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(music)
MAN - OFF SCREEN: All right, is everybody ready?
CHRISTIAN COLQUHOUN: Hi there.
My name is Christian Colquhoun.
I was one of the mechanical effects guys
for Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World.
MAN - OFF SCREEN: Okay, air. (chattering in background) and go.
CHRISTIAN COLQUHOUN: This was our compy attack effect
that we built for Jurassic Park.
The actually full name is procompsognathus.
This is Eric Ostroff.
He worked in the art department.
He is standing in for Peter Stormare,
who ended up being the star of this particular scene.
Greg Figiel did the sculpt, Jon Dawe helped me with the RC
and a lot of the puppeteering
and a lot of the little procompsognathus mechanics and mechanisms.
(music continues)
This was the beginning of the blinking eye.
To this day, I can't remember if it was me or Jon Dawe
who actually came up with idea of doing the cylinder
that actually rotated a wire that went through the center of the balls,
so it would actually make the imitation nictitating membrane blink.
These are a number of the little guys
that would be the attack procompsognathus in the shot.
They were all foam latex on a small understructure of wire.
Again, the advent of CG, we're trying to keep this
out of the CG realm and more into the practical realm.
MAN OFF SCREEN: Oh, that's crazy.
CHRISTIAN COLQUHOUN: That was actually my claim to fame on this movie
is stealing scenes from CG.
MAN OFF SCREEN: Oh my god.
CHRISTIAN COLQUHOUN: The string is actually a spectra line,
a super high strength, zero stretch fishing line.
This guy, there's a bicycle housing that runs to a velcro pad
that is positionable on the velcro suit that was underneath.
Wherever you pulled when you pulled the controller,
it would pull the spectra from one pad to the other,
but then if you pulled in the middle, like tension both sides,
it would pull right down to the middle between them.
It has a airline trigger for a solenoid valve
that would run air through the tails,
which would whip them around in a very frenetic action,
which looked really great on film.
It made it look very much alive.
(music continues)
This was the stunt man, who is writhing around
in very interesting pain there.
There were some non-functional ones on there that he could rip off,
but we had about six or seven puppeteers
that were all operating these things
completely independent of each other.
It ended up looking really great and very frenetic and very violent.
There was a particular scene with the RC one
that actually bit Peter Stormare on the lip
and he turns in to camera with this thing gripping his lip
and there was a little bit of blood on it.
You could hear people cringe in the dailies.
It was amazing.
This is a great effect and like any great effect, there was a real team effort.
I'm going to do a big shout out here
to Jon Dawe, my fellow mechanical guy, Shane Mahan,
Jason Matthews, Kevin McTurk, Eric Ostroff, Greg Figiel,
and of course, Crash McCreery.
My name is Christian Colquhoun
and that was how we did the procompsognathus attack
for Jurassic Park 2: Lost World.
It ended up being really fun and just a brilliant assignment.
Thanks.
(eerie sound)