David Krentz: I think my first conscious memory of dinosaurs was from a nature book my parents had that had the Zallinger mural in it.  I was about 3 or 4 when I began to trace over the dinosaurs.  Then I began to copy them in the margins, then on the text, then on the next page, then the next.  I destroyed that book very quickly.  In a sense, it was my first sketchbook. I looked at it again when I went home to Winnipeg for Christmas last year and I found it interesting that my three-year-old mind was trying to work out concepts like foreshortening and perspective.  The nail in the coffin for my fatal interest in dinosaurs was seeing the 1933 version of King Kong on TV.  It had everything that I loved all in one:  Dinosaurs, adventure, monsters, fantastic romantic places, good story telling, animation and glorious black and white imagery.   Due to the encouragement of my parents I never lost sight of all my dreams, however intangible they were.

D.I.G. How many people ultimately helped to make this movie?

D.K. By the time I started in December of 1995 there were no more than 20 of us. By the end of the project close to 400 + people had worked on it.

D.I.G. How many and whom did you work with directly in "designing" the dinosaurs? What, in fact, would you call exactly what you did on the film? 

D.K.  I was fortunate enough to work in tandem with the directors.  If they bought off on the designs then it went to executives, and eventually the big E, MIchael Eisner, himself.  This was my first character design job, and the amazing Thom Enriquez helped to show me how to approach the design process.  He taught me how to present and communicate my ideas to the company. My work improved so much under his tutelage.

There were a lot of artists who worked on characters for this mammoth movie, so it's important to state that design is a group effort.  Their designs ranged from cartoony to bang on accurate.  It was my job to find a solution between those two worlds.  I had to finalize the characters so they fit into our fantasy world.  There was a legitimate term for what I did, they called it to '' krentzify".  I had become a verb!

In a nutshell, the directors had an idea for a character, and would hang up pictures from artists past and I would supply actual fossil evidence. We would then arrive at a direction to go.  I would draw for a week, come back and show them, they'd send me back, and the process would go on like that for as long as it took to get them to buy off on it.  Some characters like Aladar took a year because his personality was not yet defined, others took two weeks.  The more of a main character the animal was, the longer it would take because everyone had particular ideas about it.  I would then help with range of motion and joint location for the skeleton builders.  Then my drawings were used by the CG modelers to build the creatures you see on screen.  Those guys are extremely talented!  I had a lot of contact with them.  Half my job was spent with them.

D.I.G. When did you first become involved with the film?

D.K.  December  1995.  I begged to get off Fantasia 2000 where I was working as a layout artist.  I made an absolute pest of myself until they gave in!  Sometimes shameless persistence pays off.

D.I.G. How has the script changed since then?

D.K. The script was nothing like it is now.  The Disney story process is a unique animal.  We sort of "find" the story as we go along.  I would say storyboarding rather than scriptwriting is the norm.  It's been that way since the beginning of the company, and probably will remain that way forever.  It was really difficult deciding what kind of story to tell, and every few months it went in another direction.  Eventually though you have to buckle down and say "this is the tone of the film, this is the theme, this is how we're going to tell it".  It changed from a subtle nature film to an entertaining fantasy.