Jurassic Park at 30: how its CGI revolutionised the film industry

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1993’s Jurassic Park used pioneering computer-generated imagery (CGI) to bring dinosaurs to life in Steven Spielberg’s adaption of the novel of the same name.

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https://theconversation.com/jurassic-park-at-30-how-its-cgi-revolutionised-the-film-industry-204592https://theconversation.com/jurassic-park-at-30-how-its-cgi-revolutionised-the-film-industry-204592
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Saturday, June 10, 2023
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The Abyss, Fantasy, Land, Lost World, Industrial Light & Magic, Center, ILM, Industry, Life, BBC, Walking with Dinosaurs, Method, Emotion, Attention, Movement, Projection, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Steven Spielberg, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Lost Ark, Animation, Time, Lost, Walking, Television, Velociraptor, CGI, Muren, Raider, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Land, Skin, Tyrannosaurus, Entertainment, Amusement park, Film industry, Gallimimus, Dinosaur, Magic, Jurassic Park
Summary
Key Points: 
  • 1993’s Jurassic Park used pioneering computer-generated imagery (CGI) to bring dinosaurs to life in Steven Spielberg’s adaption of the novel of the same name.
  • Jurassic Park originated in 1983 as a screenplay by Michael Crichton, whose previous foray into film as writer and director of Westworld (1973) featured an immersive amusement park where androids malfunctioned and caused havoc.
  • But his dinosaur-themed story first found publication as the novel Jurassic Park, which was released in 1990 and became a bestseller.
  • Of these methods, a combination of stop-motion animation for long shots and animatronic puppets for close ups were initially chosen by Spielberg for Jurassic Park.

CGI and animation

    • Dennis Muren from the visual effects company, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), provided an alternative approach by using CGI modelling and animation.
    • Off the back of pioneering CGI work in The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), Muren and his team produced a test sequence of skeletal dinosaurs.
    • Jurassic Park features 15 minutes of on-screen dinosaurs, of which approximately nine minutes feature Stan Winston’s animatronics and six minutes of ILM’s CGI animation.
    • Although the CGI sections are relatively short, they have a huge impact on the overall storytelling, not to mention the believability that the event is actually happening in front of us.

Impact

    • It also presented the perfect opportunity to develop and showcase the latest advances in CGI.
    • Jurassic Park inspired a number of similarly themed movies such as Disney’s Dinosaur (2000) and the award-winning BBC television series Walking with Dinosaurs (1999).
    • But more than that, it helped bring about a revolution in the use of CGI in filmmaking.
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