Dinosaurs: The Making of Jurassic World

Jurassic World

One of the highlights of last week's VIEW conference in Turin, Italy, was Glen McIntosh's presentation on  the making of Jurassic World, and Fallen Kingdom.

Glen was the animation supervisor on both projects. His talk was essentially a masterclass in creature animation, demonstrating how much careful research goes into the creation and animation of the dinosaurs.

McIntosh introduced himself as a man "obsessed with dinosaurs, obsessed with "how they looked, and how they moved."

He described the Jurassic Park series of movies as a "balance between science and entertainment", as the film-makers try to keep both audiences and paleontologists happy. 

Glen McIntosh

How do dinosaurs move?
Of course, no-one knows how dinosaurs actually moved. But, dinosaurs have plenty of living relatives, such as ostriches, so useful reference material can be found in the natural world.

Each "Jurassic" movie strives for a greater sense of believability than the last one, so McIntosh asked animators to do motion studies (essentially, test animation), to try to make each film surpass the quality of the last.

Live action reference
Animators did early run cycles on "Blue", one of the raptors, keeping Blue's head almost completely still, while the rest of the body is running, its eyes constantly focusing on its prey.  The animation was based on motion studies of a cheetah, a fast predator whose head remains locked in position to enable to cheetah to keep its prey constantly in its line of sight. 

 

The Importance of Research
The animators did lots of research, looking at alligators and lizards, and recording sounds and capturing footage. Alligators, for example, vibrate their throats when they make threatening sounds, and this animation was used to help create the Indominus Rex.



Komodo dragons
The animators also researched komodo dragons, in part for their reptilian surface textures, but also to see how they move. Komodo dragons fight one another for mating rights, and these fights can be extremely vicious.  Komodo dragons also have nasty strings of saliva dangling from their mouths, so the animators borrowed this for a close-up of the carnosaur in Jurassic World to get an especially disgusting look.

Research is important because nature can be complex and unexpected. Even apparently basic things - such as a simple blink - can be full of complexity.

Iggy Pop: dinosaur reference?

Skin and body textures
No-one knows exactly what dinosaur skin looks like, though surviving fragments suggest skin much like modern lizards. So the team researched modern reptiles such as geckos and monitor lizards to get the surface textures right. As McIntosh put it: "we don’t know what dinosaurs looked like but we can use inspiration from the natural world".

Some fossils still have surface textures, and they are very similar to animals alive today. There is even some limited surviving evidence for dinosaur skin.

Some of the reference from the natural world was quite unexpected.  For example, for the ageing T Rex (a veteran of the first movie), McIntosh's team used for reference the 71-year-old pop icon Iggy Pop, to get the feel of "old, leathery skin", a warrior survivor wearing his veteran's scars.

And just in case you were thinking that the muscles and skin were all animated with dynamics and simulations, in fact much of the work was done by the keyframe animators, hand-animating the fat and muscles using a variety of control curves.

We're no strangers to dinosaurs here at Escape Studios. To see some excellent dinosaur animation, check out "Tokyo Rex", the work of our very animation tutor, Lee Caller, below:



The Escape Studios Animation Blog offers a personal view on the art of animation and visual effects. To apply for our new BA/MArt starting in September 2019, follow this link. We train all our students with practical real-world skills, to give them the best possible chance of a career in industry. To see some of our animation success stories, follow this link.