(soft music)
- [Narrator] We all
remember Jurassic Park,
Steven Spielberg's 1993 dinosaur epic
about the dangers of leaving Newman
in charge of your security.
(dinosaur roaring)
(screaming)
Special effects were a
big deal at the time,
due in large part to this man.
- My name is Michael Lantieri.
I designed the special dinosaur
effects on Jurassic Park.
- [Narrator] And while
that included epic scenes
with the raptors and the T-Rex,
there was one special
effects sequence that proved
a lot more challenging than the rest.
- [Michael] It was the
rippling water in the cup
inside the car.
- [Narrator] Where'd that idea
come from in the first place?
- [Michael] One day, Steven
Spielberg called me from his car
and said that he was listening
to Earth, Wind & Fire
and his rearview mirror was shaking.
That's what has to happen
when the T-Rex arrives.
As well as that, I wanna
have a cup of water,
and I wanna have the water ripple.
That's the way we're gonna
see the arrival to the T-Rex.
- [Narrator] This kicked off three weeks
of long days and sleepless nights
for Michael and his team.
Turns out, making those perfect circles
was a lot harder than you might expect.
- [Michael] What he really wanted was
exact timed concentric rings,
starting from the center,
moving its way out.
So the obvious is, you
know, when you throw a rock
into a pond, you get that.
So we dropped something into the cup,
and of course it does it.
Now we had the issue of
you see what we're dropping
that Steven did not wanna see.
We kept trying everything
and just kept shooting video
and showing Steven, and
we didn't quite get there.
- [Narrator] This all
changed one fateful evening
a few days before shooting the scene.
- [Michael] One night, I
was up late with my son.
And we were playing
with one of my guitars.
I had a drink that I
set on top of the face
of the guitar, and we were
plucking and playing with it,
and I noticed that the
water began to ripple.
- [Narrator] Michael
had found his solution.
- [Michael] So I took a guitar string
and ran it through the
cup, through the dashboard
of the car, through the
floorboard of the car,
and tuned it, and when
we plucked the string,
the water began to ripples.
- [Narrator] And what
did Steven have to say?
- [Michael] When Steven
saw the cup ripple,
he had a big smile, and he says,
"That is now the arrival of the T-Rex."
- [Narrator] Michael Lantieri and the rest
of the special effects team went on to win
an Academy Award for their
work on Jurassic Park.
And I'm sure it was all because
of those perfect concentric water ripples.
