Amblimation – The Harald Siepermann Archive

Amblimation, We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story

Dinosaurs from We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story

In 1990 Harald Siepermann provided visual development for the Amblimation movie We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story. An earlier post already showed some of Harald Siepermann’s visual development for the character Professor Screweyes, which he based on the actor Danny DeVito. In addition to Professor Screweyes, Harald also made designs for various dinosaur characters that appear in the movie, among them Rex, Dweeb and Woog (at the time of production called Hatrack).

The four dinosaur characters from We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story. From left to right: Elsa, Woog, Rex and Dweeb.

Below are several of Harald Siepermann’s visual development designs for the character Rex:

… the character Dweeb:

… and the character Woog (Hatrack):

Amblimation, We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story

We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story

In the middle of 1990 Harald Siepermann worked on the visual development of the movie We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story, based on the children book by Hudson Talbott. After An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, it was the second production from Steven Spielberg’s Amblimation studio. At that time, the movie was under direction of Simon Wells and Phil Nibbelink, with who Harald Siepermann shared an office at the Forum building in Camden Town, London, while they were working on Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1987.

Harald Siepermann did visual development for the dinosaur characters Rex, Dweeb and Woog (at that time of production called Hatrack), which will be shared in future post. Besides the dinosaurs, he also worked on the human character Professor Screweyes, an evil circus director for which Harald used actor Danny DeVito as reference. Below are several sketches by Harald Siepermann of Professor Screweyes.

And below are the cleaned up designs. Although his designs doesn’t reflect the final version of the character in the film, they for sure are appealing.

Amblimation, Balto, Hans Bacher, Storyboard

Storyboard of Balto

In 1993 Harald Siepermann worked on the movie Balto, the third animation feature from Steven Spielberg’s Amblimation studio. Balto was based on a true story about a husky dog named Balto who was the leader of a sledge dog team that, under difficult weather circumstances, had to transport medicine from Nenana, Alaska, to a little town called Nome, to save children from a deadly epidemic.

Once the production was launched the team was in need of additional storyboard artists. Hans Bacher, who was the Production Designer on Balto, recommended Harald Siepermann to the producers. While Siepermann is more known for his character designs, he also had a long resume as storyboard artist through his work for his Mad T Party company, his work on the duck Alfred J. Kwak, and on the Walt Disney/Steven Spielberg picture Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

In August 1993 Siepermann went to the Amblimation studio that was located in London, where he worked until the end of the year on the visualization of the script into a storyboard. Below are storyboard thumbnails of the scene were Balto meets the white wolf and is resurrected after he had fallen from a high cliff.