New Giant Squid documentary

ob said:
Any more info on the spermwhales having an archifest at the surface, Adam?
Hi Olaf,

There were five standout underwater shots, I thought:

1. Physeter swimming towards camera whilst rolling to show a full, big squid mantle pinched between the jaws, perpendicular to the whales long axis. The tail still has rust colored skin on it, but the rest of the mantle has been abraded white and is remarkably translucent. Whale almost looks like he's showing it off.

2. Pod of cachalots at the surface, oriented noses up, jockeying for pieces of a big squid carcass. Caught a glimpse of what might have been arms being flung around, but it might have been viscera, too.

3. Snorkeler (Mori? Ku?) approaching large portion of mantle at the surface. Again, chromatophores still present on the tail fins. This mantle appeared to have been severed at the posterior/anterior halfway point, and looks to have been from a big gs.

4. Detailed shot of cachalot with what look like two full, recently inflicted Architeuthis club stamps under the left eye. (That reminds me, have there been records of sperm whales that were likely blinded by squid hits?)

5. Brief shot of another sperm whale swimming towards the camera to show what look like two large, beak-inflicted wounds on the nose. The wounds are deep, very clean-edged and elliptical. From the proximity of the shot to the unheralded Mesonychoteuthis CGI, I'd guess that someone thinks the wounds might be Messie's signature. Was that on the lost Face-Off episode?

If this show is ever on iTunes I'd buy it just to be able to pore over these shots. The pod nipping at the carcass is a jaw-dropper, and I may have said an oath, too.

Cheers,
Clem
 
They did do a shot of about 4 students lined up at the bench, with Steve stalking around cracking the whip - I mean, murmuring sweet encouraging nothings - and I was last in the row, so depending on how much of the shot they included, I may have been there for a split second. But I was 'examining' a whole (small) Moroteuthis, so anyone sorting squid beaks wasn't me - most likely Emma.
 
Tintenfisch said:
They did do a shot of about 4 students lined up at the bench, with Steve stalking around cracking the whip - I mean, murmuring sweet encouraging nothings - and I was last in the row, so depending on how much of the shot they included, I may have been there for a split second. But I was 'examining' a whole (small) Moroteuthis, so anyone sorting squid beaks wasn't me - most likely Emma.

In re-watching, it really doesn't look like Kat's pictures, so I bet you're right about it being Emma. Whoever it is is blonde and short-haired, and doesn't have much of an accent, and is being scriptedly asked by Steve "are all these beaks from one whale stomach?" or something like that... The camera angle is aimed at Steve, who's sitting and examining beaks on a lab bench, so the possibly-Emma person is towering over the camera, and at least looks tall from the camera angle.

One of the less crappy animations shows a squid at a 45 degree angle dangling its tentacles straight down and grabbing a fish from both sides. Although the motion and textures aren't so hot, it's a pretty good rendition of that model. However, there is an endemic problem that several animations, including that one, show that after prey is grabbed, rather than retracting the tentacles, they curve back to swing the fish around to the mouth, which looks completely hokey.

As a computer graphics weenie myself, I suspect that the problem there might be less that the animator didn't know that was wrong, and more than the geometric modeler s/he was using didn't allow shortening of the tentacles without a lot of extra work, so to meet the deadline they just changed the tentacle shape without changing the length. I've certainly used some modelers where that would be somewhat easier... not so much because you can't shorten the tentacles in a "jump" but because there's no way to specify that the tentacles gradually get shorter over a sequence, so you'd have to load a new model every frame of the animation. However, I'm also a computer graphics and cephalopod behavior snob, so it bugged me a lot anyway... but I also can think of situations where I'm getting paid for working X hours on an animation and it would take 10X hours to make it look good, so if a client says "sorry, we don't have the budget for that, just do the stupid thing" I've reluctantly made animations I know look bad.

I think a lot of the 3-d stuff of big squids swimming and interacting with whales were from some messie stuff; the squid shape looked much more messie than archie, and that was the one I was complaining about the strobing effect on. And I noticed, but forgot before posting, that the "club in a jar" had hooks, so it was clearly not architeuthis.

I think there was some footage of Steve on a boat, too, but not much.
 
We watched it and loved it. The only shot that made us do a true double-take was the shot of substrate being stirred up by a fan or something. We were wondering what that was all supposed to be about. Other than that, we thought the CG could've been better, LOVED seeing Steve O for the first time, and watched with fascination the sequence of still photos. If we had Tivo, we'd watch it again just to drive the ratings up.
 
monty said:
One of the less crappy animations shows a squid at a 45 degree angle dangling its tentacles straight down and grabbing a fish from both sides. Although the motion and textures aren't so hot, it's a pretty good rendition of that model. However, there is an endemic problem that several animations, including that one, show that after prey is grabbed, rather than retracting the tentacles, they curve back to swing the fish around to the mouth, which looks completely hokey.

That's spelt "hoki", actually :wink
 
WhiteKiboko said:

Scott made it clear at the showing in Hollywood that although he sometimes refers to Dosidicus Gigas as "giant" that A. Dux is not what he dives with and films. Although he also said he'd feel safer in the water with Architeuthis than a pack of big Humboldts. From Ku's pictures, I'm not convinced that this is wise, although the chance of any SCUBA diver being in Archi's native environment is pretty slim. He also didn't mention Colossal squids, which, IIRC, have been seen following Patagonian Toothfish (slightly larger than the average diver) to the surface to eat them....

Anyway, I didn't watch the whole youtube version, but any claim that it's A. Dux is bogus.
 
"In re-watching, it really doesn't look like Kat's pictures, so I bet you're right about it being Emma. Whoever it is is blonde and short-haired, and doesn't have much of an accent, and is being scriptedly asked by Steve "are all these beaks from one whale stomach?" or something like that... The camera angle is aimed at Steve, who's sitting and examining beaks on a lab bench, so the possibly-Emma person is towering over the camera, and at least looks tall from the camera angle."

It most certainly is Emma.
 
Steve O'Shea;75593 said:
Well, the latest giant squid documentary is finally airing, 3 times on Discovery Channel in August (5 [8pm, et], 6 [12am, et] and 19 [12pm, et]); I haven't seen it yet myself. Click here for further program details.

ARRRGG!!! It was September 16th! (Click the link above and you'll see...) I was looking forward to this all month!

I missed it! Surely it will re-air...
 
:oops:

Sorry T .... I was certain that it was the 19th; I wonder if they changed the date? (Perhaps I'm getting old and misleading folk ... more likely.)

Don't worry; we still haven't seen it either .... such is life (Discovery still haven't sent it through); haven't seen the BBC Whale one either, because they haven't sent that through.
 
Hey, no problem. It's my own fault for missing it on the 5th and 6th in the first place. Pretty silly that they haven't sent you a copy!
 

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