2) The Special Effects
We can’t talk about Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs for long before we have to discuss the special effects. In Jurassic Park, we had a clear demonstration of exactly what it was that made Spielberg want to direct this movie: his love of dinosaurs. But it is impossible to do proper justice here to the full extent of the work that went into creating them, beyond outlining a few highlights.
There were five separate teams assigned to bringing the dinosaurs to life – two for the animatronics, models and stop motion, and three for the CGI process (some of the crew were originally stop-motion animators, who retrained as computer animators specifically for this job). The model T-Rex stood 20ft high, weighed 17,500 pounds, and was 40ft long. During the scene in which the T-Rex attacks the SUVs in the rain, the foam skin of the animatronic absorbed so much water that the model quivered under the excess weight, and the crew took turns in drying ‘him’ between takes.
Rendering the dinosaur movements in the CGI program took two to four hours per frame, and up to six hours per frame for the rain sequences. The sound of the T-Rex walking through the undergrowth was actually that of cut sequoia trees falling to the ground. To make sure that the reactions of the stampeding herd of gallimimus were realistic, members of the effects teams first filmed themselves running across the plains. People also got inside raptor suits for filming sequences such as the kitchen scene (if you would like the magic of these scenes to remain, do not watch animator John Rosengrant’s video of how this was done. The image of life-size velociraptors running around wearing Converse isn’t one that will leave you in a hurry, I can tell you).
Jurassic Park eventually won over 20 awards, most of which were for the visual effects (including the Oscar). And yet, the total shots that involved the dinosaur effects only amount to 14 minutes of the 127 minute-long movie. That’s how much of an impact they had. The Lost World, however, didn’t fare quite so well. The visuals were still very good (many of the original team remained to work on the second film), but they were nowhere near as tight. The first shot we have of the baby T-rex eating in the nest looks like a scene from Fraggle Rock.
Jurassic Park III continued the combined use of animatronics and CGI, but without Spielberg’s vision, the computerization – and an abundance of green screen – was even more obvious than in The Lost World. To give Jurassic Park III its due, however, it did incorporate new paleontological discoveries that had been made since the first movie came out, such as the velociraptors having a feather crest.
Jurassic Park, at its time, involved the most ambitious visual effects in movie history, and some of the movie remains to this day the paradigm as to how special effects should be done (information that might have been useful to Clint Eastwood for avoiding the whole ‘plastic-baby-gate’ debacle of American Sniper). The filmmakers of Jurassic World seem to have taken note of this. The dinosaurs are vitally important. The effects, therefore, are vitally important. From the most recent trailers it is clear that a mixture of CGI and models have again been used, but the result looks highly effective and wonderfully distressing.