What a great slide show! If you can imagine Mr.Gurney's personal slides, along with his art work, and you'll come close to what we saw. The presentation was for some young school; children, but even the adults loved it too. Here's a quick review of what my family and I could remember.

• National Geographic job
• Dinotopia pictures from 1st 2 books (even pencil sketches)
• Pictures from new book. He talked about how the empire wanted to take over Dinotopia.
• He talked about how he came up with the concepts for dino-style machines.
• Studio photos. He showed us how he dresses up in costumes, and takes funny pictures of himself to get different characters. He also mentioned he works on one side of the room, while the boys play with a tub full of legoson the other.
• He showed the photo of the little neighbor girls, who were the ones used on the main Dinotopia cover art. He said he had them dress up like for a church pagent, and told them to imagine 50 ton dinosaurs walking beside them. They had no problem with that.
• Outside pictures. He goes outside, and he goes on location sometimes, to get a more real look. Some pictures were from his backyard, to the Grand Canyon.
• Book submission. He took Franklin with him when he submited 1st Flight this year. Franklin was up on his shoulders in the slide. He also mentioned to celebrate, the publisher made dino-shaped cookies for the occassion.

After the slideshow, he asked the kids a few questions. One was, if you could choose to see Dinotopia as a movie, or a game, which would it be?. The kids all raised thier hands for the game, parents for the movie. Then he asked if they knew what the largest sized carnivore was. One kid said an airidactyl.(Pokemon) No, sorry. Give up?

Then he drew a dinosaur playing soccer on a large sketch pad up front, and even put him in shorts and a jersey. After the drawing he asked the kids for questions. One was, why did he start drawing dinos? He said he's been curious since he was a kid, and saw how they were always shown as slow and dumb. We've been learning much more about them in the past 10 years or so, and he wanted to show what majestic and intelligent creatures they were, and these books explore the idea of what if we could live with them if they were.

Dino Friends

Favorite Dino Things