This shot required precise timing to get right, and a dolly track also had to be built into the stage.

Industrialist John Hammond has created Jurassic Park, a theme park of cloned dinosaurs, on the tropical island Isla Nublar, located off of the coast of Costa Rica. Jurassic Park's disgruntled lead computer programmer, Dennis Nedry, has been bribed by Dodgson, a man working for Hammond's corporate rival, to steal frozen dinosaur embryos. On the way back to the trailer, Nick rescues an injured Tyrannosaurus rex infant that Roland used as bait to hunt its father.

Gennaro invites chaotician Ian Malcolm, and Hammond invites paleontologist Alan Grant and paleobotanist Ellie Sattler. The San Diego scenes were shot behind barricades to maintain secrecy; Spielberg noted that "it looked like road-repair work was going on". Spielberg regretted excluding a scene from the script that would have depicted characters on motorcycles attempting to flee raptors, similar to a sequence in the novel. For shots in which half of the trailer dangles from a cliff, a whole mountainside was built over the structure of Universal's parking garage, and the trailer was dangled against the mountainside using a 95-ton crane. While the first film had been shot in Kauai, Hawaii, the filmmakers wanted to shoot the sequel in a different location with new scenery.

Hammond sends a team, led by the eccentric chaos theorist and mathematician Ian Malcolm (Goldblum), to the island to document the dinosaurs and encourage non-interference, although the two groups eventually come into conflict.Production continued in northern California for two weeks at locations such as Eureka, Sue-meg State Park, and private property in Fieldbrook. In the film, Dodgson gives Nedry a container disguised as a can of shaving cream that is used to transport the embryos.