Plus, the unique approach ILM adopted to digital set dressing. An excerpt from issue #49 of befores & afters magazine.
In Gareth Edwards’ Jurassic World Rebirth, few moments crystallize the film’s collision of survival panic and blockbuster spectacle quite like the T-rex river raft sequence. The moment is actually a direct adaptation of a scene from the original ‘Jurassic Park’ novel by Michael Crichton. In Rebirth, a family in search of an abandoned InGen dinosaur genetics facility on Île Saint-Hubert seek to travel down a river on an inflatable raft. The trouble is, a sleeping Tyrannosaurus rex is awoken and pursues them down the river, only to be eventually blocked by a rocky barrier.
The thrilling sequence combined photography in Thailand and at an Olympic white water rafting center in the United Kingdom, alongside significant CG creature, environment and water simulation work by Industrial Light & Magic. It also involved some unique actor manipulation to replace arms and legs of the performers who had been wearing wetsuits to deal with the freezing UK temperatures. Even the raft at a crucial, but unexpected, point was a digital creation by ILM.
The chase begins with Teresa Delgado (Luna Blaise) inflating a yellow raft with the Tyrannosaurus still sleeping in the grass by the river. “Gareth had this idea very early on that the T-rex disappeared midway through the sequence, like a magic trick,” outlines production visual effects supervisor David Vickery, who hails from ILM. “It had to happen so quickly. It was like when the waiter gets to the tablecloth and goes, whoosh, and it’s gone, or holds up the bedsheet and drops the bedsheet, and then suddenly there’s nothing behind it. That was the same idea with the raft, where Teresa pulls the cord, the raft pops up, and the 40 foot long T-rex magically disappears behind it, midway through the shot.”
Vickery says he saw the storyboards and immediately wondered how they would make that ‘disappearing act’ work. On set, special effects supervisor Neil Corbould orchestrated the inflation of a physical raft, however, it took longer to inflate than anticipated. “It gave us a good reference for the mechanics of how a raft could inflate,” notes Vickery, “but we knew we had to quadruple the speed to make the gag work. In post, we then made a digital raft that inflated, stood on its end, and fell into the water, all while revealing that the T-rex had vanished.”
“It’s just this amazing bit of seamless, invisible visual effects which I don’t think anyone realized was a CG raft,” adds Vickery. “To me it speaks volumes about what we have to do in Jurassic, which is, if you don’t believe the environment that dinosaurs are in, you don’t believe the dinosaurs. I think the reason Jurassic films are successful is because dinosaurs are creatures that used to exist. So you can suspend your disbelief when they’re on screen because they’re real. They’re real things—they’re not dragons, they’re not mythical. But if you put them into a scenario where you don’t believe the environment that they’re standing in, suddenly you don’t believe anything about the image you’re looking at. So environments and props and effects in Jurassic have to be completely convincing. The same thing goes for the water, same goes for the smoke and steam and explosions—you have to buy into them or the dinosaurs don’t become real.”
Ultimately, the family get into the raft and are then pursued by the T-rex. Parts of the pursuit were filmed on location in Thailand and parts on the white water rafting course. “The hope was that we’d find practical locations that would work for everything and that we could find a lagoon in Thailand,” discusses Vickery. “We did find one in this beautiful old quarry, but it wasn’t deep enough with fast flowing water and safe enough for our cast to be in. Luckily, our supervising stunt coordinator Ben Cooke had worked on 1917, and they had used a white water rafting course to film a river scene. So we shot at the Lee Valley White Water Centre, which was built for the 2012 Olympics.”
For Vickery, this remained a suitable solution even though it wasn’t amongst a jungle environment, largely because he was looking to avoid just shooting on an interior greenscreen or bluescreen tank. The white water center afforded the opportunity to film in exterior light, and with running rapids. The challenge, however, was the weather.
“It was early September in the UK, and it was freezing cold,” states Vickery. “It was raining. I think we even had sleet one day. So, we had to have the cast wearing 6mm thick wetsuits. I was told they would be ‘skin color’ but it turned out they were yellow, and our cast had varying shades of skin, so they never matched. Also, with wetsuits on, the bulk and heft and buoyancy of the skin changed. That meant we had to do digital limb replacement on all of the cast members. Some of the shots were wide enough that we could grade their limbs, for example, when they were thrashing around in the water in the distance, we could grade their arms to fit. But at the back end of the sequence, they’re clinging onto the rocks and their arms are outside of the water the entire time. We have full frame close-up shots that needed full CG replacements.”
Vickery did consider shooting ‘limb’ elements that could then be used for 2D replacements. He notes, however, that Edwards shot lengthy full roll takes—the movie was shot on 35mm—before calling cut. “That meant you couldn’t predict which section of footage he would use from the take. There’s no element that you can shoot to protect for that.”
Some additional water tank shooting in the studios at Malta was also carried out for some underwater moments in which Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is almost chomped by the T-rex. “We shot that with second unit,” advises Vickery. “It was on the tank that was 20 foot long and 10 foot wide, and 10 feet deep. Underneath the water, we’d be replacing the whole environment.”
For shots of the dinosaur pushing its head through the surface of the water, the VFX team had a fiberglass stuffy head that was 3D printed. “That was made by Neil Corbould’s team,” says Vickery. “The goal was to use that as a line-up, essentially, just so that we had something for timings and for positioning the camera framing. The reality of a T-rex head smashing its head under the water is that it would move very fast—faster than we could do it. But even if it’s not at the right time and at the right place, you still get a good idea for how something would look as it breaks the surface of the water, with all the cavitation of the bubbles.”
The river and rapids were ILM fluid simulations mixed in with practical water. For an earlier sequence featuring the Essex ship and its encounter with Mosasaurus and other creatures in the open ocean, ILM had ramped up its water effects toolset, overseen by CG supervisor Miguel Perez Senent. That development was leant upon also for the rapids, explains Vickery. “We’ve done amazing water simulations in the past. But the sheer volume of it and the complexity of it here, with multiple either humans or the T-rex thrashing around in this white water meant that we needed to find a way to break the simulations up into separate chunks. We used the new toolset based around the Houdini FLIP solver, which allowed us to take low resolution simulations of the white water surface and then identify individual regions within it that we could compute higher as final sims.”
“Instead of taking a massive body of water and a limit to the data size for that cache,” continues Vickery, “we could drive all of that data into smaller regions and get better resolution. Now the next tricky thing is, you’re trying to connect all the different parts of the simulations together, whether it’s white water running off of the surface of the dino, or as it slams its foot into the water, the sheet of water that gets thrown up and then lands back on the surface causing all the little white pitter-patter splatters. In the new tool we had, we could bring all of those combined pieces together into the same simulation. They weren’t separate sims that didn’t react with each other.”
For the environment surrounding the river, ILM visual effects supervisor Simone Coco led a team that referenced river areas found in China and Thailand. One of the things Vickery looked to implement was a composition of plants, trees and rocks that did not feel too manicured. “We tried to make sure that nothing felt too contrived,” he says. “We could certainly compose our shots, but we couldn’t then dress everything perfectly to the frame. Gareth used to say if you overly compose this image, like putting a plant in the foreground and another one in the background, it’s going to feel too perfect.”
To combat this issue, Vickery recounts that Edwards suggested an unusual approach for digital set dressing. “He said to get the compositor or the 3D artist to pick up a CG tree, close their eyes, and just move the mouse around and then drop the tree and just see where it goes. It might not be right the first time you do it, but if you just go and just drop stuff in, you start to get a more naturalistic distribution of the trees and foliage. Then, also make sure there’s dead plants in there. The whole idea is that it’s not too picture perfect. Those left field ideas really helped those environments feel real.”
A significant challenge on the rapid shots was integrating the live-action actors into the mix of real and digital water. “We had these plates of our cast members with their heads and their arms flailing around and bobbing in the water and going downstream,” outlines Vickery. “We knew that, at the very least, we had to replace the edges of the water to blend them into our digital rocky set. On location, it was just concrete sidings in the white water rafting course. We also realized we had to blend the actors into the midst of all of our CG sims. That meant we essentially had to match the practical water by doing digital simulations that looked the same as the practical water, right down to the splashes leaping up in front of the camera.”
“Once we’d done that,” adds Vickery, “we knew that we could render the whole environment and leave the prep team and the compositors the flexibility to choose which pieces of water they kept from the plate and which pieces of water they could keep from the CG.
For the T-rex itself, ILM followed a process of re-modeling and re-texturing a bespoke dinosaur that went beyond what audiences had previously seen in Jurassic World Dominion. For specific moments in the raft chase, such as when it gets its head stuck in the rock gap, the VFX studio looked to animal reference. “That moment,” shares Vickery, “was like when a dog is trying to get its head out of the bar of a cage. In reference, you could see it straining for all it’s worth to try and get through, with its tongue coming out and everything. We made sure our T-rex was going through that kind of ‘pain’ as well. It’s all about giving your animators something tangible to refer to.”
A new issue on ‘Jurassic World Rebirth’ and past ‘Jurassic’ films
“We also looked at polar bears fishing or bears wading down a river,” says Vickery. “It wasn’t necessarily about dinosaur performance, it was about the sense of momentum pushing through this huge volume of water, or the way the splashes leapt up from its claws as it raced forwards. Gareth was really good. If we showed him some animation that didn’t have reference, he would question it. He would say, ‘I’m not really sure if this feels right.’ But if we showed him a clip of the dinosaur and a matching reference of the real animal, he’d go, ‘Great, I love it.’
The sleeping T-rex initially utilized a lion lying on its belly as reference, but Vickery notes that Edwards felt that depiction of a T-rex had been seen before. “Instead,” advises Vickery, “Gareth thought it could look like a dog when a dog is lying on its back and its legs are up in the air and it’s having a dream. We all thought he was a bit mad and then went looking for reference, and we found all these videos of lions lying on their back, sprawled out, yawning and rolling over. So we used that as the basis for how it was first seen and then when it rolled over. We’ve all seen a dog or a lion or a tiger roll over from its back onto its side. I think you can connect more emotionally with that on a CG dinosaur because you’ve seen it somewhere before.”
