Marshall, Will and Holly get up close & personal with stop-motion dinosaurs in the ambitious 1974-1976 kid’s TV series Land of the Lost, thanks to an ingenious video compositing technique.
The sheer volume of dinosaurs that crowd episodes of Land of the Lost is impressive, considering the expense of stop-motion effects at the time. Unprecedented is the tight interaction between actors and dinosaurs. In many episodes, dinosaurs and actors mingle and even physically interact with each other.
The technical challenges of economically animating dinosaur effects for a low-budget weekly children’s TV series were solved with a unique marriage of chroma-key video compositing and filmed stop-motion animation. In the early 1970’s, the techniques of mixing dinosaurs and actors on the same screen were well established. The most common techniques included rear-projection (like Ray Harryhausen’s Dynamation technique, where puppets were animated in front of a translucent screen), or mattes pulled from a bluescreen background (sometimes it was green, or even magenta). These film-based techniques were highly refined, but required detailed planning and time-consuming execution that wasn’t practical for a weekly television series.
This production photo of Phil Tippet animating an ED-209 puppet for the 1987 movie Robocop illustrates a traditional rear projection setup. The stop-motion puppet is placed in front a translucent screen. Projected behind the screen is previously shot background film with actors. The rear projection is incrementally advanced for each frame shot. For budgetary and schedule reasons, techniques like this weren’t suitable for Land of the Lost.
For traditional stop-motion composites, actors are filmed first, pantomiming their reactions to unseen creatures. Land of the Lost’s chroma-key mattes turned this process upside down. Uniquely, the animation was completed first, on film. Later, the show’s actors were videotaped in front of a bluescreen, and directed to respond to the existing animated footage. On a video editor, a chroma key filter extracted the actors from the blue background, replacing it with the footage animated on film. Gene Warren, Jr. (now at Fantasy II Film Effects), who with his father Gene Warren Sr., Harry Walton and Pete Kleinow animated the dinosaurs in the series, reflected on this technique in Filmfax magazine #114:
We did the effects before the live-action was shot. It never had been done that way, and it probably hasn’t been done since. To do the video compositing it had to be done backwards… The characters had to match what the dinosaurs did. It was a hellof a lot of work, but also a lot of fun, and creative.
Chroma-key, still common in television production (TV news weather forecasters are chroma-keyed in front of weather maps) is explained on Wikipedia.
The chroma-key matte technique proved fast and flexible, and permitted a wide variety of camera setups. Vast landscapes shot from many angles, including many high-angle shots that would be too costly to shoot on full-size sets, are common in Land of the Lost. But chroma-key mattes weren’t without problems. The integration of the actors with the miniature sets isn’t entirely convincing; actors don’t cast shadows, and the limitations of video resolution surrounded them in a (ahem) bluespill halo. A significant technical hurdle was synchronizing the 24 frames per second film footage with video running at about 30 frames per second, which causes some interlaced ghosting between frames on the animated footage. And since video resolution is significantly lower than that of film, it was unsuitable for use in cinema. Nevertheless, Land of the Lost remains visually distinctive thanks to chroma mattes.
Technical achievements aside, Land of the Lost’s character animation is competent. The dinosaurs are distinct characters (with names like Grumpy, Dopey, and Torchy), not merely decorations. Gene Warren Sr.’s Excelsior Animated Moving Pictures studio, best known for its work in television commercials, carried out the show’s special effects, with animation by Harry Walton, Pete Kleinow, and Gene Warren, Jr. Wah Chang designed the dinosaurs, injecting a fantasy element common to his designs (the dinosaur’s long, narrow necks and oversized heads are distinctly Chang). Hand puppets were used for close-ups and physical contact between human and dino, shown at 0:04 and 0:53 in the video.
As a boy, this show terrified me. Excelsior’s dinosaurs and their chroma-key matte technique, in spite of its visual limitations, was clearly effective enough to terrify small children. Today, Land of the Lost retains a visual style that’s all its own.