A hmmmm moment…
Every now and then there’s one of those moments when you have to go hmmm. I was reading a CNN article about a bowling ball sized frog that lived contemporaneously with dinosaurs and had teeth. But it wasn’t until I saw a photo with the article that I thought I’ve seen that frog before. So, I thought about it a while and then went to the Leakey Cauldron site to find the picture of the chorus that sang in Prisoner of Azkaban. Sure enough there was the frog looking like the picture of the ancient one in the news article.
Of course, it might be hard to see the similarity from the two pictures but if you go and rewatch the movie, I’m sure you’ll see that they are very similar.
What this brings up for me is how often FX people get things right when they are told to do something. They didn’t get the teeth, but they sure made the size and shape just about right for our ancient frog ancestor.
I remember going to a talk by a planetary geologist who was saying he’d hired a science fiction artist to do a picture of Venus based on some information he gave him on the climate and other geological information. When the picture was done, the scientist wasn’t really happy with the flat mountains but the artist insisted that it was what would happen under that pressure. Next survey of Venus sent back pictures and lo and behold there were the artist’s pancake mountains.
Maybe artists and FX people should have an active part in scientific inquiry because they seem to think outside the box in interesting ways.