Recreating a 65 Million-Year-Old Battle

A friend of mine asked me how I create the fight scenes for Jurassic Fight Club. I thought it was an interesting question, and so I decided to share the information here on my blog.
First let me tell you that there is absolutely no way on earth anyone knows with any real certainty what may or may not have happened millions of years ago. There are just too many variables to be able to calculate. So when I re-create what I believe occurred, I use any evidence available to me. But I'm mostly rely on my knowledge and understanding of modern animal behaviors.

Since childhood I have diligently studied the behavior of both domestic and wild creatures. What I discovered is that almost every animal has the same basic behavioral traits. In other words, they all act the same way in a given situation. We look at our dogs and cats as pets, but our dogs see themselves as wolves and our cats see themselves as tigers. If we observe their behavior and ignore our idea that they're members of the family, you'll discover very quickly that these animals ARE wolves and tigers, when it comes to their behavior.

So when I re-create the fight scenes for Jurassic Fight Club, I literally tried to put myself in the place of these two animals. I think in terms of modern animal behavior and how two rival animals act when they confront each other. What you see on the screen is the end result of me sitting down in front of a green screen one day and just telling a story about exactly what my "mind's eye" was seeing. All of these fight scenes were taken in one shot. They were not written in advance, and I was not reading from a Teleprompter. I simply sat in an empty room, they turned on the camera and I just began to talk. Once these fight scenes were recorded, we then turned those transcripts over to our animators who began to lay out the animals and have them do what I said they would do. Then our camera crew traveled across the country in search of locations that would fit my description of the fight.

I have received a lot of e-mails from people asking me how I know what occurred, but again, it's just impossible to know. Everything you hear me say is completely fabricated and simply a story. So when you watch a fight scene you see two dinosaurs fighting. But what I was seeing in my mind as I was creating these fights could have been two fighting roosters, or a lion attacking a zebra, or a coyote fighting with a Fox.

So the next time you see a fight on Jurassic fight club, see if you can recognize any animal behaviors that you may have seen around you.