The making of Jurassic Park (1993) was a major turning point in motion picture history. Spielberg was all set to make it using traditional stop-motion animation. He had hired Phil Tippett, who now had his own special effects company and was the master of stop motion and the genius behind animating the AT-AT (All Terrain Armored Transport) Walkers sequence in The Empire Strikes Back and many other equally impressive works. Everything had been costed out and was ready to go. Stan Winston would handle the huge robotic models that could be intercut with Phil’s miniature models.
Yet, behind the scenes at ILM, our resident bad boy Steve “Spaz” Williams and his colleagues, Mark Dippé and Stephen Fangmeier, were working on what they felt was a better solution to creating what would come to be known as “full-motion” dinosaurs.
Motion is a funny thing to try to capture. Man has been trying to duplicate it in his art since the earliest cave paintings that we know about. Those ancient artists added extra legs to the animals they were trying to depict as running. When motion pictures first appeared, they were startlingly lifelike while at the same time they flickered and the images seemed to jump rather than flow. Eventually refinements in steadying the camera’s speed, adding a revolving shutter, and registration pins to cement the image down briefly during exposure produced a smoothly flowing projected image.
However, there is another element to the experience of re-creating motion and that is called “motion blur.” It is perhaps best understood by imagining the little tricks that a cartoonist uses to depict speed in his drawings. A rapidly turned head, for instance, might be depicted with multiple heads in different positions, with swirl marks added to suggest speed. It is that slight blur that makes the reproduction of movement look effortless in moving images. I once showed a commercial client the film we had shot of a huge model of the San Francisco city and bay. As I displayed it for him on one of our giant VistaVision viewers, I stopped the film to point out a detail and he remarked, “That frame is not sharp.” Without going into detail, I simply said that he would not like it very much if all the frames were razor sharp—that’s not how the magic of movies works. He seemed to buy that, and we moved on.
By the time of Jurassic Park, Phil and others had developed a stop-motion system called “go motion,” which allowed models to move during the exposure of a given motion picture frame, rather than just clicking off frames only when the model was at rest. While not perfect, the addition of a slight blurring enhanced the smoothness of the movement when the film was projected.
Phil’s expertise and the advancements in traditional stop-motion animation gave everyone confidence that these movie dinosaurs could be pulled off. Still, there was a small group in the computer graphics department that thought otherwise. They had been told that computer animation was not yet up to the task and they were not to pursue it. Besides, management thought it would be vastly more expensive even if it was possible to do it.
Somewhat undercover, Spaz and Mark built a so-called wireframe version of a walking T. rex in their computers. The movement was quite realistic-looking even in this primitive state where the dinosaur is seen only as a shape somewhat resembling something made out of chicken wire. Spaz was in the habit of letting this image run in a loop on his computer screen, especially when important visitors came on tours. One important visitor was Kathleen Kennedy, Spielberg’s longtime producer. “What’s that?” she asked Spaz. “Oh, just something we have been fooling around with,” he replied. Of course, he also explained that he was convinced that the whole movie could be done in computer graphics.
Normally, this is the kind of conversation that management works diligently to make sure never takes place. There is justification for that. I once had a projectionist that would intervene in conversations between directors and important clients, right from the projection booth, introducing his thoughts on whatever subject might be being discussed. But this intervention was different. When you are paying a lot of money for wildly talented artists to come up with creative solutions to problems, you have to have some flexibility. It’s called managing creative people, and my former colleague, Ed Catmull, wrote a whole book on the subject called Creativity, Inc. Unfortunately, a lot of Ed’s insights were not given much credence at ILM.
But when Steven saw the tests that had been done by our bad boy Spaz, he authorized a budget for seeing if this creature could be fleshed out, literally. So a camera crew was sent out to film a background into which a much more sophisticated creature could be placed. A new wireframe was created and then muscles and skin added to an animal that seemed to be stalking its prey. Lots and lots of further detail would have to be added to make this thing work, but the basic movement was almost flawless and way beyond what stop-motion animation, even go motion, could ever achieve. As Spaz told me privately later, “When Steven saw this, he went nuts and announced that all the animation in Jurassic Park would now be done with computer graphics.”
It was Dennis Muren who was in charge of these special effects. No matter how they were done and no matter how talented certain individuals might be, Dennis had the responsibility to make it work. While he may have been skeptical initially, he was now on board and would oversee all the small details that made those dinosaurs come to life. When a dinosaur stomped on wet ground, splashes of real, not animated, water were added to tie the creature to the landscape. When the T. rex attacks the kids in the overturned SUV, a full-size, pre-crushed SUV was produced as reference for the computer animation artists to re-create it with photorealistic accuracy.
Elsewhere I mention that I made an internal ILM documentary to immortalize all this, and in it I interviewed Phil Tippett at his studio. He told the story of how he learned on a Friday afternoon that Steven had decided to dispense with all stop-motion work and replace it with computer graphics. This was a momentous turning point in Phil’s life. Everything he had ever learned now seemed to be obsolete. Phil cupped his palms together in front of my camera and then slowly opened them to simulate what he described as “bomb bay doors opening under my life” as he fell into the abyss below. Over the next decade this same thing would happen to many, many talented people.
Although Phil went through what must have been a dark weekend, he rallied on Monday as Dennis called him and said, “Look, you are still on the picture, and no one knows animal movement and the archeology of it like you.” Phil adapted, changed course, and directed the computer animation. He actually got cranky computer nerds out of their chairs, making them move and imitate the animals they were going to create. They hated leaving their keyboards, but Phil was an unrelenting drill sergeant and they obeyed. As one animation painter later told me, “We started out trying to do things procedurally [draw a detail and let the computer duplicate it exactly] but it didn’t look right. It was too uniform, and nature is not like that. But when we tried doing it by hand, the very randomness of that approach began to more correctly simulate a creature in nature.”
In the end it wasn’t all computer graphics. There were animatronic animals, models, practical effects like breakaway trees, live-action wire work that made props move on set, makeup, and tons of elements like smoke, water, dust, fire, and brush to enhance the sense that creatures were actually in the scenes. Invariably it was these little things, the small touches, that sold the big shots.
Jurassic Park was a massive hit and it changed a lot of lives, mine included. Spaz was back in business and would go on to do CG work on a scene in the restoration of Return of the Jedi that George had had to drop in the original version because it looked so fake. This restoration of Spaz reminded me of a comment Abraham Lincoln had made when told that General Grant was a drinker: “I can’t spare this man—he fights.”