Jurassic World Adventure

Working with Universal Creative and the film’s creators, Framestore’s Immersive team has created a monumental offering of dinosaur thrills for the new attraction, Jurassic World Adventure, including delivering huge technical feats of sensational immersive sequences which pay homage to the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World universe. 

With renowned Framestore creative directors Gavin and Jason Fox at the helm to direct and write all the sequences in collaboration with Universal Creative’s team, and the Framestore team having just completed work across five attractions for Lionsgate Entertainment World, they were perfectly placed to bring this flagship attraction to fruition in Beijing.

“The team at Framestore have been much more than just a media vendor. They've been creative partners who helped craft and refine the story,” said Daniel Jenkins, Creative Director at Universal.  “Having a partner who I could trust with the story was a huge benefit to the development and final product.”

Framestore’s queue media for the ride is next generation in itself and gives guests the experience of what it would be like to go to Jurassic World as a tourist. The team delivered all the media seen throughout the queue including that which plays across six portrait-mounted screens standing at an impressive 9 metres tall, the bespoke media on all 11 monitors in a fully realised In-Gen Creation Lab, and for the ATLAS showroom, where guests are introduced to their ride vehicle through a sequence with a mix of game-engine and live action media.

To create the queue media, the Framestore team headed out to Hawaii where they built a bespoke six camera helicopter rig to film the iconic locations seen in the films. This was combined with an impressive CG build of the entire park environment in order to showcase the many tourist attractions our guests can expect in the fantasy Jurassic World park.

In order to bring the story to life, Framestore produced and directed three live action shoots with Hollywood stars Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard and BD Wong. Framestore also created fully CG photoreal dinosaurs as part of the experience, creating scenes such as feeding time at T-Rex Kingdom, an underwater encounter with a Mosasaur and a close shave with the classic Jurassic World predator, the Indominus Rex.

“The array of six screens surrounding the Innovation Center provides a huge canvas, allowing us to show our creatures at dramatic and impressive scale,” said Eugénie von Tunzelmann, Head of VFX, Attractions. “The amount of detail we see, for example in the Indominus Rex’s eye as she leans in close, is astonishing.”

For the dark ride itself the team worked with screens up to 30 meters wide, creating extraordinarily complex shots which interact with both physical sets and animatronics. Complicated, stunt-heavy live action performances were captured on set in LA using a motion-controlled motorbike rig. All of the media for the main ride is ‘squinched’, or perspective warped, to create a seamless experience for the huge curved scenes integrated into the attraction.

To complete this dark ride the team had to deal with their biggest challenge, scale. “The most demanding part of this project was the sheer amount of media,” said Tunzelmann. “In total we delivered over 2 trillion pixels, the equivalent of about five whole feature films.” 

To see the dinosaurs in full CG at this scale is a staggering sight. The ride opened to visitors of Universal Studios Beijing in autumn 2021.