Ultimate Dino Remix 2005 director Jackie Doherty calls her movie "joy on film." Most people around campus have been calling it "that lesbian dinosaur puppet thing with dancing." Either way, Doherty, a Communication junior, and crew recently finished filming with a big party scene shot over two weekends. The Studio 22 film follows two lesbians in a world where dinosaurs are still alive and well. The project has created quite a buzz in and out of the film department, mainly one of confusion. Doherty sat down with PLAY to explain that she anticipates just that for the June premiere.
PLAY: A lot of people have been hearing some crazy ideas about Dino Remix. What's the basic concept behind the movie?
Jackie Doherty: It's a teen lesbian love story set in a world where rock music saved the dinosaurs from extinction and they've gone on to live in modern times.
PLAY: Where on earth did you get an idea for something like this?
JD: I came up with the ending sequence for the film when I was playing this game where everyone comes up with their ideal Super Bowl halftime show. I had this idea that the field would be completely dark and there would this one single spot light. There would be this growling noise and the mascots from both teams would be dressed up together in a two-person dinosaur suit with the quarterback of the leading team in its mouth. Then it would drop the lifeless quarterback and scamper away. Then a drum beat would start from a rock band, and the quarterback would start dancing to the beat. Then the lights would go up and reveal the rest of the players on the field doing a choreographed dance.
PLAY: How did all of this translate into the movie?
JD: So over a few months I turned that around into a music video where a dinosaur gets mangled and comes back to life. Then there's other dinosaurs dancing with it. And then I built this whole plot that builds up to the last part and that's where the humans came into the story.
PLAY: And this is all with puppets. What was that like?
JD: It was awesome. I love puppets because there's something that's totally fun about them. It was fantastic. I have this really great puppet designer, Vanessa Soberanis. She and her crew and roommates designed and constructed 24 dinosaur puppets of all different sizes, from about eighteen inches to about six feet tall.
PLAY: And you just finished up doing the dance scene. How did that go?
JD: That was the last thing we did. It was shot over two weekends. We basically wrapped as the sun came up on Sunday morning. It was hard, but we all knew it was going to be hard going into it. That really excites a lot of people, getting to the hardest part. That's the part that's new and something people haven't really done before. So they can prove it to themselves that they could do it and then they move onto something more outrageous. We shot it last because we knew it would be the hardest scene to work on. They didn't finish the puppets until the week of, and then they all had to be brought up to campus. I had a rigging master who worked on attaching strings and cables and all kinds of things to them so we could use them. The way I've been describing it to people is that it was joy on film, because that's how I feel about it now.
PLAY: Looking back on the whole project now, do you regret using puppetry?
JD: No, not at all. It was a really fantastic experience to be able to go from coming in with this idea and having no clue how it was going to get done to seeing everything ultimately on the set with all the pieces in there. I really don't know how else we could have done dinosaurs except for maybe animation and that is not what I was looking for.
PLAY: When does it premiere?
JD: The Studio 22 films all premiere on the weekend of June 3 at Tech. I think everyone is really excited to see what we did. I don't know if they really know what's coming.
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