The Stan Winston School of Character Arts (SWS) is an online school devoted to special FX make-up and animatronics founded by veterans of the Stan Winston Studio (now known as Legacy Effects). Their subscription based service offers a wide range of downloadable video tutorials on almost every aspect of character effects imaginable, ranging from basic character sketching all the way to how to create fully realized movie monsters. Best of all, the videos have been created by some of the best artists and technicians in the business, many of whom were colleagues of Stan Winston himself.

To help promote their service, SWS has been regularly posting lots of rare and never-before-seen footage from Legacy Effect’s work, including this latest video of their crew rehearsing a leaping “attack” with animatronic and rod-controlled raptor puppets for The Lost World: Jurassic Park (I’ve previously posted behind-the-scenes video from the Jurassic Park trilogy here and here). You can find lots more great footage from the Legacy Effects archives in the Stan Winston School YouTube Channel.

If you’re interested in checking out full length tutorials from the SWS, now is a great time to start. This week only they are offering 30% off of all of their training videos. Just go to www.stanwinstonschool.com and use promo code 600K by Friday to get the special discount.