Jurassic Park: Set designer

The set designer on a film is responsible for taking the production designer's vision and creating it in real life as a set.  The set designer works under the art director to accomplish this.  The set is extremely important in film-making because it shows the environment where the scene takes place.  The majority of movie scenes are shot somewhere other than where the audience is told the scene is taking place.  This makes the set designer's job both very difficult and very important.

John Berger, Masako Masuda, and Lauren Polizzi are the three set designers credited for 'Jurassic Park.'  Berger is also known for his work on 'The Hunger Games' and 'Transformers.'  Masako has worked as a set designer on such films as 'X-Men: First Class,' 'Eagle Eye,' and 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.'  Polizzi was a set designer on blockbusters 'Independence Day' and 'Forrest Gump' along with many other films.  All three of these set designers brought experience to 'Jurassic Park' in creating sets of places that don't actually exist; they were not recreating a physical location.  This would prove useful for designing sets for 'Jurassic Park.'

Our chosen scene from 'Jurassic Park' is made to look like it takes place outdoors, however, everything is shot inside a studio on a set.  The film is set on a far-off, made-up island, Isla Nublar, and much of the film was shot using Hawaii as a stand-in for the island.  This scene on the T-Rex paddock, however, isn't shot anywhere Hawaii, it is shot at the Warner Brother's Studio in California on a huge sound-stage.  This was necessary in order to control the elements (in this case, rain) and protect the very expensive equipment being used in the shot such as the animatronic T-Rex.

This scene was probably intended to be the feature scene for the movie.  It is remembered as one of the more memorable scenes of 'Jurassic Park' so it needed to be well executed.  Fear and suspense were the primary communicative objectives that the film-makers were looking to create in this scene and the set designers were among those tasked with creating those emotions in the audience.  The darkness and the rain contribute to the feelings of fear or uneasiness as well as the snapped electric fence lines that are hanging in a jumbled mess and the squelching mud.  The audience's lack of ability to see very far into the distance keeps their attention on the events of the scene and adds to the suffocating sensation and the feeling of being trapped with the T-Rex.

Set designers play a crucial role in film work and their work often goes unnoticed and that is really the way it should be.  A film with a good set designer should appear like a film that had no set designer at all.  If the audience can tell that a set designer has been working on the scene they're watching, that set designer has failed.

To see entire analysis and presentation, go to http://jurassicparkmis-en-scene.blogspot.com