The Art of Writing an Invisible Creature Feature

Written by Johnny Wickham and Mike Capes

We’ve been writing comedy together and making each other laugh for the better part of 20 years now, so getting to have an idea as fun and as funny as The Invisible Raptor as our first feature length comedy script to get off the ground was a dream come true.

We met for the first time in the office of comedy legend Jerry Zucker, not for a meeting with him, rather, we just had access to the office where he worked and had a sketch comedy writing group meet after hours there. This meeting sparked a creative partnership that allowed us to create a comedic voice that we think really stands out in The Invisible Raptor.

The Invisible Raptor

We wrote The Invisible Raptor over the course of about six weeks in the Spring of 2020 (mostly over zoom) when another invisible threat was endangering our safety. Like that threat, a lot of scientific research went into this one, too. Our scientific explanations range from the creation of our creature (Chance, The Raptor) to simply “did you see Jurassic Park? We did that”. Then the decision to explain its invisibility as “did you see The Invisible Man?” A lot of painstaking scientific research went into the writing process to get it all right. We were pretty adamant about that. We took it very seriously.

Creating this raptor led us to debate a wide range of scientific topics, like: Would an invisible raptor's poop be visible? (It is.) How fast can a raptor, visible or otherwise, actually run? (41 MPH.) And, would an invisible raptor have a penis or a cloaca? (We gave it a penis. It uses it on a six foot ceramic chicken.) Once we worked out the boring science stuff, the real fun began.

The challenge writing a comedy creature feature with no visible creature is that when we wanted to have the raptor in a scene with us, we had to figure out creative ways to solve that problem without showing it. How were we going to show it, without showing it?

Thank god this is a comedy, because we were able to have a lot of fun figuring this out in the writing process. Every scene that featured the raptor we attempted to create a fun, visual gag to pull this off: puppeteering a dead scientist (played by Sean Astin) like Bernie Lomax from Weekend At Bernies, floating an eyeball across the screen as if the raptor was carrying it, harpooning the raptor with an arrow attached to a Happy Birthday balloon, and of course, lots of excessive violence and gore!

The Invisible Raptor

With the invisible raptor as the main antagonist of our story, we wanted to make him pretty bloodthirsty, and this gave us the ability to really have his presence felt on screen in a much more visually impactful way. It's one thing to have the raptor doing invisible man gags like shaking banisters on stair cases, rustling bushing and knocking over furniture, but it’s an entirely different thing to have it rip someone's head off or disembowel them while they’re on the phone with customer service.

Structurally, we wanted to give the audience fun glimpses of our invisible villain that heightened throughout the movie, where each glimpse upped the ante without revealing it until a really fun climatic ending. You may-or-may not finally see it in a climax that may-or-may not nod to the film we stole our science from.

Hands down the most fun we had while writing The Invisible Raptor was figuring out clever ways to have our actors and performers interact with an invisible dinosaur to give it life.. We wrote it for performers to be able to pantomime fighting nothing, carry nothing as a group, and—in a newly found technique—bolting Mike’s boots in to the concrete of the (redacted backlot studio’s) pavement and making him appear as if he was defying gravity a la Dr. Alan Grant lying on the breathing Triceratops in Jurassic Park. He did this all with his core strength, which is surprisingly worth about four takes. And, no, we didn't get our deposit back.

We had a blast writing this movie, and we really hope that everyone that watches it has as much fun watching as we did writing it.