Watch the making of a 'Jurassic Park' Velociraptor suit
The studio behind the terrifying Velociraptor costume in "Jurassic Park" comes clean about how they created the outfit in an epic behind-the-scenes video.
After seeing "Jurassic Park" nine times in the theater, I not only exhausted my mother's patience for the movie, but also perfected one heck of a Velociraptor impersonation.
Much to the delight of my inner child (and perhaps yours), the visual-effects studio responsible for the realistic raptor costume in "Jurassic Park" released a rare video and story that reveals the creation process behind the costume.
The iconic Stan Winston Studio created multiple Raptor suits for the popular dinosaur movies, with some controlled by cables and several designed for human performers. Studio supervisor John Rosengrant, the man inside the raptor, describes the once-in-a-lifetime experience of playing a 65-million-year-old carnivorous dinosaur.
The studio designed the primary suit by placing raptor drawings over various images of Rosengrant, then followed up with a body cast and full sculpture of the final form. In the video below, you can see the journey from simple mold to full-size costume.
To fit inside the suit, Rosengrant had to bend over, in a pose similar to that of a skier, for up to four hours at a time during filming. "My back would go out after about 30 minutes," Rosengrant said, "and that was after having trained a couple of hours a day for weeks."
In reference to the nail-biting kitchen moment in the first "Jurassic Park" movie, "that was my first big scene," Rosengrant said in a related interview. "As I was getting ready to do it, it occurred to me that it was a big deal."