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

Retrieved on: 
Saturday, June 10, 2023

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.

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.