I went to see this today, because Walking With Dinosaurs. It is both good and awful.

The awful comes first, because it really is important that you know about it before considering watching this movie (I did and took my chances).

Like many wildlife films, Walking With Dinosaurs sets up some of the animals as characters to follow through the movie. The awful bit is, it gives them voices. Actually no, the really awful bit is that the script for those voices is straight out of a bad Saturday morning cartoon. There are two American kid brothers growing up (pachyrhinosaurs). One is stronger but a bit less bright than the other – the underdog’s the hero of course – and there’s a girl pachyrhinosaurus who becomes a love interest. Then there’s a wise-cracking Mexican bird (John Leguizamo – perhaps he’s fed up with being a sloth). There’s no attempt to lip-synch the dialogue – although actually this might be a good point, as I’ll explain below – so there’s a further alienating disconnect between what you’re seeing on screen and what you’re hearing.

Maybe all this will draw in a big junior audience; but I wouldn’t bet on it. I’ve been to some fairly sparsely attended cinema showings, but I don’t think I’ve ever had Cinema 1 at the NPH to myself before (at least the circle – I can’t swear to the stalls being empty but it was awfully quiet). On a Saturday evening just before Christmas. Maybe it clashed with a lot of Christmas parties?

So what are the good bits? The visuals, as you would expect from the Walking With Dinosaurs brand, are really good. Without the physical models that distinguished the earliest Walking With Dinosaurs output, you’re often aware you’re watching CGI, but it’s still pretty good. There are a few places where it’s played for laughs visually, but these are generally not too intrusive. The most gratuitous example is our hero suffering a terrible indignity under the tail of a much larger adult. Other examples are along the lines of dinosaurs slipping on ice and aren’t too overstated. I rather suspect the facial expressions are a bit anthropomorphised, but again it doesn’t seem too heavy-handed.

Given what I said above about the awful script for this movie, it may come as a surprise that I think it actually tells a powerful and effective story. Visually, considering they’re clearly targeting a young audience and have complete control over what happens, few punches are pulled. While it’s not totally nature red in tooth and claw, animals die in this movie when they’re attacked by carnivores, including some we care about. The terrible dialogue detracts from the impact of the scenes, which is perhaps to some extent what it’s supposed to do.

This could actually be a good and quite moving movie, if it had a completely different soundtrack. If you’re an adult, wait until it’s available cheap on DVD, and play it on mute. The lack of lip-synch will help here, as it's not obvious the animals are talking. It would be great if someone could create an alternative score to accompany it.

In the category of “noteworthy, but why?” bits:

1. The story’s book-ended by scenes with some kids and a palaeontologist played by Karl Urban (Éomer in LOTR, Judge Dredd, and Dr. McCoy in the rebooted Star Trek). He’s totally wasted in this role and I don’t know why they spent money on getting a decent actor for a few insignificant scenes when they don’t even use him in any way to promote the film.
2. A herd of migrating Edmontosaurus are accompanied by Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk. Er? OK, it’s a nice track and I guess it’s for the rhythm, but the first thing it made me think was, ah, these must be Iguanodon (because of the thumb spike).
3. New dinosaurs were introduced by a brief freeze and text labelling as to what they were. Perfectly fine in a documentary, weird in a film. Given it probably did have to be there, I think I would rather have had more information.
4. The 3D is nice but not compelling most of the time; they succumb to gimmickry at one particular point that was effective enough to make me jump, but it’s not part of the main body of the movie. I feel as though I should be a bit offended by that, but ho-hum. Other stuff offended me more – see above!

I’ve been on holiday this week, and it’s been a chance to tinker with stuff that I struggle to make time for at the weekends. One of those things is a peg sculpture of a Neanderthal head (pegs à la forensic reconstruction, that is). I found it being remaindered in a toy shop last year when I was looking for a present for my godson.  I figured it was a bit old for him, but something that I would love to play with… (He did get something else, don’t worry!)

I had a choice between this and a gorilla, and according to the advertising material inside there were also a Tyrannosaurus Rex, Julius Caesar and a horse in the range, but I think this is the one I would have chosen anyway – the T-Rex obviously wouldn’t have been 1:1 scale, and a Neanderthal beats old Julius for interest any day.

There were some reasonably detailed instructions inside the kit for reconstructing the Neanderthal’s face, but one vital piece of information was missing – what is this stuff you’ve given me to build the face with, and is it going to set? It was referred to in some places as “clay”, and on the packets as “modelling material”, and it looked a lot like Plasticine.

Without a very definite idea of how the “modelling material” was going to behave, I wanted to have enough slack available to be able to just keep going if time proved to be an issue, so it became top of the list of things to do this week.

Here’s what I started off with; a skull (cream) with some moulded muscle (yellow) and fat (white) on top. Not quite sure why the fat was there, as ultimately it didn’t contribute much to the shape of the face, but I guess I was being informed as well as entertained:

So now I have a creepy Neanderthal head to keep about the house and gather dust. Every home should have one! It’s a shame that it does appear to be Plasticine and therefore not as permanent as it might be; so at some point in the future I suspect it will be reduced to its component parts and/or discarded. However, for now, it’s kind of satisfying to have the result of a (very long!) day’s work to look back on.

The Bell Pettigrew Museum of Natural History, which I visited and reviewed a few years ago, will be open on Saturday and is well worth a visit. Forward notice courtesy of Event: St Andrews, which is collated on a voluntary basis by flybynightpress (and which has an RSS feed).

Heroic journalism by the bravely desk-bound Deputy Editor of the Telegraph has exposed a fiendish Oriental plot to violate the blessed sanctity of the United Kingdom. Deadly guided pandas are to be dispatched to the rebel base of Corstorphine on the planet Edinburgh, from where the evil duly-elected leader of the Scotch peasant army, Alex Salmond, will be able to deploy them at will on a wicked charm offensive. It’s believed that the weapons of cuddly disruption could be deployed against English tourists within 45 seconds. Oi, China! It’s a black and white issue; don’t panda to these separatists!

Alex Salmond	A Panda

Also uncovered in the same story, it appears you can buy Wales cheap, if you fancy it; Benedict Brogan doesn’t.

What an idiot.

While I was in California recently, I visited Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’m not sure that there’s an awful lot to say about the aquarium itself – you know what an aquarium is, right? – apart from a couple of quite interesting nerdy facts. The money to set up and run the aquarium was largely supplied by David and Lucille Packard, also of Hewlett-Packard-founding fame; and although it’s here that they filmed the aquarium bits for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, there have never been any whales here. The tanks aren’t big enough, for a start, as is obvious when you visit.

I tried taking photos, but as very few of the beasties were willing to cooperate in behaving predictably for the camera – especially the otters – it quickly became obvious that video was the only way I was going to get anything half-decent; so here’s my inaugural YouTube video for your delectation. It’s available in resolutions up to 1080p (full HD).

Camera shake is all my fault, as is jerky zooming. Video quality is not great when the lighting is low, though it improves noticeably when the lighting is good; it's a stills camera that does video, not a dedicated video camera. I'm quite pleased with how it copes. If the video is at all sticky I blame Windows Live Movie Maker. I found it quite nice on the whole for editing my first video, but it is a bit buggy. The most noticeable flaw to you may be some slight stickiness on scene changes; the most noticeable flaw to me is that you’re not seeing all the scenes I wanted you to. When you select a clip from the middle of a longer video, Movie Maker sometimes seems to randomly start playing from the start of the video file, rather than the start of the clip. Needless to say, this is very annoying, but as I wasn’t able to figure out why it was picking particular clips to do this on, I eventually settled for the output you see above, which contains a very low number of unwanted substitutions that don’t affect my vision too badly.

Camera shake in particular is something I might have done better on. I had in my backpack a commercially produced version of The Poor Man’s Steadicam, which I chose not to use. This was mostly due to embarrassment (it’s taken me ages to get used to just using a camera when there are people around), but shhh! That’s just between us. I intend to claim it was really an altruistic move, to avoid clouting small kids around the head with the weight on the end.

The cougar that’s been sighted on the Microsoft campus has a Twitter account: @microsoftcougar. Not worth following, but amusing for a quick look.

Having failed to visit the creationist dinosaur museum at Cabazon, it was time to come a bit more up to date in a couple of ways; by visiting a more reputable scientific establishment, to see more recently extinct beasties.

I’ve just returned from setting up Mum’s new broadband connection, having agreed that dial-up is no longer the way.

I got the connection up and running within an hour on Friday (there were some networking issues to sort out, so it wasn’t a completely straightforward five minute job), then spent much of the rest of the weekend bringing software up to date. A four-hour power cut due to high winds actually meant I was a bit pushed for time, but I got all the important stuff done and had no major disasters.

I’ve left new shortcuts on the desktop for Remote Assistance and The Archers “Listen Again”.