Over 200 million years ago, dinosaurs walked the earth. The fossils and the mystery of their ultimate demise have interested people for decades. These extinct animals have been resurrected in many Hollywood films since 1925’s film The Lost World.
Since then, audiences have been captivated with seeing dinosaurs come to life in theaters; however, according to Robert Baird (1998), seeing these cinematic animals always had a “familiar jerky, almost pixelated, look” (pg. 91).
Steven
Spielburg attempted something new with his 1993 film Jurassic
Park (JP).
Spielburg's
dinosaurs had to look as real as possible. The dinosaur designs went
from using traditional stop motion techniques of films past to
employing both animatronics and computer generated imagery. Spielberg
and his design team consulted
paleontologists regularly to give these dinosaurs a sense of realism
but, despite their scientific accuracy, JP's
dinosaurs
relied upon animal
schemata for both visual and sonic design. Stan Winston (Baird, 1998)
recalled:
“You look at a
triceratops and say this animal could in some way relate to a
rhinoceros. You look at amphibians, you look at reptiles, you look at
mammals and at birds, take all that information in hand, and then you
makes aesthetic choices. Nobody can look at you and say,
scientifically, that it’s the wrong color… It’s a matter of
looking at it and going, does this feel right? Does it feel real,
does it look real, is it dramatic?” (pg. 92)
Relying
on this concept, JP's
production designer, Rick Carter, was able to get JP's
dinosaurs
away from the bug-eyed monster phenomena, noted by Sobchack (1987) and discussed in the next section, and make JP's
dinosaurs
animals (Baird, 1998).
In 1954, science fiction (SF) film Godzilla was released and later gained worldwide popularity. Shuhei Hosokawa and Akira Ifukube created Godzilla's reputable roar. Instead of using animal or human voices for the monster's roar, Hosokawa and Ifukube combined a series of musical sound and tape manipulation, becoming the first producers to use tape manipulation in Japan (Hayward, 2004). For the construction of JP's dinosaurs, Gary Rydstrom was directed by Spielberg to only use animal sounds when creating the dinosaurs' roars, breath, and other vocalizations (Barid, 1998).
The Tyrannosaurus Rex's roars and grunts are a mixture of alligator, elephant, tiger, dog, and penguin while the velociraptors used over 25 different animal sounds. Perhaps one of the most memorable sounds is the raptor call, a manipulation of mating tortoises (Rattigan, et al, 2012).
These manipulations might not be considered to be part of the temporal and three-dimensional structures necessary to schemata if not in part by using reptile sounds as the foundation for most of the sounds of the Jurassic Park animals (Baird, 1998). Still, schematas are altered over time as a person incurs experience of, in this case, sounds. Rydstrom's modified schema for sound and his knowledge of the highly intelligent pack hunter velociraptors gave reason for Rydstrom to use dolphin screeches for the velociraptor attacks (Rattigan, et al, 2012), dolphins being one of the most intelligent animals on Earth.
Many of the sounds for JP are not sounds people hear everyday. Yet, sound schema has been developed in audiences and from the many other movie examples of these extinct animals. Perhaps the reason these character sounds are more emotive than past film sound effects is because the characters look like things audiences have seen before outside of a theater such as elephants in a zoo or animal documentaries. The idea of how a Tyrannosaurus Rex might sound becomes an actuality when, visually, the character has a presence both on and off the screen.
Reference
Baird,
R. (1998).Animalizing “Jurassic Park's” Dinosaurs: Blockbuster
Schemata and Cross-Cultural
Cognition in the Threat Scene. Cinema
Journal, 82-103.
Hayward,
P. (2004). Off the Planet: Music, Sound, and Science Fiction Cinema.
London Bloomington,
IN: John Libbey. Distributed in North America by Indiana University Press.
Rattigan, T., Reisz, K., Holm, I., Firth, C., & Wilton, P. (2012). The Deep Blue Sea. Artificial Eye.
Sobchack, V. (1987). Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. New York: Ungar.
by Alix Rael
