Jurassic Park III (2001)

Rosengrant elaborated. "When our hydraulics team was creating the mechanics, they treated the Spino just like a submarine. There was never a single glitch."

Mitchell's ILM team designed some dinosaurs which were built completely in the computer, including the giant Brachiosaurus, an Ankylosaurus and a herd of Triceratops. "For the others, we had to mimic in our animation what Stan did with the live-action models," said Mitchell.

As with the 1997 sequel, Winston and his crew took advantage of advances in hydraulic and electronic technologies to breed their herds of lifelike dinosaur robotics. "There is as much science in what they're doing as there is in computer animation," said Kennedy. "Stan and his people have brought a tremendous amount of believability to these characters and to the films themselves."

The actors appreciated those advances, too. "What surprised me and probably everyone else who worked on the film was just how swept away one was by the experience of watching this technology," said Neill.

As usual, Winston and Rosengrant consulted with Homer while fabricating new creations to make them as close to the real creatures as possible. "My work with Stan is to ensure that his model makers build these animals to look scientifically accurate," Homer noted. "Stan and his sculptors came up with a pretty good, original rendition of Spinosaurus, and then I added my comments based on some more up-to-date scientific information."

The work starts with drawings, sketches and color renderings. "We then build a 1/16 version called a maquette," Rosengrant explained. "Once we have the detail down, we sculpt a 1/5 scale version of the creature, adding more detail. From there, we finish the full-scale version. It took us 10 months to go from the 1/16 scale model to what you see on the screen, a 44-foot, 13-ton lizard that we're told would have been a medium-sized version of this creature."

Even Winston was amazed by the accomplishment. "They hot-rodded this guy to the nth degree. Some of the hydraulic hoses we used are NASA approved. The T-rex weighed just nine tons, was about 35- feet and was operated at 300 horsepower." The Spino's 1,000 horsepower pulled two G's of force when its head moved rapidly.

The new creature had the desired effect on set. "I'm not kidding," said Leoni. "It was really scary to spend a couple days with an enormous dinosaur mouth looming over your gut. Trust me — when I look terrified, I am terrified!"

Instilling fear in the human cast members enhanced the performances of the animatronic characters. As Rosengrant related, "Stan has always said you can build these great machines but if they can't act, they don't perform. It helped the actors' performances when they saw this 26,000 pound dinosaur actually crash through the side of a plane. Actors can react to that, which helped us performance-wise, as the puppeteers reacted to the actors. That relationship was very exciting."

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