Behind the Crate: Creating August’s Loot Crate DX ‘Jurassic Park’ Loot! [SPOILERS]

There are at least a half dozen truly iconic scenes from Spielberg’s first Jurassic feature – Dr. Grant and the children running from a T-Rex during a stampede, the extreme close-up T-Rex eyeball out the car window during the thunderstorm…. the Jell-O! – but our choice was clear. The moment when the humans escape Isla Nublar as the park’s visitor center crumbles around them, a T-Rex roaring into the ether as the “When DINOSAURS Ruled the EARTH” banner falls atop him, was something we had to capture forever in figure form.

Our lead creative designer, Steed Sun once again discusses the process by which we concieved of and executed this awesome collectible item…

The key was to identify an IP which worked with our theme of the month.  Once Jurassic Park was chosen for “Legends”, our next step was to choose a moment which work as a collectable figure and identify the dinosaur, size and a pose which would best reflect the theme.  The original idea had the T-Rex, the falling banner and the fossilized bones on the base.  We ended up simplifying this and replaced the base and fossilized bones with the JP logo instead.

We brainstorm various moments from he films and considered all the different species of dinosaurs that was in the film. (Raptors, Triceratops, etc.)  Ultimately, we picked the most iconic scene and the one that fits best with our theme.

We were able to leverage quite a bit of references from Universal, both 2D and 3D assets so that was super helpful plus they give us great feedback to ensure that the sculpt was as authentic as possible to the film.  The tricky part of getting the colors of the iconic T-Rex correct. We went through multiple iterations from being skin color being too dark to too light in order to get the final approved color.  Also careful attention were taken with the eyes to make sure they look right and in scale with the sculpt and final deco.

Capturing the icon pose of T-Rex and how to make the banner look like its floating and falling down. Also getting the colors correct to the final version took multiple interactions with licensor before it was finally approved.