>>STAN WINSTON: The Tyrannosaurus Rex we built full size.
9,000 pounds of a completely full size, animatronic, robotic machine.
[Jurassic Park's T-Rex] [Sculpting a Dinosaur]
>>RICHARD LANDON: This is Richard Landon, mechanical designer for Stan Winston Studios,
on the original Jurassic Park project.
I was in charge of creating the armature that supported the full-size sculpting stand for
the T-Rex.
>>MIKE TRCIC: I'm Mike Trcic, and I was one of the artists fortunate enough to work on
this project.
>>SHANE MAHAN: This is Shane Mahan, and we'll be talking about the creation of the sculpture
of the full-size T-Rex from the first Jurassic Park.
>>STAN WINSTON: Over there.
A little bit more this way.
Good, okay, go back the other way.
>>SHANE MAHAN: Here's Stan talking to Steven Spielberg into the camera.
>>STAN WINSTON: It's all for you, Steven,
because we love dinosaurs.
>>SHANE MAHAN: You're watching a very quick progression.
That small fifth-scale sculpture that you saw was the basis of these parts and components
that you see now.
We took the fifth scale, which was sculpted, and then it was cut like so many loaves of
bread, if you can imagine that.
Each piece was then numbered, and then the parts are cut out so that they can fit over
the structure, the metallic structure that's going to support these pieces.
It's basically like constructing a hull of a ship.
You see 15, 16, and so on and so on, and how that was done was the parts were numbered,
top to bottom, analyzed, and then put on an opaque projector, and the projector was then
projected on the wall to the correct scale, and then the wood was cut accordingly.
It was all done by eye and mathematics and a lot of calculations.
>>MIKE TRCIC: God, it was just an incredible undertaking really when I think back on it
that we actually managed to pull this off.
There was so much ingenuity.
Everybody really pulled together and really made this work.
There's the miniature that Rich did and the armature and then the full-size armature in
the background.
I believe those are the legs as well that you see, the tall pieces.
We're just about to get ready here and place the bulkheads on.
>>SHANE MAHAN: We were actually using techniques that were developed hundreds and hundreds
of years ago by sculptors of large bronzes and such.
There's the fifth scale painted, and that was our guide and our gauge for the reconstruction
because what we had to do was reconstruct the sculpture from scratch.
>>RICHARD LANDON: Stan would come in on a regular basis and say, "Okay, I want to be
sure that I've got room for the nostrils, I've got room for the eyes.
Are you sure this spacing is correct?"
And I would not only mathematically prove on paper that it was correct, but then I also
had to satisfy him artistically,
and we would adjust little things like how much the belly would hang or how much the
tail would droop, and some things weren't exactly the same as the original planned structure,
but we changed it so that the artists liked it because it was the artist's eye that always
decided what the final product was there at Stan's.
>>SHANE MAHAN: Now a process of chicken wire and fiberglass is laid over the chassis of
the creature's body.
This is to give the clay something to stick to without going right through the wire because
at some point the weight would just push through.
Respirators, doors were opened.
Many weeks later, many, many weeks later in this process the first layers of clay are
being drafted into place.
This takes many days, and this is Roma clay.
This is not a sulfur-free clay.
This is Roma clay.
I think it's a #2 or #3 medium clay,
and those are gauge sticks.
Those sticks that you see in there are gauges of thickness for the calculation of skin and
where bones may go.
What we had to do was we would take the fifth-scale castings, and using the measurements, recreate
everything.
Mike Trcic was in charge of sculpting the head predominantly.
>>MIKE TRCIC: My focus was the head and neck area.
I wanted to make sure that I could keep that as accurate as possible.
By this time I knew the sculpture pretty intimately because I had done the fifth scale and the
small scale, and here we are on the big one.
Basically everybody--if they had a sculpting question they ran to me for answers.
>>SHANE MAHAN: It was somebody's job every morning to cut clay from the packages and
put pallets of clay in the oven on the other side of the building early in the morning
to heat it up so that the clay was warm.
This whole process, from start to finish, took 16 weeks to complete just for the sculpture,
not talking about molding it and casting it.
I believe it was just for the sculpture.
>>MIKE TRCIC: I would close my eyes at night and see scale patterns.
You see this neat little tool I made?
It's kind of cool.
Very nice.
Basic tool design.
You could do this.
Before, see, the primitive method was with this, and you would have to do this and then
turn it.
I actually remember I put my initials, MT, up on the top of the T-Rex head, and Stan
saw it, and he says, "What's this?"
And quickly I said, "Stan, you're looking at it upside down."
"That's not an MT.
That's a WI for Winston Incorporated."
>>SHANE MAHAN: The teeth here have been mocked up out of foam core to get the look,
the absolute look of how it's going to feel, but you can see all the subtlety of wrinkles
and scales.
This character had to feel 100% real, or the film just did not work.
>>RICHARD LANDON: Each sculptor would bring their favorite technique and their little
tricks of the trade.
Some of them would take the clay and stir it up with alcohol or acetone and liquify
it, and then they could apply sort of a sluice that almost looked like aged skin drawn out
over an area.
Other guys had different tools and techniques that they would try and teach the other guys
to use, and over the course of the 3 months of the sculpture they ended up doing a really
good job of doing a really unified look.
Everyone had their own contribution, and yet the T-Rex looked like one creature, not a
patchwork quilt of various styles.
There's the full-size T-Rex really kind of coming together.
You can see the legs are on.
She still needs her small arms up there at the base of her neck, but she's standing up
into the top of the building.
They actually had to raise the roof literally so that when she began moving and they did
the mechanical structure she'd have somewhere to go.
The small forearms were sculpted on a separate stand down a little closer to the ground,
and then Stan would request on a regular basis that the whole thing be assembled so that
you could tell the proportions were all correct, that everything looked right in relation to
one piece to the next.
Spielberg came by on a regular basis too.
He stayed very involved in how it looked.
The legs were originally aluminum structures.
On the exterior you can see the aluminum sticking out of the side, and that ended up being not
enough to support the weight, so we had to change to steel exoskeletons to sort of hold
up all that weight.
>>SHANE MAHAN: Thank you very much for watching.
The creation of the T-Rex was monumental in the history of Stan Winston Studio,
and it was one of Stan's great and most prized creations of creatures that he had done.
>>RICHARD LANDON: I'm Richard Landon.
Thank you for watching the behind the scenes on creating the full-size Tyrannosaurus Rex
sculpture.
It was a huge personal point of pride for me that Stan trusted me to create something
so large and so heavy having had no background before.
We all grew out of makeups and Terminators and little tiny things, and for Stan to embrace
this group of people as having the ability to step up and grow up and build something
this fantastic and gigantic was a huge point of personal pride.
>>MIKE TRCIC: I haven't seen this video in years, and again, looking back at this, again,
I can only wonder what were we thinking?