Other Titles • Jurassic Park III (2001) • JP3 • Jurassic Park 3 • Jurassic Park 3: The Extinction • Jurassic Park: Breakout • Return to the Island: Jurassic Park 3 • The Extinction: Jurassic Park 3
Neill found the word puppet a bit misleading. "These things are so sophisticated and so expressive that you start thinking of them as living beings, other personalities on the set. Each of them represents a combination of the intelligence of those people who are working them."
The animatronic characters performed via a group of puppeteers clustered around a telemetry device, much like a sophisticated video game joystick. Their body language and motion traveled electronically through a computer, telling the hydraulics what to do. Each group of puppeteers (six each for the T-rex and Spinosaurus, four for the Velociraptors) deferred to a leader who controlled the head-and-neck movement using a telemetry device. Moving the lever translates to an alarmingly real movement (in real time) of the creature's head and neck.
Another puppeteer wore a second, very different, telemetry device, nicknamed a Waldo, that resembled a cross between a straight jacket and metal backpack. Any movement of the arms, hands and shoulders was commuted to the animatronic model's movement, again in actual time. These two performers worked in tandem with a support group that controlled the movement of the eyes, mouth and tongue.
Like the T-rex, the full-scale Velociraptors received a face-lift from Winston and his staff based on new information from Homer. "Every year we discover new things," he said. "We now have pretty good Velociraptor skulls and know that they look very different from how they were portrayed in the first two movies. We've found evidence that Velociraptors had feathers, or feather-like structures, and we've incorporated that into the new look of the raptor."
According to Homer, the Pteranodon, the flying reptile in Jurassic Park III, is fictitious, and based somewhat on the Pterosaur. Producer Kennedy described the creature as "enormous and scary. We put together a fairly intense scene that probably defines this movie as vastly different from the other two." In addition to the full-sized adult flying reptiles that required a combined methodology of animatronics, puppetry and a man in a suit, Winston's artisans also designed and built a nest full of baby Pteranodons. While the raptors and the Spinosaurus were hydraulically controlled, Rosengrant explained, these baby Pteranodons were old-fashioned rod puppets. There were five of them in the nest set, with four puppeteers working underneath the set for each puppet.
Movie Database
In Theaters
