I recently had the incredible opportunity to spend some time chatting with some of the greatest visual effects artists in the industry to discuss Jurassic Park, which will be released on Blu-ray in an ultimate trilogy set on October 25.
Even if you don’t know their names, you know their work. Dennis Muren began his career with George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) in the early days of the Star Wars saga. Phil Tippett also worked at ILM and worked on stop-motion scenes. John Rosengrant worked closely with Stan Winston on the animatronic dinosaurs and has even performed as a puppeteer for movies (including performing as one of the velociraptors in the kitchen scene in Jurassic Park). He is now with Legacy Effects.
I began by asking them if they thought CGI was overused by filmmakers today, since part of the success of Jurassic Park comes from the seamless blending of multiple effects techniques (animatronic dinosaurs from Stan Winston, and the collaboration between Tippet’s stop motion and Muren’s CGI).
Muren: “Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s overused. Movies should be about people, not about effects, and there’s a tendency to just do sort of everything CG and what they’re actually doing is delaying making the decision.”
Rosengrant: “It’s lazy film-making. I hate to be that blunt but I really feel like it is, because movies were made with decisions and planning for years and now you get to set and they just don’t want to make a decision . . . they don’t want to do their homework or be locked in.”
Muren: “[Jurassic Park] very well planned. It was a mixture of real dinosaur props on the set that could move realistically mixed with post-production effects that ended up being computer graphics as opposed to just doing all one or all the other.”
Tippett: “And to add to that note there was the Winston Studios that did all the practical on-set stuff which contributed a significant amount of shots to it whereas Dennis and I worked primarily on the . . . more ambulatory shots . . . I think there was only something like 55 dinosaur shots and it was so well laid out by Steven [Spielberg] and cut together seamlessly that it was almost a perfect amount of what you needed to do to tell the story and kind of left you wanting more . . .
Muren: “You felt like there were a heck of a lot more dinosaurs in that movie than really were. It’s so funny, but Steven did the same thing in Jaws and he did the same thing in E.T. You’d think the people would learn from him how to make these movies, but they don’t. So many people just throw in a thousand shots, 2000 shots and think that’s how you do it. It’s too bad.”
Next, I asked them what they thought about filmmakers going back to earlier works and updating the visual effects (as we have most recently seen with the Star Wars Saga. Again)
Tippett: “It’s their business. Artists throughout all history have gone back in and re-worked stuff, and that could be for a number of different reasons, so you know, it’s their call to do that.”
Muren: “I agree with Phil. I wish the original versions were always available, but I think it’s fine to update a movie if it means you’re going to have an audience later watching that movie that otherwise might turn it off because of something that you could fix. It’s a shame, people were talking about a shot in Raiders of the Lost Ark where there’s a reflection in a piece of glass between Indy and the snake . . . I would hate to have people turn that movie off . . . because of that reflection looking fake.”
Their responses to the most challenging parts of working on Jurassic Park:
Rosengrant: “For Stan Winston Studio I think it was coming up with moving these giant dinosaurs hydraulically and getting them to move naturally because the hydraulics had been used in theme parks for years but they didn’t have the compliant servos and the computer technology to stop them from kind of looking very fake and mechanical so that was a huge groundbreaking thing for us and of course you’re also strapped with skins of Tyrannosaurus Rexes that are 24 feet long and Brachiosaur heads which technically oh that’s a big deal the mold-making process for something like that we turned to aerospace. Used a lot of products for the mold-making, epoxy molds and things that would be very light and strong compared to the other techniques of the past. that was daunting I mean, obviously the scope of work as well.”
Muren: “From our point of view on the CG stuff, is that we didn’t even know if we could to it at the start of the project because it just hadn’t been done before. I looked at a lot of footage that had been done by universities and all these attempts to make animal skin to look like real computer graphic creatures. Nobody got even close to it, and it was the best stuff from the finest minds. Fortunately at ILM we had a lot of people who really cared about it and we had some science people that we brought in and computer scientists to sort of help solve problems the way the light should hit the detail on it different detail on it and how we could get the apparent look of all the different detail on the skins of the dinosaurs without actually having to make all that because computers of that time couldn’t have ever handled it. There was an awful lot of cheating compared to what we do now in CG. We didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know if we could do it.”
And they are currently working on:
Muren: “I just did some work on Super 8 but now I’m onto this book I’ve been working on for a long time on and it’s on observation and inspiration for films.”
Phil Tippett is working on the final two chapters of the Twilight saga.
Rosengrant: “And Legacy Effects is working on Pacific Rim which is the Guillermo Del Toro movie and we’re also doing a smaller movie . . . called Neighborhood Watch where aliens have invaded the neighborhood.”
It was a treat to speak to these masters of visual effects, and you can see and hear more about the behind-the-scenes magic on the documentaries included in the Jurassic Park Blu-Ray set. I’ve viewed some of them already, and they’re full of movie clips, interviews, and information about all three Jurassic Park films.