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Unleashing the Dinosaurs Again
VFX supervisor David Vickery discusses the thrills and chills of introducing new creatures in Jurassic World Dominion. By Trevor Hogg
Twenty-eight years after the release of Steven Spielberg’s ground-breaking movie Jurassic Park, audiences will be able to experience the sixth movie set in the troubled dino park this summer. Directed by Colin Trevorrow (Safety Not Guaranteed), Jurassic World Dominion bookends the franchise by bringing original stars Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum together with Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. The film’s VFX supervisor David Vickery, who worked on Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, is back for more glorious prehistoric reptilian magic — and oversaw a total of 1,450 shots produced by ILM, Lola VFX and Hybride. The film is set four years after Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which ended with many dinosaurs escaping a black market auction. The plotline explores the consequences and dangers of all those prehistoric reptiles being released into the modern ecosystem.
“I was concerned initially that it was going to be too much of a ‘rinse and repeat,’” admits Vickery, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. “But the beauty of it is that you get a new crew come onboard who inject different ideas into the process, and the script is completely different from anything we’ve ever seen in these films before. There are always new creative things to sink your teeth into even if you’re working on the same franchise.”
Jurassic World Dominion was the first Hollywood blockbuster to restart principal photography during the coronavirus pandemic. “We had shot for five weeks when the lockdown hit us in the U.K. in mid-March,” Vickery notes. “Colin Trevorrow and his editor Mark Sanger [Gravity] took scenes that we had already shot in Colombia and U.K., and started cutting them straight away. A week after that we took delivery of the first cut of those sequences and started doing postviz.”
Deadliest Catch to the Rescue!
A major concern was how the production crew would communicate with each other on set while wearing masks and maintaining social distancing protocols. As the VFX supervisor explains, “Everyone was given BLARO headsets, so once we were on set everybody could talk to everybody else directly rather than the usual walkie system.”
According to Vickery, key scenes were reimagined because of the global travel restrictions, such as leveraging outtake footage from The Deadliest Catch for when the Mosasaurus attacks the crab boat. “It wasn’t easy for us to find out from Discovery what was the original medium, so we had to visually grade the clips to make sure that the color, contrast and resolution were the same,” remarks Vickery. “Then the scene itself plays out as found footage, so it didn’t have to match the aesthetic of the rest of the film, which was shot on Panavision DXL.” ILM did a frame-by-frame analysis of the various compression artifacts and aberrations found in each shot. “Colin’s goal and remit was to do just enough to be able to integrate the dinosaur,” says Vickery. “There is a moment where Mosasaurus grabs the crab pot, which was something we added in. If we added too much spray Colin would take it away; he wanted just the barest amount of CGI in the frame as it was important to him to stay faithful to the original footage.”
For the motorcycle chase involving the Ve-
Reptilian Rebellion: The brilliant team at ILM brings new levels of subtlety and naturalistic detail to the CG beasts of Jurassic
World Dominion, which takes place four years after the destruction of Isla Nublar.
— VFX supervisor David Vickery
lociraptors, Chris Pratt, DeWanda Wise and Bryce Dallas Howard stayed in the U.K. while the second unit went to Malta to capture the necessary plate photography. “We had stunt doubles and an array vehicle with six cameras rigged onto it that shot 360-degree driving plates running down all of the streets. When we got back into the U.K., Chris was placed on a motorbike on a massive rolling road that was 20-foot wide and 20-foot long. The front wheel was connected to a fixed arm that can make the bike move laterally across the road, left and right. Chris was stationary, but the engine and wheels of the bike were going 30, 40 and 50 miles per hour.” Dinosaurs were part of the postviz created by Proof. “Mark Sanger was able to edit with all of the components in place and that allowed us to see where Chris needed to be inserted into the action,” says Vickery. He adds that It was important to respect the lighting and camera style of the plate photography: “There is a tendency or danger when you get to a greenscreen to do things with a camera that are impossible on location. You have to retain that same language because that’s what makes it feel authentic.” Of course, the creative team were keen on introducing new dinosaurs in this movie, as they have done in previous installments of the franchise. “The Giganotosaurus was a real dinosaur,” states Vickery. “Google helped right off the bat. But we always go to fossil records first. You look for the holotype — which is often a partial specimen, so scientific experts have to make up the rest of the dinosaur. We would talk to [paleontology consultant] Steve Brusatte about what modern paleontologists think these creatures would look like. But then, you can also look at modern animals that may or may not be similar.” An animatronic was constructed for the Giganotosaurus. He admits, “I don’t know if we’ll ever get the chance to build something like that again just because of its sheer scale.” The creature design process involved production designer Kevin Jenkins (Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker), Trevorrow and Brusatte. “Kevin created tiny desktop clay maquettes that were scanned and given to ILM. Digital modelers checked the proportions to make sure that anatomically the dinosaurs made sense. Our creature team worked out where all of the muscles would fit on that digital skeleton and grew muscles inside of the digital models. After doing the detail pass, the digital models were given to [CFX supervisor] John Nolan who 3D printed them out.” Vickery notes that, because the digital model was an exact match to the animatronic, “If Colin wanted the front half of the dinosaur to be practical and the back half be digital, then we could do that.”
Wings of Terror
Another exciting task was introducing unforgettable feathered creatures to Jurassic World. “The tricky one for us was the Pyroraptor because the script said, ‘It surges from the water, lands on the ice, and steam is coming from its feathers as ice crystals begin to form on it,’” recalls Vickery. “You’re like, ‘That’s a scary line — but what a challenge and wonderful thing to get the opportunity to do!’” To deliver the visuals for the proto bird, an entirely new feather system was constructed in Houdini by ILM. “The quill is defined by a curve and then all of the barbs on the side of the quill are also defined by curves. We had millions of curves to describe all of the feathers in perfect geometric detail. All of those curves are simulating against each other in the same piece of software. It meant that we could introduce snow, ice, water and air, and have them simulated at the same time as the feathers in the same piece of software. That was the only way we were going to be able to achieve that sequence.”
Another major accomplishment was resurrecting the T-Rex from the original Jurassic Park (dubbed “Roberta” by dino supervisor Phil Tippett). “We unarchived all of the original Softimage 3D files from 1992, managed to get those NURBS files into Maya and convert them into polygon meshes. Then we could compare our modern-day T-Rex at a much higher resolution geometry to that older Jurassic Park model and look to see how she changed. We referenced Stan Winston’s maquette and model and added painted textures onto our digital model to match that, so you can see the much darker socket in her eye. It’s a beautiful piece of recreation of that original T-Rex model. When the trailer came out, people started noticing that the T-Rex had been restored to her former glory! It was a wonderful moment, but it took a lot of work.”
