Jurassic Park

        Although heralded as a milestone in digital animation (and rightly so) what appeals to me about Jurassic Park is the way that computer effects are combined so seamlessly with more traditional animation techniques. Steven Spielberg assembled a team including Stan Winston (animatronics), Phil Tippett (go motion), Michael Lantieri (on set effects) and Dennis Muren (Industrial Light and Magic, Digital compositing) to ensure that the dinosaurs the audience would see on screen were not monsters but believable living and breathing animals.

 

       The ambition to use full size mechanical dinosaurs was quickly replaced with Phil Tippett's go motion technique, which would incorporate animated model dinosaurs into live action sequences with the actors, with motion blur for added realism, but although Tippett's tests produced some incredibly smooth and realistic results, Spielberg was not satisfied and Muren posed the idea that ILM could advance their work from The Abyss and Terminator 2 and create the dinosaurs digitally. The rest is history.

 

A stop motion animatic created by Phil Tippett. It is remarkably close to the finished sequence.

 

        Yet the transition to digital didn't mean that the traditional animators were out of a job. The go motion animators' knowledge of the dinosaurs movements informed the digital creations, while Tippet's early model animatics were used as a reference. A device dubbed the 'Dinosaur Input Device' even allowed a mechanical dinosaur skeleton to be animated by hand and the information transferred to a digital model; a sort of early motion capture. As much of the technology was in its infancy during the film's production new obstacles were overcome and new techniques were being developed constantly.

 

 

 

        Yet the excitement of new technology was not allowed to interfere with the vision of creating 'real' dinosaurs. Animators mimed, acted out sequences and referred to footage of animals to improve their understanding and immerse themselves in their work as well as consulting palaeontologists.

 

        Whereas many films now seem to revolve around their special effects, in Jurassic park they enhance the story and are used in a considered fashion, with the most appropriate method being selected for each moment. The triceratops animatronic allows the actors to actually touch and interact with a dinosaur, which helps the audience invest in the digital animals. It is in this fusion of art and technology that Jurassic Park succeeds, while the attention to detail means that the effects, both practical and digital, still hold up 20 years later.