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www.postmagazine.com 21 POST JULY 2018 three dinosaurs that are new to this film: the Stegosaurus, the Baryonyx and the new, hybrid Indoraptor. The scaled busts were helpful on-set for lighting reference and for the actors and film- makers to see in different lighting conditions. In addition to the scaled bust, the Indoraptor also had a full-size animatronic head, foot and arm. Although the Indoraptor animatronics were used on-set, ILM artists often replaced them later with digital counterparts. "The creature's design evolved in post pro- duction," Vickery says. "So, in the movie, it's 99 percent CG." Work on the Indoraptor design started 12 weeks before principal photography with simple concepts. Once the filmmakers signed off on the design, Scanlan's team created a scaled bust and model makers added wear and tear to give the creature a sense of history. The design for the hybrid creature continued later in post production. "We wanted to give it an interesting backsto- ry," Vickery says. "It's a prototype; its genetics are evolving. So, we gave it flaking skin, irregular teeth. It isn't a beautiful dinosaur like the T-rex or the Velociraptors. It's imperfect. So because our final model differed slightly, we replaced the animatronic." THE ENVIRONMENTS The filmmakers shot most of the sequences on loca- tion in Hawaii or on large sets built in the UK. There are few green-screen or fully-digital shots. "Even when we had complex sequences and could have used green screen, we often took the hard road," Vickery says. "We put the actors in a Gyrosphere in Hawaii and built rigs to tow it around. It's important to shoot as much as we can in the real place. The CG team enhanced many of the filmed plates with CG footprints, smashed walls and so forth so that it would look like the dinosaurs were interacting correctly with the spaces they're in. For one of the most dramatic sequences, they inserted a volcano into filmed footage and sent digital dinosaurs run- ning from the explosion. "The volcano in Hawaii wasn't big enough," Vickery says. "So we replaced much of the back- ground, put our volcano in and added effects. The special effects team had hundreds of feet of smoke tubes and pyro explosions on the ground that they could trigger as the actors ran in the valley. That gave us something to match to, but it's much harder to do that in post than to create all-digital effects. It's obvious when the digital doesn't match the practical. I believe it's the right thing to do — to get as much in-camera as you can — but it's not the easiest way." The rescued and then captured dinosaurs land in a mansion supposedly located in Northern California. Nicholson built large sets to fit the dino- saurs and still have enough room for the camera to move back far enough to see them. "Because they're dinosaurs, though, the camera often looks up," Vickery says. "Usually, we'd have a one-story set with greenscreen above, but we didn't have that luxury. So we had cantilevered ceilings. We could lift pieces up so Oscar [Faura] could bring lights in. Then we'd lift another part and he could bring the camera around." For the exterior of the gothic mansion, which was supposed to be surrounded by a redwood forest, the filmmakers considered shooting a min- iature. But, they found Cragside, a mansion built in Northumberland, UK, in the early 1900s by an arms dealer. It was surrounded by tall conifers — firs, cypress, spruce and sequoia. "Oscar and I went up there with an Alexa mini mounted on a drone, and shot approaches to the house at different times of day," Vickery says. "We also had Clear Angle Studios do shots with a Sony a7R mounted on an AscTec Falcon 8 drone. We had full photogrammetry in a 500-meter radius around the house. It meant we didn't have to make up our CG shots in post from scratch. We could use practical photography shot by our director of photography." All told, the crew ended up with something like 40,000 images. "Clear Angle built a completely digital photo- grammetry-based house so we could work out how that fit with photos we got with the Alexa mini," Vickery says. Nicholson's team also built an entrance to the house and other partial sets that the ILM crew seamed together, fit with the aerial shots, and augmented. In addition to those two main locations en- hanced with CG, the visual effects artists created some all-digital shots for the film. They replaced all but a small section of "Main Street" in the Jurassic World theme park, which had been shot in Hawaii. They replaced a glass roof on the man- sion's large set. They created a CG lion, the CG environment and a CG T-rex for a shot intended to be in a wildlife park in California. And, they created an all-digital sequence for the beginning of the film that occurs underwater. "That was work by ILP in Sweden, managed by ILM," Vickery says. "JA again wanted to shoot a miniature, but even at one-third scale, which was the smallest I wanted to go, the submarine wouldn't fit in any tanks. So, we had a full-scale submarine built and shot it on a soundstage with a 50-foot technocrane doing camera moves around it. Then, we added the digital water." For Vickery, the best part of working on this film was the collaboration between visual effects artists and those working with animatronics. That, and being part of film history. "We breathe life into our CG characters, but being able to work with Neal [Scanlan], who is a master of his art, and see how he breathes life into the animatronics was great. I've worked at ILM only two years, and being able to work for them on a Jurassic Park film is a really wonderful thing." Few film franchises have had the staying power to last through 25 years, and continue to be excit- ing. But, the combination of a Spanish film director known for horror films, animatronics created by a master of that craft and visual effects artists riding on the shoulders of 25 years of expertise and tech- nological advances at ILM has resulted in one of the most sensational films in the series yet. SUMMER MOVIES Animatronics were used in scenes where actors had to touch the dinosaurs.