"How can you top the first one?" was the phrase people were asking before we started The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and that was a question I didn't take lightly. Three years after its release, the first Jurassic Park was still considered an amazing visual spectacle that had lost none of its freshness and magic. So as not to have the sequel look merely like a "Side 2" or duplicate of the original, we spent months mulling this over before we started shooting. While many sequences featured Stan Winston Studio's amazing full-sized robitic dinosaurs or a mix of CG with robotics, some were primarily CC. These allowed for shot designs to be freely choreographed with dinosaurs walking, running, jumping and flying. Long-lasting shots, performance-oriented, with complex moving cameras became the norm. Refinements were made to proprietary software to give the look of skin moving over bone and muscle and sometimes of muscles tightening and loosening. Our CG modelers and painters, working from Stan Winston Studio's maquettes supervised by Randy Dutra, made sure every detail would show up and move as correctly as possible. Each of the nine species needed this attention because they all showed up in close-ups.

We gave director Steven Spielberg unrestricted freedom to stage the actors and move his camera however he wished on the set to help get as realistic a shot as possible. This, of course, had to be accomplished without delaying the shooting any more than a few minutes. I worked closely with Michael Lantieri who rigged props to move on the set as though being hit by a dinosaur, as was the case with the T-Rex hitting the bus. Sometimes two or three shots were rolled into one long complex shot which made all our jobs very demanding and the resulting final shots much better.
By the time we had finished the show, we had made 50 % more CG shots than we had in Jurassic Park, requiring 10 times more animation and rendering due to many multi-dinosaur shots and 15 minutes of CG screen time.