Corridor Crew dives into the production behind the third-act T-Rex set piece in The Lost World: Jurᴀssic Park, explaining how it exemplifies some of the best visual effects work that the 1990s had to offer. The 1997 sequel to Steven Spielberg’s monumental Jurᴀssic Park saw Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm recruited to prevent a new batch of cloned dinosaurs at the Isla Sorna facility from being brought to the mainland by eager InGen executives. While it was a financial success, The Lost World: Jurᴀssic Park movie was a divisive sequel whose characters couldn’t live up to its impressive effects.

As Corridor Crew turned their focus to The Lost World: Jurᴀssic Park in the latest installment of their VFX Artists React To… series, the movie’s climactic T-Rex rampage through the streets of San Francisco was broken down. They highlighted surprising digital items that seamlessly blended with the practical effects, the carefully composed creature effects’ interactions with the physical environment, which were carefully timed to move alongside the digital creation, and explained how careful planning helped the VFX stand toe-to-toe with modern movies. Check out their comments below:

When we say that VFX were better in the ’90s, this is an example of what we’re talking about. It’s not that the effects were better, it’s the mindset behind them were so much more integrated into everything. They were so much more planned out, like, you’re saying it’s like this whole sH๏τ was planned out exactly to all these different things happening, and they just got to add in the dino.

What This Means For The Jurᴀssic Park Franchise

The Franchise Has Tried To Maintain A Consistent Look

With the franchise still ongoing to this day, the Jurᴀssic Park series has both taken advantage of the latest technological developments available, while also becoming guilty of committing several of the major criticisms modern VFX has become accustomed to. After the franchise’s return with 2015’s Jurᴀssic World, the movie was finally able to visualize a functioning, somewhat successful park, with later movies further showing dinosaurs spread into other major modern settings. To create the creatures of the later film, a mix of practical and digital effects was used, though there was a greater emphasis on the latter.

While the ratio between animatronic puppetry and digital dinosaurs has fluctuated between films, it can be argued that the franchise has been consistent in its methods over recent installments for the most part. Despite this, several VFX supervisors from ILM have opened up about the challenges this has brought, with David Vickery stating that quicker productions and faster sequences were hampering the careful work in ways that opposed the preferred way of handling VFX. As such, the upcoming Jurᴀssic World Rebirth has been heralded as a return to past productions’ methodologies.

Our Take On The Lost World: Jurᴀssic Park’s VFX Legacy

The State Of The VFX Industry Has Become A Much-Discussed Topic

Though developments such as the Volume used by many Disney productions have offered new VFX work opportunities, audiences have also more heavily scrutinized certain productions for their rushed VFX. As such, certain viewers have had a renewed interest in past movies, and have often shared Corridor Crew’s perspective. As moviegoers and experts online celebrate the best VFX has to offer in both contemporary releases and past releases such as The Lost World: Jurᴀssic Park, it is certain that companies are listening to see what audiences prefer.

Source: Corridor Crew/YouTube