JURASSIC PARK T-Rex - PART ONE - Skinning an Animatronic Dinosaur

>>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.