Clayton Sandell, writing at Medium.com, talks to Skywalker Sound veteran Tim Nielsen about Jurassic World Rebirth, on how they brought sounds to dinosaurs using cats, dogs and even oven mitts.
One of the most endearing and adorable new dinosaurs to light up the screen in Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025) is a raccoon-sized Aquilops named Dolores.
Almost like a pet, the creature adopts 11-year-old Isabella Delgado (Audrina Miranda) on the fictional island of Ile Saint-Hubert. To help bring Dolores’s charismatic personality to life, Skywalker Sound veteran Tim Nielsen unearthed a few audio recordings of another pet: his beloved, late female cat named Howard.
“This was a neighborhood cat that decided to live with us for ten years,” Nielsen tells Skysound.com. Howard, Nielsen explains, was once in a catfight that left her with an injured windpipe and an oddly unique sound.
“She purred nonstop because she was just a very happy cat, but she would make these crazy little gurgling sounds that became a lot of the lower sounds whenever Dolores is eating or licking her lips,” says Nielsen, the film’s sound designer and supervising sound editor. “It makes me happy to finally find a movie where I could use some of the recordings I made over the years.”
Nielsen and the Skywalker Sound team once again assembled their best roars, grunts, and snarls for Rebirth, directed by longtime Skywalker Sound and Industrial Light & Magic collaborator Gareth Edwards (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story [2016], The Creator [2023]).
The strong creative partnership between Skywalker Sound and the epic dinosaur franchise has flourished over seven films, beginning with director Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original, Jurassic Park. The film won Academy Awards for Best Sound (Gary Rydstrom, Gary Summers, Shawn Murphy, and Ron Judkins) and Best Sound Effects Editing (Gary Rydstrom and Richard Hymns). ILM also took home an Oscar for Best Visual Effects.
“I was just tickled pink to be to be asked to be part of such a huge franchise and couldn’t wait to get started and meet Gareth,” says supervising sound editor Bjørn Ole Schroeder. “It was also a huge challenge because at the same time, both Tim and I knew that we had an incredibly compressed schedule.”
The team got to work fast, focusing first on designing distinct sounds for the bevy of new prehistoric beasts that come with every Jurassic film.
“You have all the dinosaurs that came before in six other films, so each of them can’t really sound like any of those,” Nielsen says. “We were just trying to find the identity for each of the main dinosaurs. And what happens on a project like this is that toy producers need access to those sounds long before the filmmakers do. So the first conversations were really about approving sounds for the toys, which had to be made a year in advance.”
Two experienced Jurassic sound design veterans helped early on to create new dino vocals for Rebirth: Al Nelson and Gary Rydstrom.
“I’d missed it,” Rydstrom tells Skysound.com. “And I had some material I wanted to play with. I’d forgotten how much fun it was to make sounds for a dinosaur.” Nielsen adds that “to have Gary involved and offering thoughts and notes was a huge asset to us.”
As the production roared full speed ahead, the Skywalker Sound team discussed their ideas with Edwards, often without the benefit of having seen any finished visual effects.
“Al and Gary and I would all go off and we would all make a version of a dinosaur, but we’re working with concept art. No footage,” Nielsen explains. “Sometimes we ended up doing something kind of similar to each other, and sometimes we did something very different. It was great to come back, compare notes, and talk to Gareth. And he would kind of say, ‘Oh, I’m leaning towards this,’ or, ‘I really like this.’”
Schroeder says that during early temp mixes, Edwards wanted the sounds to suggest the presence of creatures that weren’t necessarily seen.
“He didn’t want to give away too much too early,” says Schroeder. “There are moments where we kind of tease some things with sound that we didn’t even reveal. And that was exciting.”
On Ile Saint-Hubert, an expedition team led by Zora Bennett (Scarlet Johansson) cautiously enters a large field of tall grass that first appears empty. The sequence incorporates near silence into the mix, helping build emotional tension. The mood suddenly breaks when Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) begins noisily chomping breath mints. The Skywalker Sound team spent hours working to get the timing and rhythm of the crunching just right.
“When I saw it a couple of times with an audience, I was surprised how much of a jump scare moment it was,” Schroeder laughs. “When Dr. Loomis chews on the breath mints again, literally the whole audience jumped up.”
Quietness conveys a different emotion moments later. After the team collects a blood sample from a herd of Titanosaurs, Dr. Loomis — who has never seen any dinosaur outside of a zoo — reverently approaches one animal and reaches out to touch its leg.
“It’s not fully silent, but it really feels like we’re almost dropping to absolutely nothing,” says Schroeder. “And that was so emotional. We were always kind of going back and peeling away more and more layers to almost nothing. And when we finally got with Gareth and were mixing with him in London, he said, ‘That’s it!’ That’s exactly what he wanted.”
Read the article in full here.
Images: ILM/Universal
