| There have been many questions as to why Crichton/Spielberg decided to make a Dinosaur book/movie. This area of filmography has remained vastly untouched, and for good reason. Now with the advent of CGI the impossible can be realized. Take for instance claymation/animatics, which has been widely accepted now as the only way to get realistic but somewhat synthetic looking movement on film. This looks great for movies where there's not many close-ups. Now with the advent of CGI we see what appears very real. Muscle tension, skin movement, and most important close-ups bring many new ideas to the screen. What was impossible five years ago, looks very real today. Spielberg was not aware of what could be done with CGI when he first started working on JP. He had seen Terminator II and was impressed with it, but remember most of the work done on T2 could be classified as special effects. At that time no attempts had ever been made to model a living (once living) animal. ILM approached Spielberg with the idea of creating the dinos, Spielberg had asked Stan Winston to do the animatics for JP. But was interested in what could be done with CG, so he asked them to make something he could see. ILM used an Amiga running Lightwave and created a skeleton animation of a Gallimimus running. Spielberg was impressed he asked to see it in a more realistic environment. So ILM created (This time on a SGI machine) a animation of some Gallies running across an open field. (Still skeleton) Spielberg was very impressed, but at this time he was still planning on using animatics for all the up-close shots. Until ILM created an animation of a T-Rex walking though some trees, Spielberg was astounded not to mention Stan Winston, who said "Looks like were out of a job.", to which Spielberg replied "Don't you mean extinct?". (These lines were given to Grant and Ian in the film) Spielberg then made the decision to go full CG on Jurassic Park, and Winston would collaborate with ILM on the project. They made movie history with JP, CGI would now be accepted as a REAL alternative to claymation/animatics. They brought the dream of real dinosaurs to the screen for everyone to see. I don't know of anyone who didn't leave the theatre with a feeling they had just seen REAL dinosaurs for the first time. With Jurassic Park we got a taste of what is yet to come, now with the sequel coming, be prepared to take a step back in time once again a big step, about 65 million years. Prepare to be shaken once again! |