Dinotopia - Hypothetical Keyframe

In 1992, illustrator James Gurney published the fantasy book Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time, the first of a series set in a fictional lost continent filled with humans and prehistoric creatures from every age coexisting. The same year, acclaimed screenwriter Linda Woolverton wrote the script for a live-action feature length film based on this first book, and pitched it to Columbia Pictures accompanied by some of Gurney's sketches of key moments in the film.

Though it was never produced, the sketches were published in Imaginative Realism, Gurney's 2009 book describing his process for painting fantasy subjects. When I saw them, I was disappointed that I'd never get to see them on the big screen, but was instantly inspired to do what I could as an artist to visualize what a live-action Dinotopia movie might look like. With Gurney's permission, I created this scene using digital painting and photobashing to bring this lost movie to life.

This keyframe shows the character Will Denison cornered by a massive Giganotosaurus named Stinktooth in the Rainy Basin region of Dinotopia. Behind him are ruins left behind in the jungle by an ancient Dinotopian civilization. In the 3 decades since the original production sketch, we've learned a lot more about Giganotosaurus, which allowed me to paint it more accurate to how the animal might have looked like in life. The large horns of the original are gone, replaced with a lower, rougher skull, and the arms are smaller.