Universal PicturesAlthough Jurassic Park is a children’s film, there are some parts which could have easily been R-rated.
If you are quite attached to the movie, I can only apologise for what you are about to read, which is equally disturbing and fascinating.
As you may have read in the headline, when you hear a velociraptor bark in the popular film you are actually hearing recordings of tortoises having sex.
Sound designer Gary Rydstrom received the Academy Awards for Best Sound and Best Sound Effects Editing for his work on 1993’s Jurassic Park.
However, while working on the film was fun and won him these coveted awards, Rydstrom faced many challenges including creating numerous distinct dinosaur noises from scratch.
With dinosaurs being long-dead, no one really knows what they would have sounded like, so Rydstrom had to use his imagination.
He decided to spend months recording animal noises, mixing and editing the sound to give each dinosaur its own voice.
Unfortunately, or fortunately depending upon your thoughts on it, the noise of mating tortoises was deemed perfect to be used for the velociraptors’ voices.
Rydstrom told Vulture:
It’s somewhat embarrassing, but when the raptors bark at each other to communicate, it’s a tortoise having sex. It’s a mating tortoise!
I recorded that at Marine World… the people there said, ‘Would you like to record these two tortoises that are mating?’ It sounded like a joke, because tortoises mating can take a long time. You’ve got to have plenty of time to sit around and watch and record them.
Well, the wait paid off as for some reason it works perfectly!
Tortoises weren’t the only animals used to create the sound of the velociraptors.
Rydstrom explained how the breathing noise the velociraptors make is actually a horse, while the hiss comes from a goose.
He said:
Birds make pretty raspy sounds, but geese are famous for being the nastiest. You’ve got to get a goose mad and then they hiss at you, and it doesn’t take much to get a goose mad because they seem to get mad at everything. All you have to do is get close to one and stick a mic near its beak and you’ll get that hiss, and that’s the hiss that Muldoon [the game warden] hears before he dies.
Well, I have certainly learnt something new today which, being honest, will only improve my experience of watching Jurassic Park.
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