Jurassic World: Dominion will have more animatronic dinos than last 2 films

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Although Steven Spielberg's JURASSIC PARK featured ground-breaking visual effects, it was the animatronic dinosaurs which really sold the reality of the park. While the sequels which followed continued to use the animatronic dinosaurs, there was definitely a larger number of CG shots, and it all came to a head with JURASSIC WORLD. The dinosaurs in the Colin Trevorrow film were almost exclusively CG, with very few animatronics, but J.A. Bayona would make an effort to use more animatronics in JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM.

While speaking with Collider, JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION director Colin Trevorrow revealed that the upcoming film will actually utilize more practical effects than either of the previous films in the JURASSIC WORLD franchise.

We’ve actually gone more practical with every Jurassic movie we’ve made since the first one, and we’ve made more animatronics in this one than we have in the previous two. And the thing that I’ve found, especially in working in the past couple months, is that we finally reached a point where it’s possible to… digital extensions on animatronics will be able to match the texture and the level of fidelity that, on film, an animatronic is going to be able to bring. And you didn’t use to be able to really mix them. You could really see the seams. And so that part of it is very exciting for me.

Trevorrow went on to say that he's following in the footsteps of what J.A. Bayona did on FALLEN KINGDOM when it comes to the dinosaurs. "[Bayona] found the value in creating really photo-real, just beautiful lighting references that could be articulated just slightly. Just a head and a jaw that could move, but painted beautifully, hand-painted," Trevorrow said. "And we do it for all of the dinosaurs now, so when we put it into a space, you can see how the light reacts to the skin. And even if they ultimately do make that a digital animal, there was always something there reacting to the light in that environment … just puppetry in general, just really simple puppetry is proving to be amazing." While I would imagine that a lot of us still hold a great deal of nostalgia for the days of purely practical effects, when it's done right, the combination of practical and digital is certainly hard to beat.

JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION is slated to hit theaters on June 11, 2021.