Jurassic Park

Last time, we started our prehistoric meander through the dinosaurs of the Jurassic Park franchise by looking at the most iconic dinosaur of all, the T. rex. I looked at how one of the largest terrestrial carnivores the world has ever known was brought to life for the original Jurassic Park, through groundbreaking CGI and a truly enormous animatronic. If you haven’t already read that post, I suggest you do so first because in this article, we’ll be moving ahead to Jurassic Park‘s first two sequels, The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III, to look at the challenges the filmmakers faced when bringing back such a memorable dinosaur.

The Lost World takes place on Isla Sorna, or Site B, another dinosaur-inhabited island – this time, with no fences in sight. And whereas Jurassic Park featured one T. rex, The Lost World, in the typical sequel fashion of going bigger and bolder than their predecessors, has multiple T. rexes. Three to be exact – a mother, a father, and a juvenile.

When it came to making the second Jurassic Park, the designs for the dinosaurs that had appeared in the first movie didn’t require any cosmetic upgrades. That said, because the new film would feature a male and a female T. rex, some adjustments were made to differentiate between the two. The original female T. rex animatronic (with a few modifications) was reused (even though the one seen in The Lost World was a different individual, on a different island), but a male counterpart had to be created from scratch. ‘I sculpted a neck wattle to put on the male to make it look different,’ says effects supervisor and puppeteer Shane Mahan. The male’s brow was also shaped differently, and his skin was imbued with slightly brighter colours.

The two adult T. rexes could not be moved from their location on the sound stage due to their size, so new sets had to be built around the animatronics as filming progressed. They were used for a scene in which the two dinosaurs smash their heads against a trailer, causing real damage to the vehicle rather than using CGI. While Stan Winston’s T. rex had been rooted in one spot during the Jurassic Park shoot, this time the two dinosaurs could move across the studio floor. ‘The first film, the T. rex was planted on a motion base, and he could move within his own radius of movement,’ notes special effects supervisor John Rosengrant. ‘But what was missing was the sense of travelling. The CG one did the travelling and the animatronic one stayed put.’ This time, however, a dolly track was laid on the floor, and the T. rexes were shuttled around in motor-driven carts, creating the on-camera illusion that they were moving through the environment. ‘Think of it like a railroad track with these eight-ton dinosaurs being moved on a track to feel like they’re moving and circling around,’ Rosengrant adds.

As the trailer scene unfolds, one of the characters who has accompanied Ian Malcolm to Isla Sorna, Eddie Carr, meets a horrible demise while trying to save his friends. After one T. rex plucks him from his vehicle, clamping its jaw around his leg, the other T. rex also takes a bite, tearing Eddie in half. The aim was to shoot as much of the scene on set as possible. The actor’s stunt double wore a harness with a cable that ran into the animatronic dinosaur’s mouth, which would appear to be clamped around his leg, so the T. rex could be used to winch him up off the ground. ‘It was a frightening scene because this machine is actually plucking this guy up out of the vehicle and dangling him there and swinging him around,’ says Rosengrant. Puppeteering the T. rex, Rosengrant needed to observe the action on a monitor, using the relayed image as his guide. Unfortunately, the setup made it difficult to judge the animatronic’s exact movements. ‘I didn’t have any depth perception,’ Rosengrant explains. In other words, one false move and the stuntman might get injured. Fortunately, the scene was completed without any incidents.

The moment Eddie is tossed into the air and bitten in half was accomplished by seamlessly blending live-action with digital imagery. In fact, the sequence initially looked so realistic that director Steven Spielberg was concerned that it would be too much for the audience to endure. ‘Steven had boarded two Rexes pulling Eddie apart,’ says Dan Taylor, who animated the scene. ‘But when we got all of the elements together, he saw how intense it was, and he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to get a PG-13 rating for the picture. So we went through a process of toning it down… Eddie is still torn apart by the Rexes, but it isn’t quite so ‘in-your-face’.’

Stan Winston Studio also created a baby T. rex animatronic for the movie. Three iterations were built: a hydraulic-operated version for close-ups; a version with limited head and tail movement for long shots; and an entirely self-contained battery-powered unit that could be clipped onto the actors via a belt and carried freely during tracking shots.

Spielberg was particularly impressed by the third iteration of the creature, which Vince Vaughn, who played Nick Van Owen, was required to carry into one of the field research trailers. ‘The whole thing was done with remote-control devices off-camera – one controller for the tail, another controller for the eyes and the mouth,’ says the director. ‘And, of course, these controllers are working in all-metal trailers. So, there was often a lot of interference and unexpected [creature] movement that was never planned for. And it was very hard for Vince Vaughn to carry that thing right into the trailer and set it down on the table. But it looked so real in every shot.’

A T. rex also appears in Jurassic Park III – but only briefly. It fights – and is ultimately killed by – the third instalment’s main antagonist, the Spinosaurus, shortly after Alan Grant and the Kirbys arrive on Isla Sorna. The practical T. rex used in Jurassic Park III was the same one built for The Lost World, which had been kept in a Winston storage facility since that film’s production. On the studio floor, the battle between the animatronic T. rex and Spinosaurus was apparently a sight to behold. ‘One of my favourite days on the production was watching two gigantic animatronic creatures roar – silently – at each other on the interior jungle set,’ says Jurassic Park III director Joe Johnston.

‘They were both on their tracks, moving and sparring with each other like big lizards,’ John Rosengrant recalls. ‘We filmed the beginning of the fight, then we went away and shot other things. Then, at the very end of the shooting schedule, we shot some more, taking those two machines and slamming them into each other. For all the fans out there who might wonder if the T. rex really lost the fight – he did. Not only did he lose in the movie, but the Spinosaurus actually took him out on stage. The Spinosaur was so strong, he smacked that T. rex around quite a lot. In fact, there was a really sad ending to a long night of shooting when the spino threw one final blow and broke the T. rex’s neck. The head collapsed, the neck tore open in the back, and hydraulic fluid shot out almost like blood spurting.’

The animatronic began to spasm, as if it were having a seizure. Rosengrant jumped onto the T. rex and plunged a knife ‘into the creature’s foam rubber throat and dragged it down to open a huge slit almost three feet long,’ Johnston says. With hydraulic fluid spurting out of the wound, the crew grabbed towels and quickly surrounded the creature, attempting to stem the flow. A hydraulic line had burst, the fluid threatening to eat through the T. rex’s rubber skin. Fortunately, the damage was minimal. ‘The Spinosaurus literally ripped the T. rex’s head right off,’ Stan Winston exclaims, ecstatically. ‘There was just literally no contest between the machines, much less the real animals.’

Despite the setbacks, Joe Johnston managed to complete the fight sequence. But after reviewing the footage, he realised it would be difficult to get much of the fight between the Spinosaurus and the T. rex on the same track. ‘It was like watching boxers in a ring, where they circle each other and bob and weave,’ the director says. ‘There were limitations to what Stan’s stuff could do along that vein.’

Johnston had always envisioned that the faster parts of the fight, and those featuring full-body shots of the dinosaurs, would be digitally animated. But it now became clear that the battle needed to be expanded with more computer-generated shots than initially believed – or budgeted for. ‘We shot the sequence, I showed a rough cut to Steven, and he agreed we needed more money,’ says Johnston. ‘Steven made a phone call and got us enough to practically double the sequence budget. He was entirely supportive during prep and production, I suspect because Steven was more than familiar with the ordeal we were going through, having already done it twice.’

The battle of the titans presented some problems for the animation team, exacerbated by the fight’s concept not being finalised until very late in the production schedule. The team had just seven weeks to complete ten very complex shots, and the master animation file for the battle was handed over with only two days left on the schedule. The fight consisted mainly of digital dinosaurs, with the footage of the animatronics used for close-ups and a few over-the-shoulder shots.

After Jurassic Park III, the franchise took a break for over a decade. When it finally returned with the long-awaited Jurassic World in 2015, the T. rex was, of course, back – and what is more, it was the individual seen in the first movie, affectionately called Rexy. She would then go on to make appearances in Jurassic World‘s two sequels, Fallen Kingdom and Dominion. Next time, I’ll be looking at how the second trilogy in the franchise brought back and aged such an iconic dinosaur.