DGA Monthly

1 2 I D G A M O N T H L Y In Colin Trevorrow's handling of Jurassic World, a dream through the eyes of a child turns into a nightmare. Breaking away from their grown-up minders, teenage Zach (Nick Robinson) and younger brother Gray (Ty Simpkins) steal a glass "gyrosphere" vehicle and go off-roading through the Jurassic World theme park, gliding freely amidst the smaller dinosaurs. Unbeknownst to them an "Indominus Rex" — a genetically modified monster of a dinosaur that kills for fun — has escaped its pen and is terrorizing the park. As they stop to marvel at four herbivore Ankylosauri in the tropical forest, they are discovered by the Indominus, who kills the group before turning its attention to the kids cowering in their glass ball. "This ride that is meant to make you feel free, running with the dinosaurs, reveals itself to be a cage," says Trevorrow. Shot single camera in 78 days in Hawaii, on 35mm film that would be converted to 3D for its theatrical release, Trevorrow's discipline was to create everything practically, save for the CG dinosaurs. For this Indominus encounter, this meant no CG environments, natural light, and putting the kids S H O T T O R E M E M B E R Jurassic Jeopardy Colin Trevorrow's 2015 feature, Jurassic World, brought Michael Crichton's test-tube dinosaurs back to wreak havoc again on hapless hubris-filled humans. In this article, Trevorrow describes how he created a nightmarish scene that sets the tone for the continuation of the highly popular franchise that began with Steven Spielberg's now iconic 1993 feature, Jurassic Park. | by Rob Feld photo by Stefanie Keenan in a remote controlled gyrosphere built from scratch with spinning glass, that could be shaken upside down on a gimbal. "As a 38-year-old man directing like a 14-year-old kid who had seen Jurassic Park in the theater, my lack of understanding of what I couldn't do probably led this to being the craziest of the three movies. I also stuck most to the grammar of Jurassic Park in this one — a certain elegance and a heavy camera, gliding in that Spielbergian way, with a lot of pans and camera movements revealing things in a 3D space." Trevorrow broke the attack scene into three segments with visual representations familiar to children, now writ large with the Indominus. "I started with pinball, as the kids get bounced around between the dinosaurs in their ball. Second is a cat with a ball of yarn, which is how the Indominus plays with them. The third step is a snake unlocking its jaw to fit something into its mouth that it shouldn't be able to swallow — dinosaurs can't do that, but this one can." 1 This shot is a table-setter to show the dinosaurs' size. Everything except the CG dinosaurs is real. The gyrosphere was controlled remotely on a track with an S-curve, and on a rig that allowed it to spin 360°. We could counter its movement with the camera on a 50' Technocrane. We always tried to add little pieces of dinosaur in the frame to create depth, like in the right corner. Because this was shot on 35mm (Kodak Vision3) film, the hot highlights on the top of the CG dinosaur's head are almost blown out, which you wouldn't do if it was shot digitally — you'd have to match whatever the light was doing in the digital frame. But playing off the dynamic range of film, the way they replicated the specular Hawaiian sunlight hitting the wet skin of dinosaurs, was a huge advantage in this movie. 1 We push in slowly and crane up as the Indominus Rex appears behind them, then cut into a matching rise in the reverse angle. I love switching to dinosaur POVs and becoming the animal, watching as these kids get smaller and smaller in the frame, realizing how screwed they are. All the reflections of the environment in the glass are real except the dinosaur, which we laid in. We took plates of everything, shot on the same lenses as whatever the plate was being composited with, instead of using an array. DP John Schwartzman tuned our Panavision H-Series lenses, which are spherical lenses that captured these really creamy skin tones with these beautiful aberrations in them. This is probably a 50mm lens, here. 2

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