"We had achieved quite a lot on those earlier films," 25-year SWS supervisor & co-founder of Legacy Effects, John Rosengrant said, "so there was a lot to live up to. We wanted to make the animatronics faster and better. At the same time, we wanted to come up with new designs and pump some energy into the old ones." By the time it was completed, the studio's full-size Spinosaur measured nearly forty-five feet long and weighed 25,000 pounds. Revisiting an approach that had worked well with the T-Rex rigs for Il mondo perduto - Jurassic Park (1997), the crew built the Spinosaur from the tip of its nose to the base of its tail, from the 'knees' up, and mounted it to a motorized cart that ran on tracks. The Spinosaur was not only the biggest and heaviest animatronic ever built by the studio, it was the fastest, featuring state-of-the-art, 'hot-rod' hydraulics - designed by Tim Nordella and Lloyd Ball - controlled by an eighteen-inch-tall telemetry device. "The Spino had to be faster, splashier and better than the T-Rex," stated Nordella. "The producers wanted something that was going to actually kill the T-Rex, in fact; so it had to be a more formidable character than the T-Rex was." Whereas the T-Rex had boasted 200 horsepower, 1000 horsepower drove the Spinosaur. Its solid-state construction also made it far sturdier than the T-Rex, which had been quite delicate, despite its appearance. The Spinosaur, in contrast, could take a beating. In one of the last scenes to be shot though not its last scene in the film the Spinosaur does battle with a T-Rex. The crew took one of the T-Rexes from The Lost World out of storage and refurbished it for the fight scene, which was as violent on stage as it appeared in the film. "That was a true fight," Robert Ramsdell said. "They were just going to scrap the dinosaurs after the show anyway, so they had us really ram those two robots together to get as much great footage as we could. We had two puppeteering teams with their little telemetry devices, swinging them around; meanwhile, these huge robots were slamming into each other across the way. Everybody on our crew was a little bit on edge about it, because we'd put a lot of time and work into these things. But the producers and studio execs were having a great time watching this, rooting for either the T-Rex or the Spinosaur to win. We ended up knocking the head off of the T-Rex - so I guess the Spinosaur won!"

Film

Nessun dato in archivio