The Maverick Who Brought Dinosaurs to Life in Jurassic Park
Hello friends!
I hope the summer is treating you well (or the winter, if you’re reading this from the Southern Hemisphere!).
I enjoy the sunshine, but 90 degree temperatures work best when you have air conditioning to accompany them.
But in the UK where I live, you’re hard pressed to find air conditioning. You won’t find it in most homes (including mine) or in restaurants and shops.
The best way to escape the heat is to go to the movies.
And that works for me — I’m always up for the movies!
Last month, during the first heatwave, I went to see Thor: Love & Thunder.
I did not love the film, but the air conditioning comfort was worth the price of admission.
As I sat there enjoying the theater’s air conditioning, I wondered how much of the movie was shot using green screen.
Technology has come so far since Terminator 2 impressed all of us in the 1990s.
And the other film that scratched the surface of what technology could do was the biggest movie of the summer of 1993.
It combined two things I loved:
Steven Spielberg and dinosaurs.
Spielberg didn’t waste money with big stars for this film.
Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum are good in their roles, but the stars that really pulled us into the theaters (more than once) were the dinosaurs.
You may not think so now (given the sea of CGI films made today) but when Jurassic Park came out, it was incredible.
When those dinosaurs appeared on the screen, we had the same reaction as Dern and Neill in the movie:
But how did those dinosaurs make it to the screen?
I was curious…
After I read about the big name effects teams that worked on the film, I discovered Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams.
If the world of animation in 1991 had a bad boy, I think it may have been Spaz…
Here’s the story of how Steve Williams’s refusal to take no for an answer led to the magical dinosaurs in Jurassic Park
Steven Spielberg began production on Jurassic Park in 1991.
He hired Oscar-winning special effects and visual effects experts to create large animatronic dinosaurs and puppets, and planned to capture their movement on film using a well-established process called stop motion.
But there was one problem.
Stop motion footage can appear jerky on screen – or even worse – fake.
So Spielberg hired Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) to add effects to improve the stop motion footage.
And that’s where 29-year-old ILM animator Steve Williams comes in…
Williams was tasked with adding blur to the footage to improve the appearance of the stop motion dinosaurs.
But Williams and some of his colleagues at ILM saw an opportunity.
Instead of using stop motion, why not build the dinosaurs using computer graphics?
But this was 1991, and no one believed computer graphics were capable of creating a dinosaur that looked real and could move – or they were too scared to try.
But not Steve Williams.
Williams had already been pushing the boundaries of what was possible, working on the effects in films like The Abyss and Terminator 2.
Even though his boss had explicitly told him not to, Williams secretly began building the bones of a T-Rex in computer graphics.
“We were mavericks. We always questioned established systems. ILM was a lab. We were inventing and experimenting with things.”
Spurred by his curiosity (and a desire to convince others he was right), he spent months experimenting, and managed to create an incredible CG walk cycle of a T-Rex.
But he knew his boss would never show it to the film’s producers.
So he got creative.
Williams knew that Jurassic Park producer Kathleen Kennedy would be visiting the ILM office for a routine screening, so he set up a monitor by the door that showed his T-Rex creation, ensuring she would see it as she walked down the hall.
When Kennedy saw Williams’ CG T-Rex, she was immediately impressed – and suddenly stop motion didn’t look like the best option anymore.
With Kennedy’s endorsement, Williams got the green light from his boss at ILM to continue building his CG dinosaurs.
He spent the next 4-5 months building the skin of his T-Rex (to match the animatronic versions that had already been created), before it was unveiled to Spielberg, George Lucas, producer Kennedy, and a few others working on the film.
When they saw the CG dinosaur moving on the screen, they were amazed.
And it changed everything.
When Spielberg saw what was possible with CG, he knew it was a game changer.
And the well-defined process of stop motion was suddenly on its way to being extinct.
In fact, Spielberg was so enamoured with the T-Rex, he re-wrote the end sequence of the film to include more action with a T-Rex.
Williams had built the creature, but now he and the team at ILM had to make it run.
Phil Tippett, who had originally been hired to create the stop motion work on the film, was able to help the animators understand the kind of movement they would need to create in computer graphics.
At the same time, the team at ILM had to make sure their CG creations aligned with the animatronic dinosaurs and puppets Stan Winston and his team were creating.
The final film that arrived in theaters in 1993 included a combination of CG dinosaurs (visible in the wide shots), animatronics, and puppets.
When Jurassic Park opened in June 1993, audiences couldn’t believe how realistic the CG dinosaurs were.
The film was a smash hit, raking in more than $900 million, and becoming the highest-grossing film at that time.
Although many initially doubted what computer graphics could do, Steve Williams was always a believer.
“I love the term ‘You will never’, Williams said. “If I listened to the people who said, ‘You will never…’, T-Rex wouldn’t have been built.”
You can see how Steve’s work on Jurassic Park evolved here.
Fun Fact: When Steven Spielberg decided to use computer graphics in the film instead of stop motion, he had to break the bad news to stop motion expert Phil Tippett.
After telling Tippett he was being replaced with computers, Spielberg asked him, “How does that make you feel?”
Tippett responded, “I think I’m extinct.”
Spielberg responded: “That’s a great line for the film.”
And Spielberg added the line to the film.
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-Beth
Certainly realistic enough to have me shaking in my boots when this came out!
Beth, great post! It has just reminded me that when I travelled in Belize in 2008 we visited some beautiful Mayan Ruins. As we sat at the top looking out over the jungle canopy we heard the crazed screeching of the howler monkeys. The guide asked what it reminded us of - the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park! He then told us the story of how the film makers recorded the howler monkeys to use in the film. Many more people have seen Jurassic Park than have heard howler monkeys in real life, so the sound is now more attributed to dinosaurs!