Jurassic World

In 2015, after a hiatus of more than a decade, the Jurassic franchise returned with a long-awaited fourth instalment, Jurassic World. Although it introduced several new prehistoric reptiles (and one that never existed in real life, the Indominus rex), fan-favourite dinosaurs also made a welcome return. During the writing process, director Colin Trevorrow was mindful of which species Jurassic fans would want to see again. ‘As someone who is a fan of these films, I don’t think I could wake up in the morning without bringing back certain dinosaurs, and not just for the sake of having them there,’ he explains. ‘It’s important to me that dinosaurs like the T. rex are given the weight and the heroic qualities that they had in the first film. In my eyes, the T. rex was the hero of that movie; this was something that mattered to me and was hugely important to include.’

In fact, the T. rex seen in Jurassic World is the T. rex – the same individual from the first film, affectionately called Rexy (originally a fan name, but now part of the official canon). In the aftermath of the Isla Nublar Incident, as depicted in Jurassic Park, Rexy lived wild on the island for nearly a decade. However, she was later recaptured by InGen when they returned to Nublar to create a fully functioning dinosaur theme park, Jurassic World. Rexy has lived in the T. Rex Kingdom, located near Main Street, since the park opened and has proven to be one of Jurassic World’s most popular attractions.

Recreating the iconic dinosaur was tricky because the digital files made by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) for the original movie were no longer accessible. Needing to build the dinosaur from scratch, the Jurassic World team sought out physical miniatures of the T. rex. ‘We actually went and got the original sculpt of the T. rex head and scanned it into the computer,’ says visual effects supervisor Glen McIntosh.

The effects team also unearthed several other T. rex models, from miniature sculpts to full-size animatronics, but they soon discovered that they were inconsistent in their appearance. ‘They were all actually quite a bit different from each other,’ says McIntosh. ‘So we had to decide which we thought was the best T. rex.’ During these discussions, it was unanimously agreed that one feature in particular had to be carried over into Jurassic World. Given that the T. rex was intended to be the very same character seen in the 1993 movie, its thick hide needed to feature the scars it sustained battling Velociraptors in that film’s finale.

Although Rexy uses the original design from Jurassic Park, a few changes were made to reflect the fact that 22 years have passed since we last saw her. She moves a little differently because she’s older, for example – she’s been incarcerated in a theme park for over a decade, so her muscles have atrophied somewhat, and her skin has been tightened a bit.

Director Colin Trevorrow wanted to find a way to do something that would be as ‘visceral and intense and scary and awesome’ as the ending of Jurassic Park. ‘We wanted her to essentially save the day again,’ he says. Although Rexy’s presence at the park is briefly alluded to early in the film, when Gray fails to see the creature through a throng of tourists as she feasts on a goat, she isn’t seen again until the movie’s climax – a deliberate choice on Trevorrow’s behalf. ‘I almost wanted people to get angry about the absence of the T. rex,’ explains the director. ‘Very rarely are we able to have a moment of cathartic joy in a movie – it’s really hard to earn it. We had the gift of the T. rex to help us deliver that. I feel like we spent an entire movie building up to those last ten minutes.’

When she first arrives on Main Street for the climactic battle with the Indominus rex, the T. rex busts its way through a Spinosaurus skeleton statue. ‘We offered the idea to Colin of placing a Spinosaurus skeleton statue along Main Street as an homage to Jurassic Park III,’ says production designer Doug Meerdink. It’s also revenge, of a sort, for the death of a fellow T. rex at the claws of the Spinosaurus in that earlier Jurassic outing. A full-size skeleton was built on set, but a CG version was used for the moment the statue is destroyed.

Although animatronics had been largely abandoned in favour of full CG dinosaurs in Jurassic World, for the direct sequel, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, new director J. A. Bayona was keen to include more of them. With several scenes taking place in claustrophobic settings, where the film’s characters often get very close to the dinosaurs, Bayona saw opportunities to take advantage of the realism that animatronics had to offer. One of the animatronics that would need to be built was Rexy.

‘When we first heard about the job, we all had visions of ourselves fully constructing a life-size T. rex from scratch, just like you see in the behind-the-scenes of the first Jurassic Park,’ says sculptor Michael White. ‘But obviously, with practicalities, time, and budget, this just wasn’t possible. The reality is, [on set we] only need to see the head and the neck.’ The rest of the T. rex would be computer-generated later in the process.

Using digital models for the T. rex as a starting point, head and neck sculpts were created using both clay and plasteline, an oil-based sculpting clay. ‘That then gets moulded in fibreglass,’ adds Michael White, ‘and then from that you produce a fine latex skin.’ The thickness of the skin varied, depending on where on the dinosaur’s body it was placed. The skin around the eyes, for example, was quite thin, ‘so that it is much more flexible,’ adds White. ‘Whereas around the neck it would be a lot thicker.’

One of the sculptors’ primary tasks was to add texture to the dinosaur hides. Says White, ‘Our job was to take that plasteline and to carve all the detail into it – every single scale and scratch and scar.’ Much like the work ILM did on the digital T. rex in Jurassic World, ‘we had to put in the original scars from the fight it had at the end of Jurassic Park with the two raptors,’ White adds. ‘The big claw marks down the neck and everything. Not to mention the new scars she acquired fighting the Indominus [in Jurassic World].’

A full-scale animatronic of the T. rex was used on set for the scene in which the drugged dinosaur is held in a container. At different times, Rexy is a full practical model, a combination of practical with CG extensions, and completely CG. ‘We make the switch from practical to CG as she wakes up,’ says ILM animation supervisor Jance Rubinchik. ‘We added eye twitches and blinks to the practical T. rex in the beginning to make her feel more alive and real, then augmented her through a slow build across the sequence as the action ramps up to the fully digital T. rex.’ When Rexy opens her large mouth to attack Owen Grady, she’s completely computer-generated.

In the sixth entry in the Jurassic series, Jurassic World Dominion, the rivalry between the T. rex and the new apex predator, Giganotosaurus, is an ongoing theme. With several no-holds-barred battles with the Giganotosaurus in Dominion, Colin Trevorrow – who returned as director for this movie – believed the venerable dinosaur needed a visual overhaul. ‘Colin felt like the T. rex, over a period of five movies, deviated too far away from the original Stan Winston T. rex that everyone remembers so viscerally,’ says visual effects supervisor David Vickery.

While the T. rex seen in Fallen Kingdom looked somewhat emaciated, Trevorrow decided that Rexy’s new environment in Biosyn Valley should give her a new lease on life. ‘I figured, ‘Well, she’s probably eaten whatever the hell she wants out there – bears or whatever she finds. She’s a little healthier now.’ And maybe the fact that she’s fed a little bit better, she can start looking like when she was getting fed goats every day in Jurassic Park.’

Trevorrow initially wanted to reuse the animatronic T. rex from Fallen Kingdom, but it had already deteriorated, so Rexy was instead portrayed entirely through CGI in Dominion. It quickly became apparent to the visual effects team that Rexy had changed and evolved over the years; she had received slight adjustments in each film, to the point that she looked quite different from the original movie. ‘She’s grown, she’s aged,’ says Vickery. ‘She was kind of fending for herself after Fallen Kingdom and became more muscled, but thinner. Colin wanted to restore her to her former glory, and so we actually engaged in a process that we coined ‘digital palaeontology’. We went back into the ILM archives and found back-up files of the original T. rex from 1992 – files that were thought to have been lost long ago – and we brought them back online.’

The visual effects team were able to compare that model to their current high-resolution model of the T. rex and see how Rexy had changed. They immediately saw how much ‘meaner’ the original design was. ‘Obviously, our new model has so much more detail,’ Vickery says, ‘but we could also see where the profile of her jaw was slightly different, or the line on the side of her mouth; the brow ridges had spaced slightly differently, and the eyes weren’t as sunken. We were able to match those proportions back, and then, referencing all of the photography we had of Stan Winston’s original maquette and looking at how the textures had changed over the years, we were able to restore her to how she looked in the original movie – with the addition of a few scars she has acquired along the way, of course.’ In this way, the team was able to get as faithful a recreation of the famous dinosaur as they possibly could.

In the very beginning of Dominion, we get a prologue that takes place 65 million years ago. Here, we see the original T. rex from which Rexy would (much later) be cloned by InGen scientists. Interestingly, if you look closely, you can see that this T. rex is covered in a coat of proto-feathers. Science has, of course, discovered many new things about dinosaurs since the original Jurassic Park was released, and so setting the prequel in a time before genetically engineered dinosaurs allowed Trevorrow to showcase dinosaurs in a more scientifically accurate way.

‘I think we have a really good logical explanation for why these [dinosaurs] look different from other Jurassic dinosaurs […] in the past,’ Trevorrow says. ‘In this case, […] we’re showing them in their original habitat. There was no frog DNA used to bridge the gaps in the genomes, so it gave us an opportunity to show dinosaurs with feathers.’

So, did the real T. rex have feathers? Well, the jury is still out there. Feathers are not well-known in large dinosaurs. This may be because big animals retain heat much more effectively than smaller ones, and feathers would have interfered with their need to radiate heat effectively. But, in 2012, a relative of the T. rex – up to 9 metres long and weighing 1.5 tonnes – was discovered in China. Remarkably, it quite obviously had feathers, like the long, thick, filamentous plumage worn by the modern emu and cassowary. It was named Yutyrannus huali, which means ‘beautiful feathered tyrant’ in a combination of Latin and Mandarin. Yutyrannus is, to date, the largest feathered dinosaur that we know about, and its discovery debunked the notion that only small dinosaurs were plumed.

Since T. rex was related toYutyrannus (albeit living some 55 million years later), it is possible that the former had feathers on at least part of its body for at least part of its life. But it probably wasn’t covered in feathers like its Chinese cousin, for whereas Yutyrannus lived in a relatively cool period in the Cretaceous, thus necessitating the need for insulation, the climate in which T. rex lived was considerably warmer. Palaeontologists speculate that if T. rex did have feathers, they were probably very sparse, like the hairs on an elephant – and probably similar to what we see in the Jurassic World Dominion prologue.

At the end of Dominion, Rexy encounters two other tyrannosaurs, which Trevorrow confirms as the same duo featured in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which BioSyn had previously captured from Isla Sorna and brought to their sanctuary in the Dolomite Mountains. Trevorrow says that he wanted to ‘really make the audience want [Rexy] to find peace. We want her to find a home. She feels like she has been constantly displaced, time and time again. For her to find a family and sense of belonging is what I want.’ Colin Trevorrow wants Rexy to live the rest of her years in peace, and I think it’s fair to say that this is what fans of the franchise also want for her.