Babetician wrote:
[The dinosaur model] was about 12 inches tall. I'll have to ask Bruce what happened to the model.
Before the makeover, the model was a bright sky blue, with no personality. I always try to make my faces wicked looking. Bruce re-designed the teeth, and wanted me to sculpt ridges along the face that lined up with the teeth.
That is a fantastic looking dinosaur model! Would have loooked great animated.

On the subject of shoddy VFX, I have to side with a lot of posters here in that I will cut a lot of slack for low-budget films. Someone cited The Crawling Eye (or as we Brits know it by its original title, The Trollenberg Terror) for poor VFX. But I defend that film by saying that the main problem with the miniatures is that they're too small for the extensive fire effects at the end, and the production clearly couldn't afford a high-speed camera so the poor old VFX crew had to shoot them at normal speed, thus causing them to look rather absurd when in action. Having said that, the aliens themselves are well designed and made (the veiny brain/bodies and hideous bloodshot cyclopean eyes are great), the miniature of the laboratory on the mountain is decent enough as well, and there are effective matte paintings. Given that the VFX were helmed by Les Bowie, I should imagine they cost virtually nothing, as he was a master of low-budget effects. John Brosnan says in his history of special effects, Movie Magic:
Bowie can claim to be the only man to have parted the Red Sea for only £80, and in Technicolour! It was not that impressive apparently but as Bowie says: "What do you expect for £80?"
I can't forgive big-budget crap, though, and top of my list must be 1979's Meteor. Remember, this was post-Star Wars and contemporaneous with Alien, they spent millions of dollars yet the miniature spacecraft still look like they were made from Airfix model kits; the various meteor 'splinters' are awful, just bright lights zooming around, no trails or anything; most of the destruction scenes are naff, but that of New York is especially abysmal, mainly tinted stock footage of buildings being explosively demolished. There's a scene early on depicting the Skylab-lookalike Mars spacecraft passing in front of the sun in which the 'sun' is clearly a film light, complete with visible lamp-housing! Shots of the missiles taking off from the orbiting weapons platforms reveal the exhaust plumes to be vapour squirted over bright grain-of-wheat bulbs, the bulbs actually being visible in the model rocket nozzles in some shots! National insignia on the US and Soviet missiles look like model kit decals, I swear you can see the outlines. There are many more examples. It's truly dire.

Funnily enough, at around the same time Meteor was being made, a TV film was rushed into production with a similar theme (doubtless to cash-in on Meteor-mania) titled A Fire In The Sky (not to be confused with the much later Whitley Streiber alien-abduction anal-probe-fest Fire In The Sky) in which a comet hits Phoenix, Arizona. For a film made with a fraction of Meteor's budget, the production team turned in vastly superior effects - you can see the relevant clip here:
A Fire In The Sky

Last Edited By: Roger McT Dec 27 11 2:00 PM. Edited 4 times.