller animals became almost invisible on the opposite bank, and even some of the larger animals were tiny. We wanted our star, Gorgi, to come right to the front of screen space, to be nearly in the room with the audience. This meant staging the scene very, very carefully, in order to get the right animals right up to the camera, without getting unnaturally close to each other. We also had to plan the space around the waterhole to make sure the far bank wasn’t too far away, to find a balance between a confined space that brought the animals close to the camera, but without destroying the illusion by cramming them into the scene. 

Having only one view also means you have limited tools for directing audience attention. No camera moves, no cuts, no pulling focus. Animal activity needed to be obvious enough to spot, but not so obvious as to appear unnatural. We could use the most obvious animals, and particularly Gorgi. What was she looking at? What was she responding to? When she runs or roars, what do the other animals do? These movements and gestures within the performances became the key to directing audience attention. 

In the end it worked out wonderfully. While we had, of course, shown the film to many people for feedback, sitting in the exhibition on opening day was thrilling! We got to watch families sit, enthralled, through several loops of the animation. They weren’t watching it once or even twice, but sometimes for over 30min at a time!