King Dazbog

Artist's rendering (with rigging). 

Artist's rendering.

I intend to bring a fully-grown dinosaur puppet to the life this year. I shall utilize similar techniques to those that made last year's giant squid project a success. The dinosaur will be roughly 25 feet tall, and 60 feet long. It will be highly animated, using a combination of puppetry and mechanically-driven movement. King Dazbog is a glowing, nighttime art piece. Imagine, if you will, gazing out across the nighttime horizon, scanning the horizon for the next thing to explore. Your eyes rest upon -- can this be real? -- a gigantic, fully-grown, green-glowing dinosaur! It lumbers fluidly and slowly across the landscape, and like a prehistoric moth to an ancient flame, you get on your bike and take off in hot pursuit. From a distance, the motion is shockingly realistic. Its shoulders rock up and down with every colossal step, it's tail swings back and forth in giant sweeping arcs, and its head peers about, raising up to browse the tops of trees, or dipping down low to investigate something on the ground. As you approach, you see the dinosaur is transparent -- it glows a ghostly green and blue, textured like a reptile. Its skeleton is clearly visible inside its body -- ribs, leg bones, and vertebrae running all up and down its spine, all moving in unison with the creature's body. Closer still, and you can make out the dinosaur's head and face -- its mouth opens and closes, its eyes glow a spooky red -- and best of all you can hear the beast. Each step is accompanied with a low-frequency boom that practically shakes the earth, and, just as you reach its tree-trunk legs, the beast unleashes a mighty roar.

"What...IS that?" you ask a fellow thunderstruck Playa-goer.

"That's Dazbog. King Dazbog." 

"Wow," you grunt, "all hail King Dazbog!" 

Artist's rendering.

Here's the scale model of King Dazbog's skeleton.

This is a reference photo of dinosaur anatomy. 

Some early concept sketches.

Details of the metal work. 

A still shot from the Sketchup model. This is to scale.

Another scale Sketchup still.