4 Creating Cool-Looking Dinosaurs	KING KONG PRODUCTION NOTES Introduction Movie Profile Synopsis A Filmmaker's Dream The Story of King Kong A Young Dreamer Meets a Classic Story 4Casting Kong: Keeping Original Time Naomi Watts as Ann Darrow Jack Black as Carl Denham Adrien Brody as Jack Driscoll Captain, Assistant, Orphan Building a Shrewder Ape Andy Serkis as Kong 4Filming Kong: An Island Off the Charts Cool-Looking Dinosaurs Primitive Islanders A Fully Digitalized Kong A City That No Longer Exists Shooting in Non-Digital World 35-Year Journey Neared End 4Other Stuff: Articles & Interviews Picture Galleries King Kong Poster Store 3Website Home
	The same philosophy of stylization and evolution-run-amok was applied to the fauna that inhabit Skull Island. Jackson was specific in his vision that included “just kind of cool-looking” dinosaurs… ones that differ from the currently accepted paleontological research of how these creatures probably looked. Jackson comments, “We deliberately wanted to throw back a bit to the old-fashioned movie dinosaurs, where they have big scales on their backs and spiky bits, and that sort of crocodile kind of skin texture that they didn't have. And so we threw all that out and just went down the movie dinosaur road-we created a bunch of fictitious dinosaurs, really.” While there are examples of recognizable ones (particularly the sequences involving a Brontosaurus stampede and a battle between Kong and three Tyrannosaurus rex), even these have Skull Island peculiarities.  And some of the beasts-flying lizard-like creatures, for example-never existed at all, except in the 65-million-year-old evolutionary hothouse of Skull Island. Building on historically accurate dinosaur skeletal structures, Weta took creative Darwinian license with the shapes, textures and colors, even going so far as to create one entirely new species, aptly named the Wetasaur. “They're actually original designs; they're not Tyranodons or things like that. They're just creatures that we designed ourselves that we thought would look good in Skull Island,” adds Jackson.  A design process similar to the one utilized to develop and create the miniature sets was employed to give birth to the Skull Island dinosaurs. Final conceptual art was transformed into hand-sculpted creature design maquettes, of which there were more than 150. Ten large “high-level,” detailed creature maquettes were completed for digital scanning, each one taking approximately 1,500 hours to complete. Dinosaurs' dead ancestors-in the form of full-size T. rex, Brontosaurus and Ceratops skeletons-were built for set specificity.      Amazingly, more creatures were created for Kong than for the entire The Lord of the Rings trilogy. 4Next Page: Creating Primitive Skull Islanders