>>AL SOUSA: Hi, this is Al Sousa.
I was part of the Stan Winston crew for Jurassic Park.
I was the lead mechanical designer for the sick Triceratops.
>>SHANNON SHEA: Hi, this is Shannon Shea.
I was fortunate enough to be part of Stan Winston’s Triceratops crew for the first
Jurassic Park movie.
>>AL SOUSA: Here I am
many years ago,
demonstrating the breathing mechanism on the
small scale model.
We built a small scale version of the
character before the full scale
so we could show Stan how everything was going to work
and basically
built
a bigger scale version of everything
with all the mechanisms and controllers
when we went to the full scale version.
That breathing mechanism was basically just a post
underneath
that just pushed a lever pushed it up and down and moved the skin up and down.
There I am demonstrating the tail mechanism
which had movement from side to side
and also up and down as well.
There were no hydraulics in this character.
It was all just
mechanical.
A lot of cables and pulleys and the tail was like a direct linkage mechanism.
>>SHANNON SHEA: Joey Orosco is here painting the Triceratops.
He started the paint job in Los Angeles.
You can see how detailed and beautiful of job he did.
Unfortunately, things were so,
so tight that we had to ship it
to Hawaii
and Joey actually finished the paint
on set.
Here he is working on this very intricate paint job.
This is when Steven came by the shop
and this is us demonstrating again a concept
of how we were going to puppeteer it.
It got loaded into, as you can see it wasn’t finished.
All the legs were apart.
We could only ship
a certain container to Hawaii.
The legs had to be put on in Hawaii.
>>AL SOUSA: We had to be ready
with the character because it was going to take like a month to ship it there on the
container,
on the boat.
We had to have it ready a month before they wanted to shoot it,
to give it time.
Then this is a big hole they dug in the ground with the platform over the top,
so that all the puppeteers could be underneath.
There were
one or two inside
the character.
The only one that was outside was
the guy doing the eyes
with the remote control,
with the radio.
Everyone else,
all the cables and all the controllers were down underneath that platform.
I think the one guy
was inside that was working the tail.
Everyone else was underground
working the breathing mechanism,
working the mouth, and the tongue.
Working the
forearms and the legs.
Those were all cable controlled.
I remember when
they told me I was going to Hawaii
because I had just started working for Stan at the time.
Out of all the characters we made, this was the only one that shot on location.
Everything else was shot back in L.A.
I was pretty much the brand new guy at Stan’s.
They said, “The character you built is filming in Hawaii so you get to go to Hawaii.”
That was kind of funny.
Now, here
here we are starting rehearsal.
This was, I believe, our first day there in Hawaii.
We set up a camera
and had a monitor underneath
in our little put down there.
Then Stan was directing us.
We were going through the various movements.
First one at a time so we could look at each one, one at a time.
Then we started trying to
combine them all together
and Stan was kind of conducting us like an orchestra
where he wanted all of those movements to blend together into a really smoothe …
He was really,
really about smooth movements in your performance.
He didn’t want any of what he called herky-jerky movements.
>>SHANNON SHEA: While most of the guys were
in the pit
moving the dinosaur around, I was outside
on the day of shooting.
The radio controls were
handed off to me because I was responsible for doing all of the
cosmetics on the dinosaur for the shoot.
I had to do all of the
puss
and the spit and
the rheumy eyes and all that stuff.
In fact when Laura Dern,
pops the micro vesicle on the tongue,
that was a little gag
that I figured out.
I would have to actually run in with a syringe
and refill
the cavity.