For Colin Trevorrow, closing out the Jurassic World franchise was a balancing act that combined two generations of casts while wrapping up decades worth of storytelling. The filmmaker and his team also were responsible for 27 different dinosaurs, ten of which had never been in a Jurassic film in the past. Among them all, one stood out as the toughest to get right.
“The Pyroraptors were really hard and were the ones that took the longest to develop, because we didn’t really have any baseline for it,” Trevorrow said on this week’s episode of THR’s Behind the Screen podcast. “We had to understand how feathers reacted to wind, ice water and all of these other elements that.”
To get it right, the team gathered feathers from all over the world and built an animatronic to experiment with how the light would play off its feathers.
The director also talked about the return of dilophosaurus, the species that caused the demise of Wayne Knight’s Dennis Nedry and audiences haven’t seen since the original Jurassic Park. “I was very reserved with that one. … having solely seen it as an animatronic, and never digitally animated,” Trevorrow admitted. “So we didn’t have a digital model. We used only the animatronic.
“We were limited to what it could do, but I think the limitations of what animatronics can do are part of what makes that character scary,” he said, noting “it just kind of stares at you from a stationary spot. And then suddenly it’s right in front of you. When it’s there, it’s horribly nasty.”
You can listen to the full podcast below.
