EXCLUSIVE: Neal Scanlan Talks Breathing Life Into A Practical T-Rex For JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM

With Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker making its 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD debut last week, we were recently given an exclusive opportunity to sit down with Academy Award-winning special effects supervisor Neal Scanlan to talk about his work on the Skywalker Saga conclusion.

In the midst of our informative conversation, while explaining the highly intricate process behind creating the Vexis snake, he also opened up about his work on another recent billion-dollar blockbuster, the J.A. Bayona-directed Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which featured its own monstrous practical effect.

In one of the film's standout sequences, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) find themselves face-to-face with a tranquilized Tyrannosaurus Rex and face a daunting task when they must extract her DNA in order to save Blue.

While it is the same Rexy character from Jurassic Park, Scanlan confirms the sleeping T-Rex in the movie is actually constructed from an all-new practical mold that was massive in scale and allowed the actors to fully interact with the King of the Dinosaurs.

ROHAN: You started working on Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker almost immediately after finishing Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Were you in charge of the big T-Rex transport scene in the middle of the movie?

NEAL SCANLAN: Yes, yes.

ROHAN: I absolutely love that scene where Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are trying to extract the T-Rex DNA. It's just a stunning sequence and looks even more amazing since it was all done practically. Was that the original T-Rex that Steven Spielberg used in Jurassic Park, or did you build your own new dinosaur for Jurassic World?

NEAL: We built the full-size T-Rex with twenty of the largest panels that we could find and actually, that’s not very big at all, they’re about A1 size. It felt sort of like a one-foot tile, that was about the size that we could make. So, it was a three-dimensional jigsaw that clipped together to create this full-size physical form, which we then molded and then cast out in essentially a sculpting medium, so that we can get into it a second time and fully detail and bring out all the aspects.

So, it was it was essentially the model that everybody knows, with the tweaks that the guys at ILM wanted to do, plus a little bit more we did ourselves in order to sort of give us a little bit more expression based on the scene that we knew she was in because the thing about practical effects, what we try do, in certainly a scene like that, we knew the T-Rex was in a container. We knew that it was sedated, lying down, so the physical shape, the compression of the foam and all of those things, we sculpted a lot of that into it, just so that it feels like it really is sitting in that environment and then, because it was in the container, we knew that we could build that high up on the platform.

So, the container was actually a lightweight mimic and the animatronic sat on top and we were below it, so it allowed us to take the opportunity of bringing it to life without getting involved with very heavy hydraulics or electric motors. We were able to do mostly through physical performance again, but by effectively attaching a lot of puppeteers to it and using human beings to move Rexy.

ROHAN: Awesome, like I said, I absolutely love the T-Rex and that scene was probably my favorite in the movie. Are you returning for Jurassic World: Dominion, which I know is currently shut down, or are you moving on to more Star Wars?

NEAL: Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do the next one, it was right in the middle of finishing off Rise of Skywalker as far as publicity and things were concerned and we, at the time, were hoping to move into the Star Wars TV series. 

 

 

 

Lucasfilm and director J.J. Abrams join forces once again to take viewers on an epic journey to a galaxy far, far away with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the riveting conclusion of the seminal Skywalker saga, where new legends will be born and the final battle for freedom is yet to come. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker opens in U.S. theaters on December 20.