Dinos, Black Gang Chine

Two Dinosaurs That Walk. Two That Are Worn. One Internal Marionette Rig Nobody Expected.

Commission: Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine | Restricted Area 5 | Bipedal Walker & Wearable Baby Dinosaur Characters

The Brief

Blackgang Chine — the oldest theme park in the United Kingdom, and one of Creature Encounter's most valued long-term clients through Vectis Ventures — was building Restricted Area 5: an interactive prehistoric dinosaur experience requiring four characters capable of carrying the full dramatic and physical weight of a live dinosaur encounter.

The brief called for two distinct formats simultaneously. Two full-scale bipedal walking characters — dinosaurs that move through space the way a dinosaur should move, on two legs, with the kinetic credibility that an audience will either believe completely or not at all. And two wearable baby dinosaur characters — smaller, more intimate, designed for the keeper performers who would carry them through guest interactions across the park.

Four characters. Two completely different engineering challenges. One six-week build.

The Walkers

The bipedal walking dinosaur is one of the most demanding briefs in large-scale puppet fabrication. The challenge is not simply scale — it is kinetic logic. A quadruped puppet can distribute its weight across four points and move with relative mechanical stability. A biped has two points of contact, a high centre of gravity, and a movement vocabulary that is instantly, viscerally legible to an audience: either it moves like a dinosaur, or it moves like a person in a suit. There is no middle ground.

The solution was an internal marionette rig housed within the chest cavity of each walker — a mechanism that animates the character's upper body and head from within, driven by the performer's own movement, creating the kinetic chain from foot to head that gives a bipedal character its sense of living, breathing, purposeful locomotion.

This is not a common solution. It requires a precise understanding of how the performer's movement translates through the rig into the character's visible behaviour, and a mechanical design that amplifies and refines that translation rather than simply transmitting it. The result is a dinosaur that does not just walk — it moves with the particular quality of something alive, something ancient, something that has been here before and intends to be here again.

The Babies

The wearable baby dinosaurs are a completely different engineering challenge — and in some ways a more delicate one. Where the walkers needed to command space and dominate it, the babies needed to be held, carried and brought close. The audience relationship is fundamentally different: not the wide-eyed distance of a crowd watching a predator move, but the intimate, breath-held closeness of a child reaching out to touch something small and alive and apparently real.

Each baby features a moving mouth, blinking eyes and flapping wings — mechanisms that deliver the expressive vocabulary of a living creature at a scale and weight that a performer can carry comfortably through a full working day of guest interactions. False arm jackets for the keeper performers extend the illusion: the performer's real arms disappear, replaced by the character's own limbs, so that what the audience sees is not a person holding a puppet but a keeper cradling a creature.

The babies chirp, roar, snuffle and snort — onboard sound systems giving each character its own vocal presence and allowing the keeper performers to create dynamic, responsive interactions that no silent puppet can sustain.

The Skin

All four characters feature latex skins — sculpted, textured surfaces that carry the visual language of prehistoric life across every scale of audience encounter, from the distant silhouette of a walker moving across the park to the close-up inspection of a baby being held at arm's length by a five-year-old who wants to know if it bites.

The texture of a dinosaur skin is, of course, an educated guess — palaeontology can tell us the structure but not the surface. The creative choices made in the skin fabrication are therefore simultaneously scientific and artistic: rooted in what the fossil record suggests, extended by imagination, and calibrated by the single most important question in any character build: what will an audience believe?

The Specifications

Walkers: moving mouths, blinking eyes, bipedal walking, internal marionette rig, onboard sound system, latex skin. Babies: moving mouths, blinking eyes, flapping wings, wearable with false arm jackets, onboard sound system, latex skin. Four characters total — two walkers, two babies.

Build time: Six weeks.

The Result

"Our dino babies have been getting a fantastic reaction across the park. They complement our existing characters well and the performers have loved getting to work with them."

- Verity Godwin, Vectis Ventures

The performers loved getting to work with them. That sentence matters as much as the audience reaction — because a character that performers love is a character that gets performed well, day after day, across a full season. That is not an accident of design. It is the result of building with the performer's experience in mind from the very first sketch.

The Vectis Ventures Partnership

Restricted Area 5 is the fifth Creature Encounters commission for Vectis Ventures — following the POLAR bears and Squirrel Bears at Robin Hill Country Park, and Cedric the Dragon and the Dodos at Blackgang Chine. Each commission has built on the last, the relationship deeper and the creative ambition higher with every project.

Blackgang Chine now has a character portfolio built across multiple formats, multiple genres and multiple audience relationships — prehistoric walkers and baby dinosaurs, a fire-breathing dragon ambassador, beloved park icon Dodos — all created by a single maker who knows the park, the audiences, the performers and the operational environment from the inside. That coherence shows. It shows in the characters, in the performances, and in the audiences who return because the world they find at Blackgang Chine is a world that has been built with care and held together with craft.

Thinking About Something Similar?

If you are planning a live dinosaur experience, prehistoric themed attraction, immersive science event or any live entertainment programme requiring bipedal walking characters, wearable creature characters or a combination of both — we would love to talk.

We have extensive experience building characters across multiple formats for a single immersive experience — matching the engineering solution to the performance context, the audience relationship and the operational demands of the environment. We understand that a bipedal walker and a wearable baby are not just two different sizes of the same brief — they are two completely different encounters, and they need to be built accordingly.

To arrange an informal, no-obligation Discovery Call with Jamie and Michael, please use the Enquire button below.

Creature Encounters are designers, makers and performers of extraordinary puppet experiences, based in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. We have delivered bespoke animatronic characters, bipedal walkers, wearable creatures and puppet characters for visitor attractions, theme parks, theatre and live events across the UK and internationally, for clients including Vectis Ventures / Blackgang Chine, Vectis Ventures / Robin Hill Country Park, Away Resorts, Mark Thompson Productions, Atomic London / Greater Anglia Trains, Animal Madness Ltd, Big Brum Theatre in Education, Lakeside Arts Nottingham, and the Remal International Festival in Kuwait.