ILM BLOCKBUSTER: BRINGING THE DINOSAURS OF JURASSIC WORLD BACK FROM EXTINCTION

DAVID VICKERY: Anyway, thank you. Firstly, huge thank you to Autodesk for inviting me here today. And thank you all for coming. Well, there's a few empty seats, but it's nice to see so many people here.

So my name is David Vickery. I work at Industrial Light and Magic, and I was the visual effects supervisor for Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom, which, let's be honest, is something I never thought I would be saying out loud. Because Jurassic was such a really huge influence on me as I was growing up, and it's a big reason why I wanted to get into filmmaking. So to actually get to work on one of the films as a supervisor was really quite a big honor. And I didn't feel any pressure at all.

[LAUGHTER]

You know, following in the footsteps of Dennis Mirren, Phil Tippett, and Stan Winston. And I met those guys, and they kept giving me feedback on my work. So it was pretty terrifying.

Anyway, so today I'd just like to talk to you a little bit about the pre-production, the shoot, and the post-production of the film, as seen through the eyes of a visual effects supervisor. And I'll go into some detail into the decisions we make during pre-production, how we collaborate with nearly every other department on the film set during the shoot, and how the artists at ILM are very much a part of the filmmaking process. We're not just a tool that gets used now in post-production to fix things. But we're actually collaborating throughout the production of the film with many other departments to help bring these dinosaurs to life.

Talking about dinosaurs. I should probably talk about those too. They seem fairly important. So we created a little over 1,200 visual effects shots for Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom, which doesn't actually sound like very much by modern standards. Big blockbuster films often have 2,000 or 3,000 visual effects shots. But Fallen Kingdom only actually had 1,800 cuts in the entire film. I counted that last week sometime.

So when you think that the visual effects budget for the movie was 30% of the entire production budget for the film, it gives you some idea of how much involvement we had in the project. And we had a number of different visual effects companies working with us on the film. We had companies in Spain, Sweden, Vancouver, San Francisco, London. So it was a huge worldwide effort.

And one of the first things we do in the very, very beginning of production is story concept development. And what that is is artists at ILM, our concept artists actually sit with the director. And our director is a gentleman called JA Bayona. He directed A Monster Calls and The Impossible, which you may have seen.

And he's a very visually driven person. He would sketch and storyboard himself all the way through production. So he sat with our artists at ILM and invited them to pitch new creative ideas to him, just in the form of these very simple black and white sketches. And sometimes these images would be driven by ideas in the script, and other times JA would just say, have you got any cool ideas? And they'd just come up with random stuff. And so they were really connected with the filmmaking process, and had a really big influence on major plot ideas during the film.

This image you see here is very much an homage to Jurassic Park in the scene in the kitchen when the raptors stalk Lex. But JA didn't think that was scary enough. So he paid his tribute to the film by creating a genetically engineered, completely insane hybrid dinosaur, and putting it in a 9-year-old girl's bedroom in the middle of the night. He used to say two things on this movie. He used to say, the kids will love it. And that was when he was trying to persuade the producers of a crazy idea. And he would say, this is going to make the kids cry. And I'm not sure which one he preferred.

So these are some more images from that story concept development. And ILM would turn out dozens upon dozens of these ideas. And it was a sort of more developed storyboarding as the movie. And we would take some of those images, and we would start to render them a little bit more creatively. So we'd start to get an idea of the lighting, the palette, and the tone of the film.

And this was back in July of 2016. And so two years before the film came out. And when we finished the movie, I looked back at some of these original images, and compared them to finished frames in the film. And you can see, just from comparing these, how much influence those early sketches had on the composition, the lighting, and the framing of the shots.

And these images you can see here now are final frames from the movie. I can play those shots as well, if I hit [INAUDIBLE] enough times. There we go.

So I didn't realize it at the time when we were working with JA on these initial concept developments how much influence they were going to have on the finished product that we came out with at the end. For me, it just kind of goes to reinforce the testament of how ILM really engage filmmaking from a very early point in the production, and are trying to become part of a production team that's solving technical and creative challenges, and helping to visually shape the film.

So the next phase was taken over by our production designer, Andy Nicholson. And he would put together a series of 40 or 50 carefully crafted images, which form a mood board for the entire film. And we would put these up on a wall in a war room at Pinewood Studios. And it would just allow everybody on the film, including our studio executives, to walk around that room and really get an idea for the film.

So with these sets of images, things like this and the script we could really start planning. So it was an invaluable part of the process for visual effects. We could start to advise which parts of the sets we wanted to build practically, and where we wanted to allow for visual effects extensions, whether we wanted to shoot on a location, or whether we wanted to go and build sets on a stage.

And visual effects is obviously not the only deciding factor on how and where films get made, but on Jurassic, we were a really big part of that process. It seemed like we became almost like the glue that held all the other departments together. Because all the other departments needed visual effects in some way, shape, or form. Our construction department needed to know how much of a set they had to build practically. Our stunts department needed to know what our dinosaurs looked like, and how they moved, so they could work it into their stunt list.

Our DoP, he needed to get into sets and remove parts of the ceiling so that he could light the sets in certain ways. So we had to work out how he could engineer those bits out, and we could put them back in in post-production. Even our costume department relied on us, because for some reason unbeknownst to me, everyone in the film, nearly everyone in the film wore glasses. And we were really worried about getting bad reflections in people's lenses. And we tried just about every type of anti-reflective coating we could find.

So if anyone here knows how to stop getting reflections in people's glasses, then please come and find me afterwards. Cause we didn't work it out. What we ended up doing was taking the lenses out of their glasses for most of the film, and then putting them back in in post-production, which seems the wrong way to do it. But next time, just don't wear glasses.

So the design scape, as I was saying, really helped us start planning for the movie. And it was also a great way to get people really excited about the film. And when you see images like this, really beautiful pieces of concept art like this, you can understand why.

In the case of the dinosaurs, you can see Blue, the velociraptor at the top, and the t-rex at the bottom. When we see these concept images, it helps us start to decide how and when we could use animatronics as the primary method of realizing the dinosaurs in each scene. So the combination of the design scapes and the script, it really showed us exactly how much people were going to need to interact with dinosaurs in the film. And there was, frankly, a terrifying amount of human, dinosaur interaction. We had to work out how to bring it to life. I can play these shots as well.

So both of the sequences you can see here relied on a combination of practical animatronics, created by Neil Scanlon and his team, and extensive visual effects work from ILM. And it might not be that obvious what the visual effects work is at the moment. But I'll show you.

So sometimes I really did think it was going to be easier to grow real dinosaurs in a lab than go to the kind of crazy and extreme lengths we went to on Jurassic to create them digitally. But I'm kind of glad that we didn't do that, because then I'd have been out of the job for the last two years. And on Fallen Kingdom we had 21. Oops. Hit the button again. We had 21 unique species of dinosaur. Which is more than any of the other films by a considerable margin.

And for each of those dinosaurs we had variations in size, in shape, in texture, in order to give us enough scope for scenes where we had dozens of rampaging dinosaurs in one single shot. We had to think about how they could fit into sets, in cages, in the backs of lorries, down small corridors. And seven of those dinosaurs were brand new. We'd never seen them. So we had to design them from scratch.

And the obvious place to start when you're designing a dinosaur is science. So we had a big science room. And well, actually this was just one of the warehouses where we had all of our skeletons come in. And somebody was building them to use in one of the exhibits.

So we could go in and we scanned all of these dinosaurs using photogrammetry, and using LIDAR scanning so that we had accurate 3D models of them in Maya. And from there, we could start to look at how muscles would have attached to their bones. And we built all the dinosaurs from the inside out. So we had skeleton rigs. We had muscle rigs as well. But using fossils as the basis for that.

But sometimes we found details in reality which didn't really work for our film, and so we embellish and adapt it a little bit, which is why they don't always look exactly like you think dinosaurs should look. And this was a good example of it. This was one of the skeletons in the diorama room set.

Anyone that hasn't seen the film, this is probably lost on all of you. But hey, it's fine. I'm sure you have. So this is one of the skeletons in the diorama room. And it was a skeleton of a velociraptor. And it's two foot tall. But we all know velociraptors are six foot tall. So it was a good reminder for me at least that, while science was a good basis for where we wanted to start in creating our dinosaurs, we're making a science fiction movie, not a documentary. So you have to take reality with a pinch of salt sometimes.

And the first digital step that we took was to create a sculpt of our dinosaurs. Again, the primary piece of software that we were using at ILM was Maya. And we had an amazingly talented concept artist called Jama Jurabaev, who would spend a few days sculpting these dinosaurs to try and get a sense of their overall proportions and size. And at this point, we would even take them and put them into Unreal, and give JA a headset, and actually allow him to stand next to them, because there's a big difference between looking at a dinosaur on a screen, and standing next to a 15 foot tall dinosaur.

And he would change his perception of the animal very quickly when he saw it in a virtual space and he could actually walk around it. And he would even make it bigger or smaller.

Usually if it's on a screen, a laptop, he would make it bigger. And as soon as he stood next to it, he realized he made it too big. And he'd start scaling it back down again. Anyway, these sculpts would let us get an early sign off on the design of the creatures from our filmmakers. But even at that point, we'd think about how the dinosaurs needed to move, because that would influence their shape as well.

And we were very lucky to have a talented animation supervisor called Glenn Macintosh who did all these wonderful sketches. And he did it so that he could really start to think about the attitude, and the motion, and the movement of those animals.

And these sketches would go hand in hand with the 3D sculpts. And it would help us adjust the proportions of the dinosaurs. So in the case of the indoraptor, the early designs had much longer forearms. And we started animating him, and making him walk around like a quadruped. And as soon as he started walking, his elbows were ramming into the corners of his knees. And he was basically tripping over himself, and it was the least scary walk cycle I've ever seen.

So we had to sort of re-proportion him. And we looked at cheetahs, and leopards. And we had to lengthen his torso and shorten his arms, and actually be able to make him move in a more elegant way.

So those sculpts would then turn into a concept image. And this was another very quick iteration, a quick paintover that would take a couple of days. But it would allow us to show our director, JA, what we believed the dinosaur was going to look like.

And these are some walk cycles that come from a little bit later on in the process. But at the point that we had that concept you were just looking at, I distinctly remember getting JA Bayona to give it the thumbs up and approve it.

And then we had Colin Trevorrow on the film as well, who he wrote the script. He was an executive producer on Fallen Kingdom as well. But he also directed the first Jurassic World film. So he had a fairly big say in what went down on this film.

So I got both JA and Colin to sign off on this design. I was pretty happy. It was a good day for me. And then I went to see my producer. And I said, Pat, JA and Colin have just signed off on the indoraptor. And he went, Vickery, good job. Send it to Steven. And I was like? What do you mean, Steven? Who's Steven? He went, Spielberg.

[LAUGHTER]

It kind of takes the wind out of your sails a little bit. You still got to get Steven Spielberg to approve it. And then we have a good ending to that story, cause Steven actually really liked it. So we got away with it in the end.

So part of Jama's job at that point as well was to create a mood board, something that I'm sure a lot of people do in engineering and product design. But we also do it in visual effects. And it helps us keep a consistent vision for those creatures as they get moved through various different departments through the modeling, texturing, and lighting teams, but also used by other departments on set.

And it also was really important to me that we referenced as many real animals as we could when we were detailing these creatures. So those details from real animals, like sea urchins, iguanas, and snakes would keep these fantastic dinosaurs grounded in reality. And the human eye is so incredibly perceptive and sensitive to detail, that to make these animals as convincing as possible, wherever we could we would use details from real animals as a visual anchor to reality.

And it's more obvious. Some dinosaurs, like the largest sauropods, we could look at elephants. And they'd give us a great sense of detail for the skin detail, and wrinkling. But if we looked at videos of elephants, as they moved that would start to show us how the muscles and the skin actually move on those creatures and flow underneath it. So from an anatomical sense, we could actually get a better idea of how we could transpose that detail onto our dinosaurs. I will show you more about that in a minute.

So at the same time, as the hero concepts of the creatures, we also started to look at how those animals will fit into our sets. Because one of the big problems with dinosaurs is, they're big. And Andy Nicholson, the production designer, was really worried that they just weren't going to fit into any of the rooms. Because there haven't been many instances where we've put dinosaurs inside a house in the Jurassic Park franchise yet. So he had to build an absolutely huge bedroom for Maisie Lockwood, who is the 9-year-old girl in the film. I don't think many 9-year-olds have a bedroom big enough for a four poster bed, two dinosaurs. But Maisie's room had 14 foot high ceilings, and was nearly 25 foot long. And it still managed to look kind of cramped by the time we filled it up with dinosaurs.

So there's a scene that takes place later on in the movie where the indoraptor attacks Maisie and Owen in Maisie's bedroom. You'll see this in a minute.

So Andy knew that we were going to have to build most of the contents of that room digitally. Because the dinosaurs are going to completely smash it up. So he filled it with just about every type of complex object you can imagine. There were fur rugs. There were feather boas. There were hundreds of teddies and books. There were glass jars full of marbles, that he then backfilled with glitter.

There was a two foot high LEGO ferris wheel made of thousands of pieces, and a drum kit. And I just walked into this room and had a minor panic attack. It was like the most complex sort of CGI environment that you can imagine. It felt like a conspiracy.

So you can see, we had to replace most of it digitally. But what Andy didn't find.

[LAUGHTER]

Was an E.T. toy. So we added one of those in. And you can see that in. These are the Easter eggs. These are the things that we shouldn't really have had time to do. But you can see it on the floor. It got kicked by the indoraptor. And that was the sort of stuff that we put in.

And there are many of these little kind of Easter eggs in the film. And JA would say, that's for Steven. Because he was about the biggest Steven Spielberg fan you can imagine.

So anyway, I spent the first 10 minutes on the director's walkthrough of this set, trying to move everything into the corner of the room where I thought the dinosaurs wouldn't reach. Of course, the director and the dinosaurs had completely different idea about that. So we ended up having to build pretty much all the room.

There were 150 CG props for that one set alone. We didn't have the luxury in this sequence of relying on animatronics at all, because the fight between the dinosaurs was just so frenetic that there was no way we could actually reenact it on set.

But there were plenty of places where we could. So how do we decide when to use animatronics? Well, it's kind of a tricky question, because in visual effects, you can just about do anything now pretty much, give or take. But that doesn't really mean you should. And I'm a firm believer in that.

And Colin Trevorrow and JA were very keen to use as many animatronics as they could. But animatronics have their limitations too. But it's slightly ironic for me that the big part of my job in the early phases of a film, trying to find ways to not do visual effects. It's like I have to be the most work shy person ever, cause I'm trying to find ways for the director to film things, to get it for real, to get the basis of the shots that we're filming as grounded in reality as possible, because if we don't film it right, we're never going to fix it. If the sort of basic structure of the shot is not correct, we're never going to make it look any good.

So Neil Scanlon and I sat down. We looked through the script. And neither of us wanted to rely on either digital or animatronic techniques for the sake of it. But we wanted to try and find a way that we could collaborate and play to our own strengths, and come up with the best results. And this often meant that we would have to take the more difficult route of shooting with animatronics. Because animatronics are not easy to film with. They're quite slow. It takes quite a long time to set them up. It takes even longer to move them to another part of the room.

But we knew animatronics would give us a brilliant physical presence on set. They allow the actors, the camera operator, your DoP, and the director to interact with something physical in a very direct and immediate way that CG never could. CG is a very slow, laborious, painstaking process that involves dozens of people sat in completely different rooms. We wanted to give JA the ability to direct something in real time.

The bottom line is, you believe the shots in the film with animatronics are real, because they are real. They may not be actual dinosaurs. But they're a real performance being given by a real object.

I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago in Turin, and I was very lucky to see Hans Zimmer speak there. And he summed it up very much more succinctly than me. And he was talking about music, not dinosaurs. But he said real time is where shit happens.

And it's perfectly true. And we wanted to allow shit to happen. We wanted to give our director the ability to actually stand on set and interact with a dinosaur, and see what happened. And loads of happy accidents happened. And we got loads of really gritty and interesting performances that were interactive that we'd never have got if we'd have just done all of the dinosaurs digitally.

So the leap we took on Fallen Kingdom was to take our digital dinosaurs and actually share them with Neil Scanlon, the animatronics supervisor. So what you're seeing here is actually a 12th scale print of Blue, taken directly from ILM's digital files. So we looked at all the pre-viz for each dinosaur. And we posed the dinosaur in what we called a rest pose that was as close to the sort of average position that the dinosaur was going to be in any one sequence.

We took the 3D models. And we baked all of the displacement, all the high res texture displacement maps that the artists had painted. We baked that back into the 3D meshes of the dinosaurs. And then we created these huge OBJ files, with hundreds upon hundreds of millions of polygons, and cut them up into sections.

And we worked out that if we were printing our dinosaurs at one to one scale, which is what you can see here-- if you look closely, you can just about see where the seams of the 3D print have been stitched back together-- that the polygons in the 3D meshes needed to be no bigger than one millimeter square. Because if they were any bigger, when you printed it out, you could see the polygon facets in the 3D print. And Neil Scanlon actually did one print where he could see the faceting.

He had the most panicked phone call I've ever gotten. He was going, I can see the polygons. He was never going to be able to sand the edges off all the little corners. So we had to trash a lot of models and start again.

And it was fine for Blue, because Blue's not that big. Only about two meters long lying on the floor. But for the t-rex, it was a totally different prospect.

And the t-rex we built an animatronic from the tip of our nose back to sort of around her shoulders. And Neil had to reconstruct 54 separate 3D printed sections in a sort of massive 3D jigsaw, and glue it all back together so that he could take a mold from that and cast silicon back into it to create the animatronic.

The benefits of this incredibly long winded process was that when we got into post-production, we knew that the physical animatronic would match the digital dinosaur that we had at ILM perfectly. So we would be able to seamlessly replace and integrate the digital performance with the physical one that we got on set.

So on set this is Blue. So what I'm showing you here is just a series of plates from the film with no visual effects at all. So this is just the raw photography that we shot on the day. And somewhere under there there are like 20 people with rods hiding underneath the truck. Cause Neil had like 20 guys underneath that truck, puppeteering it. So it's a really direct performance.

And you get an amazing performance. It's a really fantastic looking animatronic. The detail in it is amazing. Their performance is incredibly reactive. And so now we can play a game.

So I'm going to make you play the guess what we replaced game. Someone has to help me or the talk stalls a little bit at this point.

OK. So this, again, one plate with the original photography. Does anyone want to hazard a guess as to what we may have done in post-production? Anyone? Thank you.

Sometimes this talk works, and sometimes it doesn't. And actually thank you. We didn't replace the claws. That was the only bit we kept.

[LAUGHTER]

Sorry. That's unfair. Please answer the next question as well. So this is our animation pass. So this is just an OpenGL preview out of Maya. The claw is the only part of the animatronic that we kept. We replaced everything else.

And that seems like why did we go to all the lengths of making an animatronic if you replace the entire dinosaur?

Because on set we got an amazing performance. Something that even the performance of Zia on the right hand side of frame, can you imagine as a director trying to sign off on this shot if she was just standing in front of a green bean bag. It would be really hard to know whether her performance made any sense, or what the dinosaur was going to be doing.

And you'll notice that the CGI animation of Blue is a deliberate, very direct match for the performance of the animatronic. We didn't go and set out to change the performance. We set out to match it, and enhance it.

So the enhancements that you can see in here are all of the throat shapes, the bellowing movement in the throat shapes, and the subsurface motion of the muscles and the tendons firing, the nictitating membrane in the eye, the really subtle trembling, and lip curling. All of these are details which Neil could never have done.

And so this is the final shot that was in the movie. And you notice that we kept the strap that goes across her mouth, because there are tiny details like the vibrations in the leather straps, things that we'd never think to add in post-production, and we'd never have the time to add them in post-production. So by going and filming this for real, that's one of the happy accidents, the shit happens moments.

So here's another one. This is the original plate again. Do you want to walk into the trap?

[LAUGHTER]

Anyone else want to walk into the trap? You might win. You might get it right.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAVID VICKERY: Yeah. OK.

AUDIENCE: You replaced Chris Pratt.

DAVID VICKERY: We replaced Chris Pratt. He's the only CG thing in this shot.

Yes. It's the other way around. So yeah. We've replaced the eye, because often the eye actually looked a little flat and plastic. And the shading we could give much more a sense of refraction of light through the lens. So we always replace the eye.

But in this instance, we replaced the hand. And if you look at the previous take, you can see when JA saw this, it's just a slightly mechanical movement in the claw. And JA felt that its performance wasn't suitable for Blue. She needed to feel like she was in pain. And we could give a better sense of that with our animation. So it's like a digital reshoot. And here's the final shot.

And we had loads of animatronics on Fallen Kingdom. This is Neil Scanlon you can see in the red and white t-shirt on the left. A very talented guy. And so we had a full size head for the indoraptor that we could mount on a dolly track, and push it in and out of shots kind of slowly. But it would work. It was great. And looked beautiful.

We had a leg, a full size arm for the indoraptor. We had a body that we could lay down on the floor. But we also needed something that could move a lot faster, that could represent the whole of the indoraptor, that could run through sets and chase people. And we were never going to be able to do that with an animatronic. So we came up with inflatable dinosaurs.

[LAUGHTER]

I mean, the whole film was about trying to find as many ways as we could to merge kind of physical and digital techniques, and to engage people on set with the post-production process. And bring them into the creation of our dinosaurs, rather than always relying on it being a decision that was executed by post-production artists only.

So this is Liam who is one of our creature performers that we had. He doesn't look very happy. That's because he's standing in the rain, even though he's inside on a stage. So he's wearing the inflatable indoraptor. And it still sounds crazy when I say that out loud.

But it was an amazing performance tool. Because we had another guy. Aidan and Liam were a father and son indoraptor team. And one of them wears the tail. And the other one wears the head. And I could advise them as to how far apart from each other they would need to stand in order to inhabit the volume that the indoraptor would be in.

And they could run through a room. And it meant that our camera operator knew what lens to use. It meant the DoP knew how to light it. Focus knew where to pull focus to. And the director knew what was going on without simply looking at me and saying, where's the indoraptor? And I would just go, it's over there somewhere.

I didn't want to do that anymore. I wanted to bring a performance piece to the set. I didn't want to use a guy with a tennis ball on a stick, a really inert dinosaur. So we came up with the inflatable.

And there were huge benefits to this. We could terrify old ladies all day long. This is Geraldine Chaplin, who was dangerous with a poker.

And I am kind of making light of it, but the benefits of this were so huge, because we could take any shot. We could take our inflatable, and we could bring it to the set. And we could rehearse with it. And everyone would know what their cues were. The cameraman knew where to look. The camera operator-- sorry-- would know where to look. The actors knew which direction to look in.

And it's quite surprising when you're on set. If you tell everybody where the dinosaur is and then roll cameras, they'd all look in slightly different directions from each other, guaranteed. So actually having something physical on set for people to react to and interact with was invaluable.

And the plan was that we would rehearse. Everyone would know their marks. Then we'd take the dinosaur away, and we'd shoot it. And everyone would remember everything they needed to do. And what we found, in practice, was that as soon as you took the dinosaur away, the whole shot just started to die. Like the energy in the take just left. We lost that extra 5% that you got when you had the dinosaur there as a performer.

So what we ended up doing was leaving it in most of the time. And JA would pick the takes with the dinosaur in, because those were the ones that had the energy. Those were the ones that really sold the shot in the most effective way. And we ended up having to paint the dinosaur out in nearly every single shot before we could add the dinosaur back in.

And here's a good example of that. This is a sequence where the indoraptor attacks Claire, Owen, and Maisie in this tiny little kind of diorama room. And here's the original plates we shot with the performers. There should be some audio with this, which is worrying for later on.

So you see, you get a kind of really interesting interactive performance with lots of energy. And there's a huge amount of visual effects work that needs to go into that in order to create the finished shots. But I'll show you. Oops. I'm just going to go back.

Let's see. Let's see if the audio works. Don't know what's up. There should be some audio. I can make dinosaur noises. Screaming and crashing around.

Now it's finished. Do you think you could go and see where the guy is, Wes? Only cause later on there's loads of takes with audio as well. Thanks.

Anyway, so I'm moving on. Even when the dinosaurs weren't moving at all, there was still value in having some sort of stand in or performance piece there to give the actors something to work with.

So in this scene I didn't want Ted Levine to just step over an imaginary dinosaur on the floor. And if we'd have asked him to do that, he never would have come up with this idea to put his foot out and kick the dinosaur's head. That was something he ad libbed on the day because there was a performance piece there.

And you start to see in this breakdown all the extra layers of detail that we add into the dinosaur, some of the inside out build of the creature, the muscle and the skin stimulation. And we put a huge amount of time into overhauling the creature's pipeline for Fallen Kingdom, because we had so many new creatures on screen. We needed to create a really robust system that could be easily adapted across all of our different animals.

And so to underpin the creature simulations, our animation rigs had a huge array of predefined model shapes built in on sliders that would control skin tension, eye blinks, facial shapes, tendons firing underneath the skin. And you can see a small sample of that here.

Yeah. A quick test. I'm just going to back up. Here we go.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[INAUDIBLE]

[THUNDER]

[SCREAMING]

[GLASS SHATTERS]

[SCREAMING]

[DINOSAUR MOANING]

- Go. Go.

[SCREAMING]

Ow.

[GROANING]

[END PLAYBACK]

AUDIENCE: Lots of screaming.

DAVID VICKERY: That was a pretty good rendition you gave.

[LAUGHTER]

OK. Skipping back forward. So where was I? Oh, yeah. All the predefined shapes that we had to build into the animation rigs. The other thing we had to consider is that the dinosaurs in Fallen Kingdom, they'd been left to roam free across the island. So they're fending for themselves. And how we wanted to portray that was having a much more malnourished creature, much more leaner, with more muscle, bone, and sinew showing.

And in the case of the indoraptor, that was doubly so. Because he'd been basically hauled up in a cell his whole life and tortured, and was some sort of genetically inbred, synaptically misfiring evil creature. So he has all these kind of weird bodily tics and twitches. And it makes his skin move, twitch, and flick in really complex ways.

So here's a little demo showing some of the creature sim tools that we had. And in the top left, you can see the first step, which is just modeling the underlying skeletal and muscle structure of the dinosaurs. Always based on scientific records.

And you can see it's a fairly low resolution model. But it's accurate dimensionally. And those muscle structures are rigged to the animation skeleton in a fairly standard way. And we have a secondary set of splines that run between each of the joints so that as the dinosaur moves around, those splines change length slightly. And as they change length, what that does is it informs the muscles as to whether they should be under contraction or expansion. So we actually then start to introduce different shapes into those muscles, depending on whether they should be firing or relaxed.

In the top right what you can see is the tetrahedral mesh that we build to simulate the muscles. So once we understand whether they should be under contraction and rigid, or loose and flexing, the tetrahedral mesh will actually then create a simulation of them. So we get wobbling, jiggling, tension in other areas.

In the bottom left you can see the next phase, which is to wrap the high resolution skin of the dinosaur back to the simulation mesh, just to make sure that we're not going to lose any of the high res detail in the creature's model. And in the bottom right is the penultimate step, which is actually to run a skin simulation on top of all that.

So we had texture maps which would control whether the skin would stick directly to the simulated muscles, whether it would be left to slide over the top of the muscles and the fixed structures of the bone, or other areas where it would just be left to simulate of its own accord. It would be pinned back to the original animation mesh of the dinosaur.

And we take all that, and we wrap a final skin simulation on top. This is like a thin skin wrinkle layer, which gives us these tiny little creases in the joints and the crease of the elbow, underneath his arms and in the corners of his legs. You get an incredibly complex system that really starts to detail the anatomy of the creature really quite realistically.

And there's a lot of control in it as well. And the benefit of this tool was that we could now take it, and we could warp the anatomy of that dinosaur onto subsequent dinosaurs. And, in theory, we get a really beautiful simulation relatively cheaply like this.

[LAUGHTER]

Straight out the box. It never works first time. This is like basset hound mating with a hot air balloon.

Sometimes I make it sound a bit too easy. But this demonstrates that it's not. Like set it all up. It's all working perfectly. Hit go. And that comes out in the morning.

So we took this same kind of practical, wherever possible mentality whilst we were shooting in Hawaii. And we filmed at Kualoa Ranch on Oahu, which is a favorite of many film productions.

Our first problem to overcome in Hawaii was the weather. We were shooting there for three weeks. And in the space of one morning, we would see huge downpours of rain, thick coverings of white cloud, blue skies, the whole gamut of weather.

And so we already knew we were going to have to augment and replace a lot of the environment to add an exploding volcano. But our first challenge was literally contending with the elements. So our special effects supervisor laid down hundreds of meters of smoke tubing and firebars. And we literally used it to diffuse the atmosphere with smoke, nontoxic smoke.

So the image you can see here, all of the atmospheric smoke inside of the mountain there was all created by our special effects supervisor during the shoot. And the goal here was to try and create a consistent visual aesthetic, a consistent atmospheric condition for the three weeks of our filming so that we had plates that came out that looked the same.

We also laid down dozens of explosive charges in the ground, which we could trigger as our cast were running through. And that put them in a much more real situation, and helped them in their performance. But it also helped the editor when it came to cutting the sequence, because he had very natural cut points to help edit the scene back together.

And that's something that if we'd have put all these explosions in in post-production, we could have spent weeks editing a cut, put all of our explosions in, and then had the editor completely re-edit that sequence based on the timings of our animation. So actually getting it in camera whilst we were in Hawaii was really important.

In post-production we then had to match a lot of those physical effects with digital simulation. So we had set ups to run very complex and detailed fire sims like this, where we were pretty much burning most of the jungle down.

Other tools that allowed us to add interaction with the dinosaur's feet. So depending on where and when the dinosaur were placing their feet, this would churn the ground. And we could control whether the ground needed to be dusty, or dry, or wet, or compacted.

Before I go too much further into this, what I wanted to do is just show you this little sequence. So this is a comparison on the left hand side of the original photography from a little beat of the gyrosphere escape sequence. And on the right hand side, the final shots. And it gives you a better understanding of the scope of work in just that one sequence.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]

[EXPLOSIONS]

- Oh!

[SHOUTING]

[LARGE CRACKING]

[STOMPING]

[SCREAMING]

- Go! Go!

- [INAUDIBLE]

- Buckle up, children.

- OK.

- Get in!

[ROARING]

[GROWLING]

[END PLAYBACK]

[LAUGHTER]

DAVID VICKERY: I got caught out. I know I said I didn't want to use sticks, but Justice Smith was really scared of sticks. So we had to use a stick for that shot.

So we worked closely with the SFX team in Hawaii. And we built a number of gyrosphere rigs as well. So we had a motion control. On the right hand side, you can see we had a motion control rig that would allow us to puppeteer the gyrosphere when it had actors in it, as if the gyro mechanism itself was broken, and it would tumble the ball, and tumble them round and upside down. And that was controlled based on the pre-viz that we'd done.