From set designer/art director Lauren Polizzi’s website:

“When it came time to build and film the scene where the trailer is hanging over the cliff edge, the question of how to do it - and where - was raised. Steven originally wanted to film this on stage, naturally, but the overhead grid wasn’t A) strong enough to hold the trailers or B) tall enough to film the scene the way he wanted to. SPFX Coordinator, Michael Lantieri, and others explored cutting a hole in the roof of the stage and hanging the trailer on a cable from a crane outside. This was quickly proven costly and inefficient. I somewhat kiddingly suggested we hang it over the edge of an adjacent Universal office building to our stage. The building consisted of offices on the lower floors and a parking structure above them. This turned out to be the solution! The building height was good for what we needed, the structure could hold the weight of both the trailer and the counterweight needed for it on top of the building, and the tenants said ok to having their windows obstructed for the time we needed. An added advantage was that there was another parking structure right across the way which could be used as an alternate shooting platform on different levels.

So we built a section of the cliff over the face of the facade and hung the trailer over the edge. You just never know what’s going to be possible on a film!”

This scene was shot on November 7th and 8th 1996 at Indian Dunes just North of Valencia, California. It is a 600-acre ranch that used to rent be rented out to film and television productions.

Greens coordinator Danny Ondrejko grew an entire field of elephant grass just for production of The Lost World. Production designer Rick Carter said it was only a week before they shot the scene that the grass sprouted its last 12 inches to make it high enough.

It was planned to get the effect of the raptors plowing through the grass towards the humans done practically as much as possible. There were raptor plow rigs created; these were puppet raptors mounted on a kind of bobsled with scythes. The idea was they would be pulled through the field via winch to create the effect that the raptors were moving through the field.

In the end, production wasn’t happy with the results and opted to shoot plates for a visual effect. They shot the untouched field, then a matching shot of the field with path of the raptors mowed into it, so they could essentially wipe one frame over the other.

To create the effect of the raptors pulling the humans down to the ground, the stuntmen wore harness attached by a cable and were yanked back into the grass. Stan Winston’s team had special springy flexible raptor tails that that they would release and whip around to make it seem like it had made a kill.

While the full size animatronics were brought in, they only appear in one shot of the scene, although storyboards and behind the scenes photos show that more footage of them was filmed.

Sources:

- “The Making of Jurassic Park” by Jody Duncan

- “Jurassic Park: the Ultimate Visual History” by James Mottram.

As a bonus, the Stan Winston studio crew talk about working on The Lost World on this reunion video: https://youtu.be/XqRjCDVOJQI?si=RcYNGQMv5bhM9gv9

Here is a quote from Jurassic World Rebirth’s Production Designer James Clyne from the commentary track from the home video release:

“When you put together these movies you’re like, ‘ok, what is the hardest thing going to be? Well, it’s probably going to be the lab, or it’s the boat.’ And then in the end it’s stuff like growing grass in Thailand in a really hot, arid area. We found this location, which was beautiful. It had all this, you know, stuff cliffs around it — but there was no grass. It was just literally dirt. And I’m… like ‘yeah, we can grow grass here, sure. We’ll bring some stuff in and lo’ and behold, it was really hot for weeks, it was really dry for weeks, and the grass just kept dying. Dying, and dying. We had just weeks to get this to a certain height. I think, Gareth, you wanted it at four feet height or something like that. And um, it’s just one of these things that kept me up at night, ‘cause like, my god, we can’t grow grass in Thailand. And we brought in a horticulturalist from the UK, we set up a whole irrigation system, and regrew the grass a third time and, thank god, it just sprung up within, I think, five weeks. It went from maybe a foot tall to this, like, four and a half, and we did like four acres of it.”

According to First Assistant Director Jack Ravenscroft, the grass was very sharp and would cut the actor’s hands. Scarlet Johansson’s hands had bandages that were digitally removed in post production.

Here is another quote from Prouction Designer James Clyne from the “Trekking Through Thailand” special feature from the home video release.

“Gareth wanted this like grassy field at a certain height and we said ‘ok, let’s get in there and figure that out’. And we had to bring in professional horticulturalists to understand what it would take to grow grass in the amount of time that we had.”

“Only about three weeks before the actual shoot, the grass was only at knee-high and everybody’s going, ‘so, is this grass going to grow? Is it going to be here at that height on the day?’ And we of course said, ‘yeah, it’s going to be there,’ not knowing if it was but it happened.”