the story of a monstrous sound

The moment became film history for many reasons. A storm hits Isla Nublar while an employee disarms the park’s security system. The power line that powers the guests’ jeeps runs out of charge. The noise of the bait goat turns into silence and, in the background, the audience in the movie theater begins to feel what is about to happen while on the screen some glasses of water shake with us. This is the story behind the most astonishing roar in cinema history: the first time we heard the T-Rex in ‘Jurassic Park’.

A few years ago, Spielberg said that for the star appearance of the T-Rex, the presentation card before the public had to be up to par or nothing that happens from then on in the film would be credible. In this way, both what we see and what we hear had to be in harmony. In that sense, ‘Jurassic Park’ was a prodigy ahead of its time. For the robotic models that were going to amaze the viewer, Spielberg hired Stan Wilsona renowned special effects artist and, above all, animatronic design specialist.

After signing the contract, Wilson dedicated an entire year to studying, researching, and even interviewing all the dinosaur scientists and researchers. The final result we see on screen is a fascinating combination of practical and digital effects. Yes, there is a lot of craftsmanship in the animatronics or dinosaur robots, but the beauty of the images results from a mix in post-production with movements and digital effects (made in Industrial Light & Magic).

But if the visual section of the film was fundamental, the sound was no less so. For the director, they had to go hand in hand, and the first question the team asked was the most logical.

Four animals to build a roar in DTS

Spielberg hired sound engineer Gary Rydstrom to achieve the titanic task of achieving the roar of the dinosaurs. It was not just any question, since, in reality, humans do not have the slightest idea of ​​what creatures that inhabited the planet long before we existed sounded like. Not only that. Filming took place in the early 1990s, and studies on the subject did not provide many clues.

Rydstrom began studying what had been done in film before. As far as he found out, the The first appearance of Tyrannosaurus rex occurred in 1918. with ‘The Ghost of Sleep Mountain’. In this case, it was a silent film that featured stop-motion animation by Willis O’Brien, who would also animate the dinosaurs in ‘The Lost World’ in 1925. In fact, he also lent his talent to the mythical ‘King -Kong’ from 1933, a paradigm shift as it was a talkie where we could hear the sound of the T-Rex. At this point in the story, the technicians used a slow, backwards mix of lion and tiger vocalizations.

Rydstrom said years ago that, ultimately, and despite all his creativity and precedents, the singular power of the T-Rex’s roar in ‘Jurassic Park’ was narrative:

For me, sound effects don’t just serve to make the incredible believable… They are really there to tell stories… to give us a feeling of fear [y] an idea of ​​who these dinosaurs are

Hence, based on some scientific data, the final result did not look like what the studies say. As he told NPR in an interview, he began the process of creating the T-Rex roar by recording a wide variety of animal sounds. He knew that only the perfect combination would work, so he tried to “get all the interesting animal recordings we could find.”

This process bore fruit after months of research, and the most unexpected animal noises were used for the iconic scenes of ‘Jurassic Park’. For example, the sound of turtle mating was used to provide the characteristic screeches shared among the film’s Velociraptors.

However, of all the dinosaur sounds in the film, none are as extravagant as the one made to find the T-Rex. Four animals were key, and the first of all the most surprising: the engineer’s dog, Buster, a small Jack Russel terrier (which he also used in ‘Terminator 2’). As he himself explained:

The way they animated the T. rex was very dog-like, especially when it grabs the Gallimimus and the lawyer and shakes them to death. Every day I saw my dog ​​playing with a rope toy and doing exactly that, pretending that he was killing his prey.

So, surprisingly, the first sound from which the T-Rex’s roar was going to come It was a Jack Russel terrier. However, he needed much more to achieve that overwhelming moment when the dinosaur appears. Let’s remember the scene:

Rydstrom recalled in 2013 that he was looking to create something that sounded “huge and otherworldly” but was still believable and organic. And, most importantly: he was trying to establish an ancient and elemental enemy. That’s how he finally found the other three animals, a mixture composed of the screech of a baby elephant, gurgling of an alligator and a growl of a tiger.

Apparently, the alligators’ deeper voices acted as the low-frequency element of the final roar. However, as he emphasizes, the key part of the sound was the high-frequency element: the baby elephant. How do i do it? With patience and some luck, because during the recording session, the baby elephant only made the iconic “high-pitched cry” once which forms the basis of every T-Rex roar in the film. “We kept trying to get him to do it again, and the people in charge said, ‘We’ve never heard him do that before; “That’s a strange sound.”

The film and the rest of the franchise used that unique mix. They had achieved an amazing (although not true) sound of the T-Rex, one that, along with the rest of the dinosaurs, gave the film the only two Academy Awards he won (in the sound category)and literally the reason the digital theater system (DTS) with surround sound proliferated in American movie theaters.

Universal, the film’s distributor, then signed up to 1,000 theaters for DTS for the release. A boost for technology considering that at that time the “rival” digital system, Dolby’s SR-D, had been active for a year in 250 cinemas around the world (Sony Dynamic Digital Sound would be released a few months later).

By the way, for those seconds before the appearance of the T-Rex that Spielberg masterfully achieved, with the iconic glasses of water shaking and generating tension in the viewer because it is going to happen, not so much study was needed. Not even Rydstrom’s involvement.

In this case, it all started from Spielberg’s moment of relaxation. The director was mulling over the script while he was driving in the car listening to a song by the band Earth, Wind & Fire. When he stopped the vehicle he observed the vibrations caused by the bass of the song and knew that he already had the idea “before the beast.”

The rest is film history.

Image | Universal, The Movie Times

In Xataka | Jurassic Park was hacked 31 years ago. Now we know what was in that source code