How to Make Dinosaurs Real: A Writer's Guide to Cinematic Storytelling

Analysing the way Stephen Spielberg uses the camera and the frame to make us better writers.

Do you remember the first time you saw Jurassic Park?

There are few movies as formative for people in the 90s as Jurassic Park. It managed to achieve wonders in the eyes of the 1993 cinema audience, which garnered the film multiple awards and rave reviews. Everything about it was brilliant, from state-of-the-art visual effects (both practical and CGI), to a sweeping soundtrack by John Williams that has become an instantly recognisable motif.

(The latter even managed to launch many successful memes and joke videos, usually involving epic music contrasted with mediocre visuals, or vice versa.)

But probably the film’s crowning achievement is how Stephen Spielberg was able to tell a story, visually, about something very much in the realm of science fiction. A story that has stood the test of time and feels just as visceral and exciting now, 32 years later, as it did on release.

But why Jurassic Park?

The moment I fully grasped the power of this craft, as exemplified by Spielberg, came when I was still very young. I had managed to sneakily watch Jurassic Park, despite how it had been made clear to me by my parents that I was ‘too young’ and that the film was ‘too scary’ for me to watch.

Spoiler alert: They were right, I was absolutely too young.

The next few weeks, I slept terribly. Sometimes I would lie as flat as possible underneath my bedsheets, believing that if I stayed incredibly still and didn’t move a muscle, the Velociraptors might not find me. It is amazing in hindsight how vivid and real a child’s imagination can feel after the lights go out.

What is just as amazing is that the combination of strong visual effects and excellent storytelling managed to create a monster that felt tangible and was very much an emotional reality, changing how my 8-year-old self acted.

This is the very thing I hope to do in my own writing: to use my craft as a writer and artist to make the whimsical feel real for you, my kind readers. So what better way to achieve this than to learn from the masters? But how do we take something as visual as film and bring it into a writer’s toolkit?

Let’s explore.

Jurassic Park Technique 1: Scale & Verticality

Stephen Spielberg made a conscious decision with Jurassic Park to shoot the film in a taller aspect ratio, 1.85:1, to emphasise the dinosaurs’ height and the vastness of the park’s landscapes. Standard widescreen CinemaScope prioritises a film’s horizontal scope. This decision led to a film that, from the very start, frames humans and dinosaurs in the same shot, making the human characters feel incredibly small and overwhelmed. Low angles throughout help emphasise this power dynamic, with multiple instances in which the creatures tower over the humans.

But how can we do something similar in writing? It is not as if changing the font size or the page size will affect how a person perceives a character’s power dynamic in quite the same way. However, you can control scale with sentence structure, using narrative altitude - how far the narrator’s voice is from the action - to create this sense of grandiosity. As well as techniques such as sentence complexity or simplicity.

For example, to create a sense of immense scale, you can use long, complex, flowing sentences with multiple clauses. This mimics a slow, sweeping camera pan across a vast landscape. The narrator’s voice becomes more distant, philosophical, and epic.

To make things feel small, intimate, or personal, you use shorter, simpler sentences. The focus narrows to concrete, sensory details.

Examples from ‘The Strings Of Us’.

With his eyes still closed, he perceived the landscape around him as vast, moving through time and space in a grand cycle of shifting and swirling patterns that went on into infinity. He knew suddenly that the meadow beneath him would come up to him, in just a moment, with the movement of the earth. As long as he stayed true to his place in this swirling mass.

This is an example from my prologue of using sentence structure to convey scale. The first sentence is long and complex, full of grand concepts like time, space, and infinity, mimicking a wide, cosmic shot. The subsequent sentences become slightly shorter and more punctuated, bringing the literary equivalent of the camera back to the character as Que’rup orients himself. The prose is being used to control the narrative zoom lens.

Jurassic Park Technique 2: Contrast (Awe vs. Horror)

In Jurassic Park, you will begin to notice a certain motif when it comes to how the subjects on a screen are presented. In awe-inspiring moments, the shots are wide and breezy, with open spaces. The horror moments are tight and claustrophobic: extreme close-ups, enclosed environments, often shown from a character’s subjective perspective, such as that famous scene of the water in the cup rippling in time with the looming footsteps of the T. rex.

To apply this technique to literature, we can build on what we have already established in the first technique and add extra layers to explore. To enhance our long, flowy sentences that convey space and scope, or our tight, claustrophobic sentences that convey intimacy, we can start playing with diction and setting.

This is one of the greatest strengths of writing compared with film. You achieve this contrast between awe and horror by manipulating your word choice and descriptions of the environments your characters inhabit.

For awe-inspiring moments, you might use words that are abstract, wondrous, and vast: infinity, cosmos, consciousness, grandeur.

The setting can also be open and symbolic, like a verdant meadow under the sky or a wide, endless beach. Even internal environments can have this open quality, with large windows that illuminate a common area, or an atrium brought to life by the gentle, echoing hum of footsteps as people go about their business.

And then for those horror moments, you shift to sharp, visceral, sensory words: hiss, clang, heat, steam, prickling, unbearable. Whilst moving the characters from an open space into a confined one, perhaps a tight corridor, a damaged facility, the space between two hot pipes, or famously, a cramped commercial kitchen, where the sound of metal utensils clattering on the floor can alert the two velociraptors hunting you to your hiding spot.

Examples from ‘The Strings Of Us’.

As carefully as I could, I teetered over electrical wires, shuffled under pipes, and retreated from touching the increasingly warm metal with my chest. The danger of being scalded was only a few centimetres away. The structures around me groaned threateningly. The humidity down here was insufferable. Steam hissed, masking my ragged breathing, and I could already feel beads of sweat rolling down my shoulders.

This section from my 6th Chapter is in direct contrast to the earlier parts of the story. We had established a sense of wonder with one style of language and setting, and then here, we pivot hard, trapping both the character and the reader in a physically and sensorially oppressive environment. The diction supports this claustrophobic feeling with words that imply danger. Instead of stepping over wires, he teeters; instead of crawling under pipes, he shuffles. His breathing is ragged rather than worn. Between these two techniques, you can create a feeling for the reader of being trapped alongside the character.

Jurassic Park Technique 3: Symbolic Visual Cues

In Jurassic Park, there are subtle yet consistent visual rules that are employed throughout the film. Characters descending into danger and ascending toward safety is a nice, obvious starting point, leaning into the ideas of up and down being metaphorical directions for failing or succeeding, heaven and hell, taking a fall or rising above. Another visual clue comes in the form of characters being backlit to signify an important decision.

To achieve the same thing in our written stories, we can use character action & metaphorical staging.

In prose, these symbolic layers come through your characters’ physical actions and their placement within a scene. Something worth thinking about very early in your process, when you are “blocking” or “staging” your scenes.

A character looking down on another can literally represent dominance. You can use geography here to your advantage, such as Juliet in the balcony, or Saruman in his tower. A character physically turning their back can represent emotional rejection as it would in real life. You could even be as on-the-nose as Jurassic Park is and have characters descend into danger and ascend out of it. The physical staging of the scene and the characters will tell the audience a lot about the story’s dynamic.

Don’t forget that these ideas can also be used to show a character’s internal state. Often, when we write in third person, we need to show what is happening inside a person’s head without being told, breaking the illusion of being separate from the character’s inner workings. It could be a simple comment on their mental state, such as a character tidying something or fussing over their appearance, which can represent a desire for control. It could be a comment on a much grander metaphysical aspect of their journey, such as a character walking into darkness, which can represent their moral descent or their soul into the unknown.

Examples from ‘The Strings Of Us’.

Before he could even notice or resist, I jumped into his lap, like a common pet. A few people gasped, and the room stilled... The Heat of all those eyes seemed to momentarily burn into my fur… – It was then that I felt the next newest most unusual thing I’d ever experienced. Elias put his hand on my back and gently stroked me like I was a lap cat.

In this scene from chapter 2, Cas’shya performs an act that is, on the surface, a shocking breach of protocol and taboo. But the action itself is one of comfort, vulnerability, and connection. She physically closes the space between them and makes herself vulnerable to this “deeply distraught giant” to offer solace. Elias’s response, a gentle, stroking hand, is not one of dominance, but of quiet gratitude. The physical action serves to demonstrate the book’s core theme: that connection and compassion can transcend species, hierarchy, and perceived differences. I didn’t need to tell you this because this scene shows it through a single, powerful, and unconventional physical act.

The Jurassic Park Workshop: A Practical Exercise

Now, I want to turn this analysis back over to you. It is time to step into Mr Spielberg’s director’s chair and spin it in the direction of your own stories, to take control of your own scenes. If you have a moment in your work-in-progress that feels a bit flat, or perhaps isn’t landing with the impact you intended, I invite you to try this.

Pick one scene and apply just one of the techniques we have discussed. As an example, if you need to dial up the awe, pull your ‘camera’ back. Use longer, more flowing sentences to open up the space and create that sense of vastness. Conversely, if you need to crank up the tension, push the lens in. Move your character into a claustrophobic setting and focus intently on sharp, sensory details, the hiss of steam, the clatter of metal, the heat of the room. See how consciously manipulating the ‘camera’ of your prose shifts the emotional reality for your reader.

Take every opportunity to let your prose do the heavy lifting, so you don’t make a story that is explanation only.

The Conclusion: A Final Thought

At the end of the day, whether we are directing a film or putting pen to paper, we are all chasing the same thing: emotional resonance. The best writers, just like Spielberg, are intentional architects of experience. They know that every word, every sentence structure, and every physical action is a tool they can use to make the impossible feel undeniably real.

I’d love to hear about the moments that have made you feel this way. What’s a scene in a book that felt so vivid, so visceral, that it was like watching a movie? What do you think the author did to make that reality click for you? Let’s chat about it in the comments below.