I actually started writing my (then journal, now) blog entries back in 1998 because I wanted to remember my travels. I’ve got a great head from facts and figures and a particularly lousy one for remembering places and dates.
That makes it all the more annoying that, having just been in San Diego and writing my entries in a timely fashion, I completely forgot to mention to coolest thing on the trip. On Zoo day, we went afterwards to the natural history museum. It’s an OK museum, quite small, but it has some interesting displays.
In the basement, they had a temporary exhibit called Dinosaurs Reel and Robotic. (I hate the fact that link will be bad someday. I wonder if it is on archive.org yet?) It was a fantastic collection of classic movie posters, artwork, comic books, old novels, actual movie props (like the brontosaur from Son of Kong) from all over the world. There were also robotic dinosaurs armatures and animatronic displays. The most striking to me was an authentic re-creation of the tyrannosaur from King Kong, placed in front of painted background, with a foreground glass matte. It was setup exactly as it would be for filming, complete with a viewfinder to look at the shot though.
You could look all around it and see how obviously fake it was, but when you looked through the viewfinder it’s completely convincing. I’m really glad I got to see that and I’m tempted to try playing around with some foreground mattes just for fun.
Why didn’t I remember this cool exhibit? When I wrote my blog, I looked at my pictures for the day to refresh my memory.
This exhibit didn’t allow photography. Blast their eyes.
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