As of this week, Jurassic Park is officially 21 years old. And more than two decades after it hit theaters in 1993, Steven Spielberg’s dinosaur flick is still talked about as a landmark of filmmaking because it revolutionized how movie-makers handled visual effects.
Originally the movie’s dinos were supposed to be done entirely with stop-motion animation from Stan Winston Studio and creature creator Phil Tippett’s studio. But after Spielberg asked folks at Industrial Light and Magic to add some computer-generated motion blur effects, ILM animator Steve “Spaz” Williams decided to try to create the dinosaurs digitally—even though the director wanted practical effects.
“I secretly started to build a set of T. Rex bones,” Williams says in the video above, part of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences’s “Academy Originals” series. “I had a walk [animation] and I knew I was not going to be allowed to show it. [Producers] Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall were coming up, and I knew they were coming up, on a Monday in November of 1991. They came walking in and I had it playing on a monitor, and the whole deal changed at that point.”
After seeing what ILM could do “it was immediately very clear that we were going to get realistic movement to these dinosaurs that was going to be far advanced from what we were doing with stop motion,” Kennedy notes. (Tippett would later comment to Spielberg, “I think I’m extinct”—a line the director worked into the film.)
Ultimately, Jurassic Park was made using a combination of practical effects and CGI, but what ILM did on the film changed the visual effects game in huge ways. Watch the video above to learn more about how they did it. Oh, and by the way, Jurassic World is set to hit theaters in June 2015.
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