(BIRDS CHIRPING)
(RUMBLING)
(RUMBLING INTENSIFIES)
(ROARING)
(HISSING)
Look out! Down!
(GROWLING)
(BRACHIOSAURUS ROARING)
(ROARING)
How did you do this'?
I'll show you.
SPIELBERG: My interest is making a good movie
that honors the existence of dinosaurs,
even if juxtaposed with man today
which is a little out of kilter with actuality.
But if the movie is honorable and can get people to say,
"This is the first time I've really seen a dinosaur.
"This isn't Gorgo or Godzilla.
"This is really a movie that I think
"is really happening as I'm watching it."
Action!
JONES: With Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg recalled from extinction
the greatest creatures our planet has known.
Reborn before our eyes were living, breathing dinosaurs.
Now we'll discover the secrets of their re-creation.
(THUNDER RUMBLING)
To resurrect these ancient and powerful creatures,
Director Spielberg and his team of special effects wizards
embarked on a three-year journey of discovery.
Creating new technologies, transforming old ones
and ushering filmmaking into the 21st century.
I'm James Earl Jones.
Join me as we make that same journey of discovery.
Share in the excitement of a motion picture
65 million years in the making.
From the earliest days of cinema,
movie dinosaurs have thrilled and terrified audiences
with their ferocity, if not always their believability.
But since The Lost World dazzled viewers in 1925,
moviegoers have become increasingly sophisticated,
expecting ever-greater levels of realism.
Expecting reality.
Jurassic Park set out to give us that reality.
To let us meet face to face the awesome creatures
whose legacy fills our grand halls of exhibition.
For 165 million years, dinosaurs ruled our world.
The most dominant species of all time.
Even their naked bones dwarf us.
Standing amongst them, our imagination is fired.
In awe, we wonder how they were as living creatures.
The sheer power of their limbs.
The rough texture of their skin.
The grace of their gait.
How they sounded, how they hunted.
Even how they ate.
This is the task that the makers
of Jurassic Park set themselves.
To bring these grand creatures
back to life with absolute credibility.
Steven Spielberg wished to show us not movie monsters,
but the animals themselves, as they might have been.
Immense and beautiful living beings
that were once lords of the earth.
Through an extraordinary combination of paleontology, artistry
and breakthrough technology, he did just that.
JONES: The story of Jurassic Park begins long ago,
when the prehistoric reign of the dinosaurs came to a mysterious end.
For 65 million years, their secrets lay buried in the earth.
(EXPLOSION)
Then, in the late-19th century,
man's discovery of ancient fossils suddenly unveiled
an undreamed of prehistoric past.
These towering skeletons captured the entire world's imagination.
We all longed to see dinosaurs live again.
SPIELBERG: My first toy from a museum that I ever got
was a little lead cast Triceratops.
I became fascinated as a kid, as all kids do,
because they're bigger than us.
And they were something that doesn't exist today.
I think because it doesn't exist today
and there's no immediate, direct access,
it becomes the thing that mythology is made of,
that makes mythology so fascinating.
Only it's real. It's not mythology.
And I think, even though it has
the pull and the seduction of mythology,
it also has its roots in reality.
JONES: That reality inspired Michael Crichton's
fact-based concept for Jurassic Park,
where genetic science allows our past to become our future.
CRICHTON: The notion that extinct animals can be re-created genetically
has been discussed for at least 10 years in scientific literature.
When I started, I was talking to friends at MIT,
and saying, "I have this idea about,
"engineering dinosaurs."
I was saying it very tentatively and some of them said,
"It would probably work."
Which was kind of encouraging to me.
Michael Crichton and I were working
on another project together, a screenplay.
And I asked him,
"What are you doing in the world of books?"
He said, "I'm writing this thing about dinosaurs and DNA."
And my eyes got wide and suddenly I wanted to hear more.
I coaxed it out of him until he told me basically the whole story.
That's how the whole thing began.
Even before I had a screenplay, I began to storyboard the novel.
I'd never done that.
I broke the novel down into scenes that I thought I might want to
carry over into the motion picture version.
JONES: As Spielberg conceived his ambitious plans
for the movie and its dinosaurs,
it became clear that bringing his vision to life
would require an unparalleled level of special effects.
(ROARING)
(SCREAMING)
(GROWLING)
SPIELBERG: My one precedent for Jurassic Park was King Kong.
King Kong was the high-water mark of special effects
creating a world I never knew existed.
Especially the great fight between King Kong and the Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Almost like a sumo wrestling match.
(BOTH ROARING)
SPIELBERG: That scene looks funny today,
because I see the professional wrestling parallels.
As a young person, that scene had no peer. That was my high-water mark
for imagining what it would be like to do a King Kong of today.
I don't consider Jurassic Park a classic, as King Kong is a classic.
But I was so inspired by King Kong,
that was one of the reasons I wanted to make Jurassic Park.
What have they got in there, King Kong?
JONES: Ironically, it was a modern-day Kong
that inspired Spielberg's initial plan for Jurassic's dinosaurs.
SPIELBERG: I was impressed with Bob Gehr
and his creation at Universal Studios with King Kong.
It's basically like a big inflatable balloon.
It moves with wonderful smoothness.
You can actually see muscle tone moving underneath the fur.
I was impressed with that,
so Bob Gehr and I had some initial conversations
about making some of the dinosaurs full-size.
Initially, I wanted to make all the dinosaurs full-size.
That, of course, was just my wishful thinking.
That didn't work out. We were going to break some new ground.
But it was going to be costly new ground.
The next idea I had was to go to the great physical effects maestros in town.
JONES: Spielberg assembled Hollywood's top special effects talent
for a unique collaboration.
Stan Winston.
Phil Tippett.
Dennis Muren,
and Michael Lantieri would compose Jurassic's design team.
I remember a conversation that was simply along the line of,
"Would we be interested?" And it was like... (PANTING)
Be interested? My goodness!
JONES: The initial approach for Jurassic's dinosaurs
relied on traditional technology,
combining moveable miniatures, created by Phil Tippett,
with a few full-size robotic creatures, designed by Stan Winston.
Michael Lantieri would supervise
the interaction of these elements
with the actors and the set.
And Dennis Muren would lead the team at industrial Light & Magic
in combining the elements on film in post-production.
By 1991, work was under way at Stan Winston's studio.
The first step was to determine the look of each character.
WINSTON: The artistry
of getting these dinosaurs to look real,
is absolutely the most important first step.
If they didn't look real,
if you didn't believe their skin, flesh, reality, details,
their eyes, teeth, mouth, everything about them,
no matter how good the performances were, they wouldn't be real.
You'd have something acting real but not looking real.
My kids'll love coming to the set till they see this.
Then they'll want to go home.
WINSTON: The reactions from Steven, Michael Crichton and anyone who'd walk in
and see the process, was always excitement.
You get jazzed. You get high.
You go, "Whoa! It's really coming alive."
As the sculpture is finished, the molds are taken from that.
From those molds the skins are made.
Those then go onto the robotics
and animatronics that have been built
in a parallel process.
So, you have the robotics which are your skeletal structure and muscles.
Then your skins, which are pulled from the molds
that go over those animatronic
and robotics of these dinosaurs.
That's why this is a perfect combination of art and technology.
JONES: It soon became important to decide how the dinosaurs
would be required to move on-screen.
Phil Tippett wanted to do storyboards three-dimensionally.
With little clay figures of dinosaurs and people.
They would completely imitate my storyboards
but flesh out my storyboards and give them dimension.
(GROWLING)
JONES: These temporary sequences were Known as "animatics. "
TIPPETT: Storyboards don't show you any of the
temporal cadence, the sequence, the timing of it.
The animatics allowed us
to block out the entire sequence so that Steven, on the set
would have this template he could use to show the actors
that this is the way it's going to look.
(ROARING)
TIPPETT: Steven's direction from the very first day was that he knew
that things with big pointy teeth would be
chasing people and trying to eat them.
He had a monster movie on his hands.
That was a given.
But he didn't want to have these things portrayed as monsters.
(SNIFFING)
He wanted to bring them back down to a naturalistic level.
He wanted them portrayed as animals.
So we spent a great deal of time working
with the paleontologists, doing a lot of fieldwork.
JONES: To help portray scientifically accurate behavior,
filmmakers enlisted the help of paleontologist, Jack Horner,
one of the world's leading dinosaur experts.
Horner's research has been instrumental
in changing our View of dinosaurs.
He contends that birds, not reptiles,
represent their closest living link.
For Jurassic's design team,
maintaining scientific accuracy
would mean breaking the reptilian stereotypes associated with dinosaurs.
The idea was to get people to look at dinosaurs as more like birds,
than as reptiles.
In one of the scenes
some of the model makers had made a tongue come out.
Like a lizard or a snake.
(HISSING)
He came up with this routine for the raptors.
They're genetic mutations, to a degree.
I thought, we'll have the raptor stick out his tongue.
When Homer saw the animatics of that,
he came down on us like a ton of bricks.
He said, "Whose stupid idea was that?"
"Mine, sir."
He said, "No! They could never do that!"
We know that they didn't do that.
80, had that been left in the scene,
all the work making these things bird-like
would have been gone.
JON ES: Once the characteristics
of the dinosaurs had been settled,
it was time to put them to the test
and see how they looked in motion.
The plan called for wide shots to be done
with Phil Tippett's "go-motion" technique,
a modern extension of traditional "stop-motion" animation.
The full potential and limitations of stop-motion
was realized by Ray Harryhausen,
in 1963's Jason and the Argonauts.
SPIELBERG: The skeleton fight was just phenomenal.
Yet, there's no blurring.
Every frame is in focus.
When a sword came down, they didn't build in a "motion-blur."
But Phil Tippett had perfected the motion-blur,
which gave go-motion a closer resemblance to real life.
But it wasn't 100%.
It was still jerky.
There was a bunch of great blurred motions
on a T-Rex and raptor running.
I'd come home and look at the stuff over and over again.
My kids bought it. They said, "Wow. A real dinosaur!"
But I still saw the jerks. (ROARING)
The movement was very accurate and very rhythmical,
but there was still something a bit "go-motiony" about it.
That's when Dennis Muren came to me
with this idea to show me a test.
MUREN: If you did that work as good as you could possibly do,
it wouldn't be up to the quality of what the audiences today expect
and deserve and what we're capable of giving them.
So, we began experimenting to see
how far the computer technology
had taken us during Terminator,
if we could go up to another level.
(EXPLOSION)
JONES: At this point in time, Dennis Muren and ILM
were working on Terminator 2 with director James Cameron,
pushing the boundaries of computer-generated images,
referred to as "CG/. "
SPIELBERG: I had no idea that this amazing new process, CG/, was alive.
Except I did ask Dennis Muren 1,000 questions about the water tendril
from Jim Cameron's other film, Abyss,
which I was impressed with because it was done with the computer.
Predating that, I produced a movie directed by Barry Levinson,
called Young Sherlock Holmes,
where the first computer creature was ever put in a movie.
And that was also ILM_.
There's been a passing of the torch
after what we did with Young Sherlock Holmes.
Cameron, then, took great leaps and bounds
with a quantum leap to Abyss and then Terminator.
And eventually to the suggestion Dennis Muren made to me,
where he said, "Would you ever consider
"letting us do most of the full-size dinosaurs
"from head to toe on the computer?"
My first reaction was, "Prove it."
He went out and he proved it.
There were a number of things to solve at the start.
If we were going to risk, what we were going to risk.
Because it was pretty difficult.
We didn't know if we could do it.
We debated because we had never made living creatures.
We had done stylized things with water
or liquid metal like in Terminator 2.
The question was, "Could we bring it to life'?
"Could it breathe and sweat and be believable as a living creature?"
MUREN: We can make an object look like chrome or plastic.
I looked at all footage
of computer graphics done with dinosaurs and animals of any type.
There wasn't anything that came close to looking real.
We started investigating to see if we could do it.
Initially, all we did was build things of bones
as an example of how it could move.
And the dynamism.
SPIELBERG: The first test was to create a herd of rampaging Gallimimus.
It was going to look like a Museum of Natural History run amuck.
With all these skeletons jumping off their steel supports
and running through a field.
Which is all the first test was.
I'll never forget the time that Dennis brought the first tests down.
I'd never seen movement this smooth
outside of looking at National Geographic documentaries.
JONES: Despite the relative crudeness of the earlier tests,
it was clear that Phil Tippett's go-motion dinosaurs
could be replaced by this breakthrough computer technology.
TIPPETT: Dennis had kept me informed about all the tests
that he was doing and I was thinking, "Holy...
"This is it. We're going to be in big trouble now."
I didn't dare call Phil at that time and say,
"We'd like to replace what you were going to do on the film,
"creating 100 shots with the best go-motion
"ever done in history, with CGI."
I didn't do that because I wasn't convinced
until I saw a fleshed dinosaur
outside in the worst harsh sunlight.
(ROARING)
DIPPE: We had our T-Rex walking in a field, just searching.
We had the Gallimimuses running,
and then we put the two together.
Everyone saw the potential.
Now you could see a real physical animal.
His skin moving and breathing,
muscles bulging, all that stuff.
SPIELBERG: When Phil and I saw it for the first time...
There we were, watching our future
unfolding on the TV screen,
so authentic, I couldn't believe it.
It blew my mind again, and I turned to Phil
and he looked at me and said,
"I think I'm extinct." I actually used Phil's line in the movie.
I gave it to Malcolm to say to Grant
when they're walking up the stairs.
...we're out of a job.
Don't you mean "extinct"?
SPIELBERG: That's what Phil said to me,
so I rubbed it in by using it in the film.
TIPPETT: The change was devastating.
I had different concessions, building equipment, puppets, all this stuff.
All of a sudden it was... (EXCLAIMS) The plug was pulled.
Phil felt very bad
that I wanted to go 100% CGI and no go-motion at all.
We have no go-motion in Jurassic Park.
But I think Phil was able to
turn himself into the director of the CG! dinosaurs.
MUREN: Eventually, Phil realized there was a place for him.
I was convincing him, "There's a place for you and your shop on the show."
He had some terrific animators that understood
how we could make these dinosaurs move naturally.
SPIELBERG: He knew so much about dinosaurs and animal behavior
that he became an animal trainer. He became,
basically, a paleontologist
and he became the Alan Grant of ILM.
JONES: As the start of filming approached,
the final strategy was determined.
Phil Tippett's animators would join forces
with lLM's computer artists
and Stan Winston's robotics team.
Together, they would bring Spielberg's vision of living, breathing dinosaurs
to the screen.
JONES: August, 1992.
The Jurassic Park cast and crew
travel to the Hawaiian island of Kauai
to begin three weeks of location shooting.
Can Laura jump in?
MAN: Ms. Dern, please.
CARTER: Kauai was an ideal setting for Jurassic Park.
Mainly because the environment itself
was very strong visually. It wasn't neutral.
It wasn't dinosaurs in a neutral environment. They were emanating
from something that already had a strength.
A perfect environment where you'd want to see a dinosaur.
JONES: Having chosen this dramatic location,
Spielberg and his crew began the work
of turning Kauai into Jurassic Park.
We'll be able to see lights in the shot'?
Great. Hey, guys.
Steven specifically made a point that Jurassic was to be as
real-looking as possible in order to get the audience to believe
everything we'd take them through.
SPIELBERG: When you're putting dinosaurs back on the earth in 1993,
you have to understand
the audience has to believe in order to take the journey.
I think an audience will buy into the most far-fetched fantasies
if it's done seriously and with a lot of credibility.
So, I didn't cast movie icon stars
to play the different characters,
I tried to cast really good actors.
I felt Laura Dern was the perfect Ellie Sattler_.
She's an honest actor. Sam Neill's an honest actor.
Jeff Goldblum is an incredibly naturalistic actor.
It seems like he's making up the dialogue as he speaks.
See, here I am now by myself, talking to myself.
That's Chaos Theory.
SPIELBERG: Because the acting was so realistic,
there's enough character in the movie
to make you root for the people, not just for the dinosaurs.
That makes all the difference.
JONES: As shooting began, the filmmakers were anxious to see
how their dinosaurs would perform.
First on the schedule was Stan Winston's full-size Triceratops.
It was important that we either get bloodied
on our first day of shooting or we succeeded.
(BELLOWING IN PAIN)
SPIELBERG: Thank goodness for Stan Winston and his team,
the Triceratops worked wonderfully.
It looked so pathetic lying there.
These are dilated. They are'?
Take a look.
I'll be damned.
WINSTON: It was a nice weaning in for us into the process
because we had some hellaciously difficult stuff coming up.
And it was a good springboard for everyone to see.
A dinosaur that was totally believable.
Did what it was supposed to do.
So, our first footage was so dramatic and we got by it.
Now, we're on to the tough stuff.
JONES: The next sequence would star the enormous Brachiosaur,
which would be missing until post-production.
Before Jurassic's computer animation breakthroughs,
this type of effects shooting went slowly,
requiring cumbersome, specialized cameras.
MUREN: We managed to get rid of them for the show.
We didn't have to set up a special camera to do it with,
which meant that we could shoot our backgrounds quickly.
We could come up with new ideas.
One of the good things on the Brachio sequence
was that Steven came up with new shots while we were shooting it.
The shot of them walking up
from a low angle, looking at the Brachiosaurus,
where you see its head up in the tree,
looking almost straight up at him,
was a shot that added to the sequence.
Previously, we never would have got it.
JONES: They quickly moved on to the raptor pen,
where the vicious carnivores would not be seen but only heard.
During these shots, Spielberg provided
his own brand of motivation for the actors,
as they imagined the dinosaurs below. (MIMICKING ROARING)
(MIMICKING HEAVY BREATHING)
MAN: Cut. (PANTING)
(CREW LAUGHING)
JONES: By mid-September, shooting on Kauai was complete
and the production returned to California.
After two days work in the Mojave Desert,
the crew moved indoors to film the rest of the movie on sound stages.
Sets included the genetics lab,
the inside of the visitors' center, and largest of all,
a complete re-creation of the main road
and T-Rex paddock from Kauai.
(THUNDER RUMBLING)
JONES: Shooting the T-Rex attack on a sound stage
gave the filmmakers more control
for this logistically complex sequence,
which would require both live-action and computer-generated dinosaurs
to interact heavily with the actors and the set.
LANTIERI: No matter what creature we had,
whether it was a CG creature or real, whatever we tried to do,
we had to figure out how to make it interact with real life.
I went about taking anything in the story
that would be touched by a creature,
and figuring out how to control it.
How to make it crush itself,
bend a fence without being there.
Everything had to be controlled from off-screen, on cue.
Originally, everyone was scared
the technology would put us out of work.
Directors will sit at a keyboard
and punch one button that says "D" for dinosaur,
and another button that says "C" for creature.
In Jurassic, we learned that it created a lot of work for us.
You know what the most difficult gag in the entire film was'?
The vibrating glass of water.
(RUMBLING)
This is a great story. Steven is in his car,
and he had Earth, Wind & Fire cranked up in the car.
His rear-view mirror was vibrating.
I was on my way to do storyboards for Jurassic Park,
and I never forgot what I looked like vibrating
as the bass rhythm went off.
(RUMBLING)
SPIELBERG: I thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if
"when the T-Rex began to approach,
"the low end vibration of all that tonnage
"hitting the ground was causing these little concentric circles."
LANTIERI: It was hard to do. We tried everything.
He kept saying, "How's the glass of water'?
"We'll get those vibrating rings
"to come out perfect, right?"
"We're working on it. It's great. You'll love it."
We had no idea. I asked everybody. I called sound engineers.
I called physics, wave tank generators.
We're trying to get these perfect rings that he wants in this water.
The night before the shot, I went home.
I'm at home and I'm still playing around.
I took a guitar and set a glass of water on the guitar
and plucked the string and it vibrated and did it.
The next morning we came in and I brought guitar strings
and we fed a guitar string through the car, down to the ground.
I had a guy lay under the car and pluck the guitar string.
And that's how that shot is done.
I had no idea that it was going
to cause Mike Lantieri so many sleepless nights.
(ROARING)
JONES: As promised, the rings of water heralded the arrival
of Jurassic's fierce Tyrannosaurus Rex.
(GROWLS)
WINSTON: The shooting of the T-Rex main road sequence
was the most amazing shoot of my entire career.
Well ahead of time in pre-production
we talked and knew about this particular sequence.
And how difficult this sequence would be.
Why it was going to be so difficult.
It was in the middle of rain.
It was a heavy, rainy set.
We talked strongly with Steven,
letting him know that we're dealing
with something that is electronic,
robotics, something that things could go wrong with.
We had to keep the rain off of the T-Rex.
SPIELBERG: Let's take it out and do it again!
WINSTON: This T-Rex was in a torrential downpour
every second of footage that he was on film.
SPIELBERG: Could we please stop this'? I want to dry him down.
One more time! All right.
WINSTON: Things that we had designed
to prevent the T-Rex from wobbling or jiggling
was based on fine-tuning of this machine based on his weight.
And cut. Cut it.
As he would get rained on,
his skin would soak up water and his weight would change.
In the middle of the day, he would start having the shakes
and we'd have to dry him down.
We were constantly fighting this element of rain.
But it was wonderful to see
this 9,000-pound wonder,
40 feet long, getting in there and acting.
(ROARING)
(SCREAMING)
(ROARING FIERCELY)
JONES: The success of the T-Rex sequence
inspired Spielberg to change his plans
for the climax of the film only weeks before the end of shooting.
SPIELBERG: When I saw the main road attack,
I said, "I think our star is the T-Rex. "
The audience will hate me unless the T-Rex
makes one more heroic appearance.
So, I concocted
the idea of a big raptor, T-Rex fight.
(SCREECHING)
The original ending for the film
was not what's in the film right now.
It was smaller scale, with a couple of raptors in the rotunda
and Grant killed them and one of the raptors
got stuck in the skeleton and was killed as it crashed to the ground.
JONES: Unlike the previous T-Rex scene,
which intercut robotic creatures with CGI elements,
Spielberg's new ending would rely exclusively
on computer-generated dinosaurs
requiring animation far more complex
than anything previously attempted.
It's something we couldn't have done
or even known about two months earlier.
Steven had seen our work and got to thinking that we needed a bigger ending,
which was the right idea because here was the technology to do it.
The raptor's on this side.
If you get him around this way,
you can see him grab the raptor's tail,
and then he pulls the raptor and steps back.
TIPPETT: We got on the set and
blocked out the actions,
worked out how we were going to maintain this continuity.
If we can, it's going to be neat.
We set the camera up in the room
and shot as if there was a full-size animal in the room with the actors.
ILM would often take intricate measurements.
They'd put up these, I called them "barber poles. "
Even do a lighting reference
so the computer guys could see how the light was affecting the T-Rex.
We were scared to be too experimental
at the beginning of the learning curve,
but after a while, we were shooting like
we'd been doing CGI movies for 10 years.
JONES: The completion of this scene
in the visitors' center marked the end of shooting.
Twelve days ahead of schedule.
SPIELBERGI Cut! Great!
(CREW CHEERING)
JONES: The picture however, was far from complete.
Finishing it would make film history.
(T-REX ROARING)
Before any of the computer-generated dinosaurs could be added,
Spielberg and editor Michael Kahn
had to put the film together.
SPIELBERG: I spent weeks with Mike
every single day cutting the film down, trimming, making changes.
KAHN: We'd show people reacting to something and I'd cut the scene
as if there were dinosaurs there.
Steven and I would look at the scene and we'd say,
"Gee, it's great, now if ILM can do their part...
"It looks great without the dinosaurs,
"imagine what it's going to look like with the dinosaurs."
SPIELBERG. When I was happy with the picture, I locked the print. I said,
"This is a lock, this is the movie."
No more changes were done.
I turned it over to post-production.
JONES: The beginning of 1993 saw Jurassic Park enter its most crucial stage.
It was time to add over 50 CG! shots.
This unprecedented task called for
the most powerful, state-of-the-art computers available.
I'm in one of our three computer rooms that we have here at ILM.
What we have are thousands and millions of cycles of computing power
going by every second.
They are noisy, active and hot.
It's up to the people to harness all this energy
and all these computing cycles
to create images of dinosaurs on the screen.
JONES: Although the early tests had proven
the computers' ability to create dinosaurs,
Spielberg now needed more.
Jurassic's dinosaurs had to deliver a performance.
For the animators, this meant an entirely
new level of research and preparation.
DIPPE: We wanted to get our heads into that of a dinosaur's.
To learn to think like a dinosaur, because in a sense,
our performances are being put
into the digital character of the dinosaurs on screen.
You have to know its motivations. Like an actor.
When entering a room, you have to know what to look at and why.
How to hold your body and move.
JONES: To help the animators better understand their dinosaurs,
Phil Tippett had them step away from their computers.
One of my big things
is to try and get the animators
to pantomime with their bodies.
So, we instituted these mime classes.
ARMSTRONG: Taking those classes made us aware of our bodies and of
what we were doing and how our foot moves when we take a step.
Those are things the animator has to think about.
Those are the things they have to duplicate to get reality.
Another thing we did to make sure
our heads were in the right place,
that we were dinosaurs, we'd go outdoors
and pretend we were Gallimimuses or T-Rexes hunting each other
and shoot film.
Also to get an idea of how an animal in motion would look.
At least, if we were that animal.
We ran around with our hands like this,
thinking we were Gallimimuses.
We watched ourselves, how we moved.
Because the Gallis were bipedal and humans are bipedal,
there's a certain amount to be learned,
watching how to shift your weight,
things like that.
JONES: As research continued at ILM,
Phil Tippett's go-motion animators
searched for a way to apply their traditional skills to modern computers.
We are hands-on guys.
We're used to walking up to the puppet
and making each of these moves by hand.
I'm not used to sitting down at a keyboard and having to hit buttons.
It's kind of like animating with boxing gloves on.
JONES: To bridge this gap between computer animation and moveable miniatures,
Tippett's shop came up with a unique solution.
We proposed the development of this particular piece of hardware.
Which we nicknamed the "Dinosaur Input Device."
We'd take a similar puppet to what they're used to animating
and electronically encode it.
So they can move this around
and have that be applied to a computer.
JONES: The DID translated actual movement into computer instructions.
It eliminated the keyboard
while yielding the same CGI results.
(ROARING)
To ensure that all these results were believable,
both sets of animators looked to nature for guidance.
DUTRA: Jurassic Park was one of the first films
where we could have dinosaurs move as animals.
We pored over animal footage
to inject these with believable movements,
and stay away from third-hand fantasy interpretations,
but really go to the source, and that was nature.
JONES: To ensure a consistent look
between the CG! and mechanical dinosaurs,
Stan Winston's miniatures, known as maquettes,
were sent to the computer artists.
And those maquettes were literally put into the computer.
So the computer had a design that would configure and wouldn't vary.
I didn't want people to say, "Oh, that's a CGI shot. "
I wanted to bridge every technology
so the film would simply be, "That's a dinosaur."
As Grant does when he looks back and says...
It's a dinosaur.
Uh-huh.
JONES: The enormous Brachiosaur
was the first CGI dinosaur brought to life on-screen.
SPIELBERG: My job was to look at the CG! shots they were turning out.
And I would critique them
and make changes all the time.
I was a real critic about getting the animals to blend in
seamlessly to the actual scene.
JONES: Next up was the Gallimimus herd,
which required the animation
of more than 25 individual dinosaurs.
We had to figure out a technique to get
a herd of them done in the same time it would take
to get one shot done with a single creature.
The idea was that we'd create a single cycle of a single running animal.
And then use that cycle over and over again for multiple animals.
JONES: Simple geometric shapes
were then used to choreograph the herd.
These are stand-in shapes that represent all the Gallis.
By moving these hood ornaments around,
we can understand how the herd would move in the environment.
Then one at a time, we went in
and substituted a run-cycle for each shape.
Then we go in and take each individual cycle and edit it,
and change the individual Gallis
so they move slightly differently,
interacting with their environment.
They're flocking this way.
JONES: To convey the energy of the stampeding herd,
Spielberg needed complete freedom to move his camera.
Something traditional technologies would have denied.
I kept saying, "I want to move the camera.
"Don't tell me every time a CGI dinosaur
"comes into the scene, I got to lock down my camera.
"I want to dolly and pan like normal, and hand-hold. "
That was the ultimate challenge,
"Can you hand-hold and still put the element into the scene? "
Dennis was able to do that.
He raced along with Grant, Lex and Timmy running, looking at nothing.
That was bouncing all around,
with references that Dennis put into the ground.
Little Day-Glo golf balls.
JONES: The resulting grid was used as a frame-by-frame reference
so the computer could chart and match the movement of the camera.
Dennis was able to take out the golf balls,
put in the Gallis inside a hand-held shot.
JONES: Having succeeded with the Gallimimus herd,
/LM moved on to the T-Rex.
(ROARING)
Which proved to be the most difficult to animate.
Look out!
My big responsibility was to make the Rex run in all the shots.
It took a long time to do.
There's no reference for a seven ton
bipedal animal moving 30 miles an hour.
DIPPE: We met three paleontologists who disagreed with each other.
They were trying to extrapolate from foot prints and bones
and fossil evidence to determine how an animal might move.
When you work from a purely visual standpoint,
you have a whole other way of attacking that problem.
WILLIAMS: It took me two months to make him run correctly.
I'd do things like look at him running backwards all the time.
You see a lot of mistakes with a creature running backwards.
Then we showed them our first film that we liked.
When it was all done, they looked at us and said,
"That looked pretty dang good and maybe you guys are right."
(T-REX ROARING)
JONES: Computer technology also made it possible
to add important details to effects shots.
The splashing water made by the Tyrannosaurus' footstep
is one such detail.
The water was filmed as a separate element.
The computer was then able to place the splashing
precisely around the dinosaur's foot.
(THUNDER RUMBLING)
(T-REX SNARLING)
JONES: Jurassic's animators were creating dinosaurs that looked absolutely real.
If they were not being fully brought to life,
the one crucial element was added,
(ROARING FIERCELY)
sound.
RYDSTROM: The truth is that no one knows what they sound like.
The paleontologists have no idea
because vocal chords wouldn't survive.
The directions we got were those
that the visual effects people got,
which was to make it like an animal.
I trusted Gary and said, "Create dinosaur sounds
"that don't sound like Godzilla or Rodan.
"Make them sound real but also make them sound big and deep."
(RASPING)
And Gary went off and created these sounds that were wonderful.
(SCREECHING)
RYDSTROM: The first thing we did was record
raw material from living animals
and piece them together in interesting ways.
(CALLING)
(HISSING)
(RATTLING)
BOYES: Gary wanted to start with a clean slate.
Rather than taking sounds out of a library, he wanted to go out
and have me collect sounds in every form.
So that every sound would be a new sound
never heard before by any other audience.
I went out with ideas of what sounds we needed to gather.
I found myself just moving around
all over the place looking for sounds.
(WIND HOWLING)
Often, I'd get lucky and come across
strange circumstances that provided great audio events.
(BELLOWING)
RYDSTROM: We'd go out and record what ends up being a lot of garbage.
When we come across something we like,
I sample it and put it in the computer
and then I can manipulate it here.
Now that it's in the keyboard, you can perform it.
(ROARING)
You can quickly get a sense of what these raptors are doing.
JONES: The fierce scream of the raptors is actually a mix
of two rather harmless marine animals.
The first sound was a dolphin we recorded underwater.
It made this high-pitched scream.
(HIGH-PITCHED SCREAM)
It was really horrific. Then I'd combine that with a walrus.
The walrus had a deep, resonant chest cavity roar.
(ROARING)
Between the two, it blended into
a single scream that sounded like
a scary animal who was also big.
(SCREECHING)
RYDSTROM: One of my favorite sequences is
the T-Rex coming out of the woods and eating a Gallimimus_.
Sound people can really appreciate the animation for the scene
because we're looking for little cues to put sounds in.
There was a sad moment in that scene where the Galli
is first attacked by the T-Rex but still alive.
Then he looks up at the T-Rex in a last ditch effort
to either beg for forgiveness
or see what's hitting him, I don't know which.
It's a poignant moment.
We put the most poignant horse cry we could find.
The moment he looks up and then gets clobbered.
(POIGNANT CRY)
The T-Rex killing the Gallimimus
is just my dog playing with a rope toy.
(GROWLING)
There's a synergy that happens.
If the visuals are working well
then the sound works well, too.
You can't have one without the other, I think.
(GROWLING)
They create a whole that's stronger than the parts.
(ROARING)
(KIDS SCREAMING)
JONES: Having met success in creating dinosaurs,
the animators were anxious to extend
the boundaries of their techniques
and tackle other production challenges.
The first chance came during the T-Rex attack.
This shot required the filmmakers
to animate not just the dinosaur,
but the vehicle as well.
WILLIAMS: What I have to do here
is record all the physical data of the set,
the camera position, the size of the lens.
I reconstruct that entire set of data in computer graphics.
In wire frame, I have a reflection of what happened on the set.
This is all on the CG side of it.
When I composite the actual plate in,
it looks like it's all one element.
(GROWLS)
(SCREAMING)
JONES: The animators pushed the same technique even further
during the Tyrannosaurus encounter with the lawyer.
One of the challenges for us
was to make this T-Rex bite and grab and bring into the air
this real guy.
So we replaced him.
It's a real live guy at the head of the shot when he's doing this.
Then when the T-Rex chomps him,
we switch to our computer graphics guy.
It gave us the flexibility to make the T-Rex
take the most appropriate action, take the action that
a real T-Rex would when he would
yank him into the air and shake him
to break all the bones in his body, so he can kill him
and eat him.
JONES: As the filmmakers ventured further into the CG! frontier,
they realized they were only scratching
the surface of the computer's potential.
TIPPETT: As a result of this huge technological breakthrough,
we can do anything we want.
It's opened everything up.
You're no longer constrained by materiality.
You can do what you imagine. But it is a tool in its infancy.
SPIELBERG: I think CGI will be another tool to make filmmaking easier.
In 10 years, this technology will be awesome.
More than I can even imagine sitting here talking to you.
JONES: The awesome potential of CG! as a filmmaking tool became clear
when it offered a solution to one of the film's most thrilling shots.
ARMSTRONG: When the stunt girl
did this shot, at one point, she looked up at the camera.
There was a point where you could recognize her face.
It didn't look like Ariana, who played the girl.
We actually replaced the stunt girl's face with her face
so that it looks like her falling through the ceiling.
(SCREAMING)
JONES: The final challenge for the post-production team
was completing the new ending,
which would push the capabilities
of computer animation to its very limit.
(SCREECHING)
We didn't know how close we could get
to the computer graphic dinosaurs.
How big in the frame they can be before they fall apart
and look like a computer-generated trick of some sort.
We've got a shot where
you're 5 feet in front of the head of a T-Rex and it's full-frame.
It doesn't look like it's computer.
It looks like a totally real animal.
(GROWLING)
Jurassic Park was finally complete
and ready for release on June 11,1993.
After 65 million years, the world was about to see dinosaurs live again.
The reaction was phenomenal.
Audiences all over the world
packed theaters in record numbers.
We were thrilled, frightened and awed.
Even the filmmakers themselves could not help but be amazed
at what their collective efforts had achieved.
It's a dinosaur. (ROARING)
Uh-huh.
When you finally see the finished sequence
and the pain is over, and the anxiety is allover
and you realize how it blends together, it's a thrill.
(SCREECHING)
It's what I as a kid always wanted to see.
I think that's what's coming out.
It's a big, neat adventure movie
with some really neat-looking stuff in it.
(TRUMPETING)
They didn't match the expectations
so much as they matched the hope,
"Please, God. Please let this all work together."
(SCREAMING)
Even though I was closely involved
with it for such a long period of time,
I still watch the film and I go,
"How did we do this?"
It was a wonderful collaboration between effects and artistry
and science and paleontology.
Every single dinosaur exceeded my expectations.
The success of Jurassic Park can be attributed to the fact
that it's about these leviathans of ancient history.
It was everything I wanted it to be. No less and a lot more.
(ROARING FIERCELY)