>>RICHARD LANDON: Bunch of people from Amblin came by.
They were reasonably impressed.
Seeing it for the first time with a whole team of people going,
"I would never have believed this possible."
I don't think anything has ever been attempted, before or since,
that is as ambitious
as this first prototype build for a T-Rex.
Even without a skin on it, you can see it looking,
you can know exactly what it's doing,
how it's thinking.
If it's pausing, it's pausing to think, it's not pausing 'cause it's off.
And Spielberg would come in and he'd say,
"Hey, can it do this? Can it do that?" And Stan would give him a turn.
He would try moving it,
and it worked perfectly, every single time.
>>EVAN BRAINARD: This type of machine
had never been really done before outside of theme parks.
But even theme parks, had never done something that needed to be
quite as strong
and believable
as what we had here.
And some of the people from
one of the hydraulic companies,
when they initially came in to bid on the hydraulics for us,
when they heard the velocities
and what we were really planning to do,
they just looked at me and said,
"You guys are crazy."
Because they hadn't really seen anything like this before.
So this was all real new territory,
industry-wide in multiple industries
the film business as well as in, you know, the industrial.
I knew we were on the right track when those guys said we were crazy.
>>TIM NORDELLA: Stan looks like he's okay with what
he's seeing.
>>EVAN BRAINARD: And again, I can't stress enough, this was
uncharted territory from the point-of-view of using the input
device that we put together for it,
to the machine itself,
there was no referring back to something that we had done a year before.
So many things about it,
you know, were
very much groundbreaking career moves for a lot of us.
>>TIM NORDELLA: As you can see, the ceiling
above the T-Rex has been raised,
about thirteen feet,
so we could compensate for any movements that this thing would do.
This thing raised about twenty-three, twenty-four feet in the air to the tip of the nose from
the top of the ground—
especially when you used, the motion base.
And when you moved it fast, at 9,000 lbs,
you had to have a good, secure base.
>>RICHARD LANDON: Some of the valves inside the body
pushed sixty gallons of hydraulic fluid a minute
so you can imagine
moving through these little tiny tubes—they're only inch to inch-and-a-half—
how much fluid is being pressed how far and how fast.
>>TIM NORDELLA: It was truly a work of art,
and a magic film to work on.
>>EVAN BRAINARD: To this day it stands as one of the milestones in my career.
It's probably one of the only
shows where children have actually,
you know, asked me for an autograph.
Usually people that build stuff and
perform puppets on set usually get kind of
left to obscurity, but this was a
major feather in my cap so I'm really proud to have been a part of it.
>>RICHARD LANDON: As is always the case,
working for Stan Winston Studios,
the trust level that Stan had in all of us, was just
unparalleled.
He would say,
"You guys can do this."
And then he would give us the time,
and the materials
and the manpower that we needed to pull it off.
And there's nothing prouder than being able to come through with that level of trust.
I'm Richard Landon, for the Stan Winston
School of Character Arts.
I hope you enjoyed this behind-the-scenes peek at
the building of the mechanical Tyrannosaurus Rex.