Warner Bros. has released an 11.5 minute behind the scenes featurette called “Bringing Dinosaurs To Life” for The End of Oak Street, and it is one of the better dinosaur making-ofs we have seen in a while. It walks through how Industrial Light & Magic built the film’s feathered, scarred prehistoric animals and dropped them into a 1980s suburban street. Ian Failes at befores & afters called it a “really fun” breakdown of ILM’s work, and we agree.
If you missed the film in theaters, here is the setup. A cosmic event rips Oak Street out of suburbia and drops the whole neighborhood somewhere unknown, and the Platt family has to stick together to survive. Writer and director David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) made it for Warner Bros. Pictures with Bad Robot and Jackson Pictures. Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor lead the cast.
The film at a glance
- Director and writer: David Robert Mitchell
- Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures, with Bad Robot and Jackson Pictures
- Cast: Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery
- Released: August 14, 2026 in theaters, digital from September 15, 4K and Blu-ray on November 3
- VFX: ILM as lead vendor, with Jay Cooper as production VFX supervisor
An almost all ILM show
In his interview with The Art of VFX, Jay Cooper puts the shot count “in the 600 range” and describes the film as, “by and large, an all-ILM show.” Lola VFX handled a small amount of fix-it and age-related work. ILM’s Sydney team, led by associate VFX supervisor Gabriel Reichle, built out the Oak Street world by extending streets, adding hills and blending separate locations into one neighborhood.
The animals themselves were a group effort across ILM’s studios. Animation supervisors Kevin Martel, Shawn Kelly and Edward Zhou worked on giving each creature its own personality, which is something you notice in the film. These dinosaurs behave like characters with moods, not stock monsters.
Feathers, mud and scars
Mitchell told SlashFilm that the design process started at the script stage and mixed real science with “taking creative liberties in places.” The film’s dinosaurs are feathered, a clear break from the scaly look most of us grew up with.
ILM’s London art department, led by supervising art director Jason Horley, explored feather, beak and skin options for each animal. As Jedi News reports, the team tested different levels of mud, wounds and grime before settling on a middle ground. “These are real dinosaurs in a real setting,” Horley said. Paleontologist Riley Black, writing for Slate, counted Allosaurus, Brachiosaurus, stegosaurs, a giant Titanoboa snake and a Spinosaurus among the film’s creatures.
Building the Spinosaurus
The Spinosaurus sequence is the film’s big set piece, and it gets its own Warner Bros. featurette, “Creating the Spinosaurus.” Befores & afters sums up the approach as practical and digital effects combined. An earlier Spinosaur featurette, also covered by befores & afters, has Jay Cooper showing off an AR app used during production.
Horley also explained how the Spinosaurus design used subsurface scattering, the way light glows through thin skin, to make its back sail read as living tissue. “I positioned the lighting purposefully to enhance this,” he said.
Giving actors something real to react to
The on-set tricks are the most useful part for anyone curious about how creature shots come together. Cooper told The Art of VFX, “We always need a physical on-set counterpart.” Stunt performers wore dinosaur heads so actors had something to hit and dodge, and foam cutouts and a tennis ball on a stick gave everyone eyelines and framing.
The crew also captured lighting, LiDAR scans and set measurements so ILM could match every plate later. Back at ILM, the CG dinosaurs were lit like actors, with eye lights, bounce cards and negative fill. If you are new to how these pieces fit, our guide to what a VFX breakdown is covers the basics.
What to watch for
When you watch the featurette, look at the feather detail in close-ups and at how the creatures sit in real Atlanta streets, where the neighborhood exteriors were filmed. The film is out now on digital, and the 4K and Blu-ray release on November 3 adds the extras “Every Creature Tells a Story” and “The Spinosaurus Attack: Driving Fear on Oak Street,” according to SlashFilm. For more creature work, see our roundup of horror movie VFX creatures and environments.
Leave a Reply