We've come a long way since the early days
of computer generated visual effects.
Creating entire planets,
resurrecting deceased actors,
but one of the biggest innovative leaps,
came when CG was still in its relative infancy:
Jurassic Park.
Released in the summer of 1993
directed by Stephen Spielberg
and adapted to screen by David Koepp and Michael Crichton,
who also wrote the original novel,
Jurassic Park set a new standard to visual effects in film
and it fundamentally changed the DNA of the modern blockbuster.
CG is no longer just another "brush" in a filmmakers toolkit.
Sometimes it's the entire canvas
and that flip in the industry only occurred
when Jurassic Park showcased the capabilities of the computer,
solidifying its role in the creative side of the process
not just the technic- ah ah ah, you didn't say the magic wooord!
and despite its massive influence,
Jurassic Park actually didn't mark any visual effects milestones.
It wasn't the first to use CG
or the first to use it well.
It didn't use the first entirely CG character or even the first animal,
but it was the first to successfully hide its effects
seamlessly blending the digital work
with the practical alternatives they originally intended on using.
Phil Tippet: "Initially on Jurassic Park
everything was intended to be done somewhat more
conventionally between the full-scale live action pieces
and we're gonna do miniatures,
but ILM had been working with computer graphics
and they put together a dinos- a Tyrannosaur, it looks pretty convincing
and then we took it down to steel and we looked at it
that's how we gonna make the movie."
But they didn't fully rely on CG to create those effects.
The stop motion animation team was repurposed to animate armature rigs equipped with motioning covers.
Essentially
translating the stop motion movement
into digital data that could then be applied in CG skeleton models.
It was an awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of each method
and the bridging of those technologies was a significant factor
of making the animations so convincing.
And whatever level of detail was too complex for the CG
would be archieved with the full-scale animatronics
or Bigatures
as they called them.
It gives the animators a real life reference for weight, dimension, something physical
to occupy the space and the frame that would be difficult to create from scratch.
The goal was inspectical to recreate reality
and the key to believable effects is the way they're integrated into the physical world.
So you couch the digital images with close-ups of skin and eyes and teeth
and by the time you see the CG T-rex in motion,
the practical images are already been pieced together in your mind.
The visual effects have to be grounded in some semblance of reality
and you can see that in the cinematography as well.
Even when the CG is implemented,
you're still witnessing the events from a human's point of view.
It gives the dinosaurs a sense of scale and verticality and allows you to relate
to the characters fear and awe,
because it's presented through their perspective.
But whose perspective is this from?
Or this?
There is an incredible amount of research that went into making accurate depictions of these dinosaurs
studying behavior patterns of alligators and giraffes,
muscular movements and walking patterns of elephants
There is a reason no other dinosaur can compare to T-Rex in Jurassic Park
and that is because it was shaped in over thousands of man-hours
of paleontologic research and design.
And later iterations of dinosaurs in films
haven't used what we've learned through paleontology and phylogenetic bracketing.
They are
for the most part
Jurassic Park clones.
There has been no further innovation
even though scientists discovered so much since 1993.
"You stood on the shoulder of geniuses
to accomplish something as fast as you could
you know, you read what others had done
and you took the next step.
You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves
so you don't take any responsibility
for it."
There are a total of 14 minutes of dinosaur visual effects
and Jurassic Park is a 120 minute runtime,
only six of which use CGI.
That's 63 individual visual effects shots
by comparison,
Jurassic World has over 2000.
And that is not necessarily a bad thing,
but when CG is plan A
and plan B, C and D
are all digital effects solutions
you're probably confusing convenience with
laziness.
People like to argue that CG is somehow gotten worse over the years
and that's simply not true,
but there should never be an over-reliance on one specific tool
and that is what a computer is,
a tool.
And when use it to strip away all elements of reality
that is exactly what you fail to recreate.