Portsmouth dinosaur: capturing the return of Luna Park on Southsea Common
Back in 2010, just before Sara and I moved to Portsmouth, we were reading up on the cool stuff in our new home city and learned about a huge 53ft high dinosaur sculpture named ‘Luna Park’ that had just been unveiled on Southsea Common!
We were very excited to see it, but a few weeks later, we saw the report from Portsmouth News about it sadly burning down.
Things came full circle on 1st October 2021 when Portsmouth News called us up and asked whether we could make it down the unveiling of ‘Luna Park 2021’ to capture photos and videos of the event!
We were there within the hour — our drones are always charged, our media disks are always cleared, and our team is always ready for action! There wasn’t quite enough time to read the press release, so we were half-expecting a full-blown revival of the 16-metre Ultrasaurus. Though we did have our doubts — news of a second Jurassic art piece a stone’s throw from SSS HQ flying under our radar would have been strange!
When we got to Southsea Common — specifically, the corner over by Clarence Pier — our suspicions were confirmed! Luna Park 2021 stands at about half-a-metre, on a metre-tall plinth. We left our drones in the boot and grabbed our ground kit — Blackmagic cameras, RØDE microphones, and stands and stabilisers aplenty.
The original Luna Park artists, Heather Peak and Ivan Morison, had returned to create the scaled-down bronze recreation in honour of their 2010 installation.
Here’s our interview with Heather:
And below is another quick interview with Jay from Hampshire-based construction company JLR Services, who took on the Luna Park 2021 project for contractor Brymor Construction Ltd. We never hesitate to get these additional stories and angles for everything we document!
One of the coolest things about the new sculpture? There’s a QR code that links to an augmented reality Instagram filter, so you can ‘project’ a virtual full-sized Ultrasaurus onto Southsea Common or any other flat surface! If you wanna try it out yourself, tap here on your phone (you’ll need Instagram for it).
Luna Park 2021 was completed in collaboration with Aspex, and celebrates the contemporary gallery’s 40th birthday as well as the original sculpture’s 10th anniversary. It was made possible in part through a crowdfunding campaign, inspired by a decade of local people calling for the ‘return of the Southsea dinosaur’.
Long-time Solent Sky Services followers will note this is our second time working on a crowdfunded dinosaur-related project — the first being our campaign video for Staggeringly Good Beer!
Another little SSS anecdote: Jeeves, our friend and the freelance writer and marketer who helps us with much of our digital strategy and online advertising, actually got his start in social media for small businesses in Portsmouth at the young age of 16 when, after 2010’s Luna Park burned down, he created a ‘RIP Southsea Dinosaur’ page on Facebook which quickly amassed a few-thousand Likes. Portsmouth News called Jeeves to get a quote for a story they published about the sculpture, and the exposure landed him his first couple of Southsea-based clients! (And now here he is writing this blog 10 years later, referring to himself in the third-person — it’s all cyclical!)