Check out this really cool video from Stan Winston Studios of the T-Rex sculpture being made for Jurassic Park. I remember seeing this epic adventure in 1993 and loving it. The excitement of dinosaurs jumped to gigantic proportions, with kids being super excited to learn about the time when these creatures roamed the earth.
When Steven Spielberg enlisted Stan Winston to handle the full-size dinosaur duties for JURASSIC PARK, he based his faith in Winston — and, indeed, in the very idea of building full-size mechanical dinosaurs — on the alien queen in ALIENS. “Steven figured that if we could build a fourteen-foot-tall alien queen, we’d be able to build a twenty-foot-tall T-rex,” Winston explained.
“But that was a somewhat naïve assumption on Steven's part. There was a big difference between building that alien queen and building a full-size dinosaur,” continued Winston. “The queen was exoskeletal, so all of its surfaces were hard. There were no muscles, no flesh, and there was no real weight to it. The alien queen also didn’t have to look like a real, organic animal because it was a fictional character — so there was nothing in real life to compare it to. There was just no comparison in the difficulty level of building that alien queen and building a full-size dinosaur.” Even so, when Spielberg asked Winston if he could build a full-size dinosaur, Winston didn’t hesitate. “I told him, ‘Yes, absolutely.’ He said, ‘How are you going to do it?’ And I said: ‘I haven’t got a clue. But we’ll figure it out.’”
This video shows some of the cool practical effects created by Steven Spielberg from the film:
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