The Jurassic Park Franchise: What You Didn’t Know
Jazz Macpherson
Marketing Coordinator
The Jurassic Park series is one of the most successful franchises in cinematic history. The franchise has truly transported us into a world we’ve all imagined, but never been able to fully visualise, by employing a mix of practical effects, stunts, animatronics, and ground-breaking, revolutionary CGI. Before ‘Jurassic Park’, CGI had not been used to bring to life living, breathing creatures.
We have pulled together some of what we have found to be the most interesting facts, and stunt stories based on the five blockbuster films.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
In order to complete an underwater sequence involving two characters being hurtled off the edge of cliff whilst trapped in a gyrosphere (these are clear, rolling orbs that transport guests around the park), Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom built a rollercoaster to pull off the stunt! They filmed the actors the very first time they did it, in order to get their real, honest reactions to the feeling of being propelled and falling 100 feet into the beyond!
In Jurassic World, in order to complete the stunts for her epic death scene, where she is attacked and eaten by a dinosaur, Katie McGrath, who played “Zara”, was propelled backwards up into mid-air, held only by wires attached to a crane, and was then dropped from the crane several metres onto a crash pit. She was then yanked up and out of a tank of water, held down underwater, and yanked up again, multiple times in a row.
Tim Alexander, the visual effects supervisor, revealed that actors generally don’t do such aggressive stunts, but Katie was game enough to do whatever it took. She did all her own stunts throughout the film.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park received a sign-off from real scientists. One of the scientists involved even said that someone asks him what a dinosaur actually looks like, he tells them to go watch the movie, rather than go to the museum!
Dr. Alan Grant was based off a real-life, world-renowned paleontologist, Dr. Jack Horner, who was hired as a consultant on for the film. He revealed that his job was essentially to just sit next to Steven Spielberg and answer any questions he had throughout the film-making process. He pushed for more bird-like than lizard-like dinosaurs, and put a stop to things such as raptors having flickering lizard tongues.
On set, human actors would step in as dinosaurs, and underwent in-depth training to understand specifically how they moved, so that that characters in the film had something to interact with. The humans acting as dinosaurs were also used for motion capture of the animals.
The animators also took ‘mind classes’ to master natural, animalistic movements, and would then go out into the carpark and jump over hurdles to practice these movements.
One of the reasons Spielberg decided to take on the project, was because he wanted to make a modern-day ‘King Kong’.
Jurassic World: Dominion is releasing in cinemas June 9. You won’t want to miss it!