Artist Q&A

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Question

Can you help me convey the weight and motion of a giant stomping beast?

Floppy Thompson, UK

Answer

Bobby replies

A grizzly bear can sprint up to 60kph, which is surprising because grizzlies are huge, and great size and great speed are usually incompatible concepts. For this reason, conveying the weight of a giant beast crashing through the jungle can be difficult: we tend to think of giants as lumbering, not running with speed. In fact, even when a gigantic beast is being depicted as charging at something, it often looks like it’s running in slow motion. Again, this is because our brains don’t naturally associate ‘ big’ with ‘ fast’, so there’s a natural dissonance there. With a giant beast, powerful and destructive is easy, but a fear response in the viewer comes from adding speed.

When I was asked to do this, my first thought was the “must go faster” scene from Jurassic Park. A T-rex is scary enough, but what makes that scene truly intense was that the T-rex was chasing the jeep and it was gaining on it.

For this question, the key to showing speed is in how the weight and energy of the beast affects its environment as it crashes recklessly through it.

Normally, the bigger something is, the slower we expect it to be, and vice versa. So the challenge here is to overcome this assumption in a believable way.