With Jurassic World Rebirth currently chomping down on the global box office, you might be reminiscing a bit about the film that launched the unstoppable dino-franchise.
Make a list of the 10 most iconic shots from Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (now streaming on Peacock), or even the five most iconic, and you’ll almost certainly include the simple shot of a glass of water rippling, responding to booming footsteps somewhere in the distance as Tyrannosaurus rex approaches.
It’s one of those shots so famous, and so frequently referenced in other works, that you probably know it even if you’ve somehow never seen Jurassic Park. It’s a simple yet elegant indication of the danger to come, and the true might of these prehistoric beasts. But to pull it off, Spielberg and his crew had to rely on something much, much smaller than an actual dinosaur: a guitar string.
How a guitar string made a key Jurassic Park T. rex scene work
According to special effects supervisor Michael Lantieri, speaking in a behind-the-scenes documentary for the Jurassic Park Ultimate Trilogy Blu-ray release, the rippling water sequence began with a call from Spielberg, who explained that he was in his car, listening to Earth, Wind & Fire, and noticed how the bass in the song made his mirrors shake. Thinking it would be a great effect to signal the arrival of a giant dinosaur on the scene, Spielberg tasked Lantieri with figuring out how to make it work on set.
Rattling a car mirror turned out to be relatively easy with the help of a small motor, but getting the water in the glass to ripple without shaking the entire set, including the camera, was a different issue altogether. Finally, Lantieri found an unlikely solution.
“It was a very difficult thing to do,” Lantieri recalled. “You couldn’t do it! I had everybody working on it and, finally, messing around with a guitar one night, I set a glass [on it] and started playing notes on a guitar and got to a right frequency, a right note and it did exactly what I wanted it to do.”
To replicate the effect on set, Lantieri actually ran a guitar string through the car, where its frequencies would travel and reach the glass, then had a crew member out of frame pluck it repeatedly to get the effect. According to the folks at Guitar World, it’s actually a very tricky thing to do, as the frequency required to make water ripple actually varies greatly based on the amount of water and the weight of the glass. It takes trial and error, but Lantieri cracked it, and Jurassic Park got one of its best moments.
The latest installment in the Jurassic Park franchise, Jurassic World Rebirth, is now playing in theaters everywhere. You can also head back to the beginning and stream the original classic on Peacock right now, as well the other films in the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World trilogies.
