>>ALAN SCOTT: Hi, this is Alan Scott.
I was part of the
Jurassic Park dinosaur crew
over at Stan Winston Studio.
I was lucky enough to be part of the mechanical team, but also
with my art and mold experience integrated a lot with the
core technology and
understructures for a lot of the dinosaurs.
>>LINDSAY MACGOWAN: Hi,
I'm Lindsay MacGowan.
I was part of the Stan Winston Studio dinosaur team also.
And I worked within the mold department and the art department at Stan's
during the Jurassic Park period.
This is some of the first tests of the
tail moving with the skin on it.
>>ALAN SCOTT: When we were
developing the core technology on this,
everyone had traditionally been using rings to try and create
cores that moved sequentially and we realized that
it's going to be hard to
organize all those and make them all work,
and while I was in working on the Raptor,
I came up with this idea of just cutting in a continuous spiral
so that it could expand and contract
but never lose its shape.
It wouldn't just fall apart with
40 different rings on it. They would all stay integrated to itself
so that's actually me up there trying to pull the skin on.
So the tail and the neck for both the Raptors and the T-Rex
were done as a spiral and then reinforced
so that they didn't become too weak.
But that way we could keep the shape
and the look of everything very continuously.
The trick with these skins
is that it's a cone,
it's a perfect cone.
And every time you moved it it just kept wanting to slide off
and get
looser and looser
on it so we had to pull them up and then sew them and stitch them and glue them
to the hips and to the shoulders so that they didn't want to work themselves off.
>>LINDSAY MACGOWAN: Part of the issues with it as well was that
with all of the cylinders and the hydraulics in there
that trying to make sure that
as we were moving things that we weren't,
that the core wasn't
stripping any of the hydraulic tubes or
potentiometers that would then
cause it to freak out.
>>ALAN SCOTT: Yeah, because Tony [McCray] made everything out of vacuum bag carbon fiber.
And we didn't have the advantage of complete 3-D modeling back then so
a lot of this was done as guesswork as to what would fit.
So what looked good from the front and from the side
suddenly didn't fit from the top
so that we had to
make adjustments every step of the way.
Here's the crew pulling on the skin over the
the neck.
>>LINDSAY MACGOWAN: You can see, you saw it back there on the tail and it happened on the
neck area too
is that foam actually shrinks quite a lot when you
have that much foam,
but generally it shrinks anyway, but...
on this it shrank quite considerably
and we'd have to put in like two or three foot sections of skin
back into the...
basically re-sculpting areas with these patches.
>>ALAN SCOTT: Tremendously heavy.
These skins were, you know, two inches thick in a lot of places
because we wanted to make sure that they didn't give away the mechanisms inside
and that's kind of the
wonder of the fabrication and the coring of it.
Is that inside you've got hard mechanical moves.
On the outside it needed to look like smooth, organic, realistic movement
so a thicker skin always helps with that,
but as we learned later on, a thicker skin takes on more water.
It shrinks more,
and it's just heavier
so with the hydraulics it wasn't as much of an issue, but
they finely tuned these
dinosaurs to what the dry weight was
and then like the T-Rex which wasn't supposed to get wet,
it took on a lot of water.
And, as you can see
what everyone's doing here is they're taking the T-Rex through its paces so we would
have to see how far it would stretch
so we'd move the head all the way up to its foremost position and you can see that
that skin needed to stretch three or four feet in some places,
and then when it bends down it had to not bunch up and crinkle in unrealistic ways.
So, finding the perfect amount of tension and stress on the skin
that wouldn't tear itself apart,
but would still look organic
was tricky
on something of this scale.
>>LINDSAY MACGOWAN: We ended up having to find
different types of nettings
for use with the T-Rex
than we had done on other movies
just because the amount of stretch that they needed to go through and the
durability of the fabric.
So it was actually quite a loose weave
of netting as I recall,
but it was just
tricky trying to find the correct
amount of fabric to put in there as well as the foam.
>>ALAN SCOTT: Yeah.
Everything was so big. You couldn't risk running it three and four times.
It was
gallons, and gallons, and gallons of foam so you only had one or two shots at it.
But, it's a testament to the artistry too as to, you know,
take this amazing sculpture
and then cut 3 one-foot sections out of the middle of it
and then have to re-fabricate it
out of foam latex and patch it back in and make the lines work
and the wrinkles work,
make everything flow again even though you've
cut a big piece out and it's shrunk make it all look good again.