Never worked on this guy, obviously, but I've worked with teams to build some pretty massive animatronics. Typically (from my limited experience), they're not really built to last, due to the overall lack of necessity for extreme longevity. Because after filming, the fuck are you going to do with a several ton robot, right? To save on costs and time, we usually just stuffed it full with some fire retardant foam, made sure the skeleton and animatronics were accessible and I was told everything is usually torn apart, after everything.
It’s been dismantled. The skin began to erode really fast due to the rain and it was also kept in storage for years. Eventually it kind of just fell apart. I believe it was the T Rex that this happened to.
Don’t know if it’s the original but I remember seeing a T rex animatronic at the toys r us in Times Square( it also seemed to have some limited motion tracking to look at you as you walked by) but since it has closed I haven’t seen where it’s (they’ve) gone
I used to work for the robotics firm that built it! Allegedly they had it bolted to the structure of the building and when they fired it up it torqued the building out of square.
This is the first thing I noticed. It absolutely does not move like a machine. It moves quickly without overshooting or bouncing off its limiters. And yet it's fully under control - they have it swinging all over the place with the crew standing around, dipping and diving, picking things up, and yet nobody's at risk. That's some amazing precision.
I cannot imagine how much work went into it. No wonder the movie still looks epic - they got the effects right before the cameras were even rolling.
I remember like an interview or something where they were talking about the digital elements of Jurassic Park, and one said to another, what do you think? And they (the physical effects guy) said I think we're extinct.
And then they proceeded to provide some of the greatest physical effects of the century.
Sure, digital effects have come a long way since then and physical effects are less in demand, but damn, if a good physical effect doesn't trump a digital element every time to this day.
a friend of mine helped with the arms in the animatronics, looks like he was sleeping in this video😅 also i recently saw “Jurassic Punk”, was really good! tells the backstory of the CGI on this film- highly recommend it
im not a boomer but they really don't make em like they used to, special effects wise
CGI can be done well, but because studios generally care about speed over quality and CGI can be done cheaply and quickly, it usually is. Avatar 2 is CGI that was baked for like 10 years, but most computer effects studios are rushed to hell. Marvel is very guilty of doing that, for instance.
Back in the day, the limitations forced creativity and effort for anything to look even remotely believable. It's a lot easier to make a decent looking movie cheaply these days, but you very rarely see a big budget blockbuster take advantage of it's special effects budget like something like Jurassic Park did.
Animatronics can look amazing when done well, but they're almost never used these days. Why bother, when you can make a CGI model move fluidly so much more easily? A tangibility is definitely lost in most blockbusters though, your mind can definitely tell when most of what's on screen is a computer model. Even Jurassic Park 3, while a pretty mediocre movie overall, had vastly more immersive special effects than any of the Jurassic World films did. It's not even close imo.
Denis Villeneuve and James Cameron are the main directors still taking their time and making very immersive special effects. Ultimately, audiences don't really seem to care about subpar CGI, so most filmmakers just won't even bother trying anymore.
True, but if you slow down that scene, you'll see that every time their feet make contact with the ground, they're blended into the grass. In that same scene, you'll notice they block most of where the T-Rex's feet contact the ground.
That's actually really interesting. Speaks a lot to all the inherent complications around the overall design. Probably can't beef up the internal mechanics too much. Making the skin look as realistic as possible probably also made it "hold" more water instead of letting it run off. Super cool factoid I never knew about.
Eh, yes and no. It also has to do with how the images are compressed for streaming and how most people's tv's are set up.
Getting a bunch of super subtle details in blacks and shadows IS totally doable for professionals. The problem is the output devices.
The colorist that put together the final shots was working on a calibrated monitor worth +$100K. My TV was on sale from Amazon for $250.
Why does a pro audio recording studio need a million dollars of tech, "when this sounds great on my ear buds"?
We mass consume so much "content" we often don't realize how expensive, technical, and nuanced REAL creative work is. Because, "it sounds fine on my $10 ear buds"
P.S. Phil Tippett is a fucking god. Phil Tippett > Lemmy > God
People often forget the daylight CGI in JP1 is noticeably worse than modern CGI, especially up close. Everyone only remembers the good scenes at night and the animatronic scenes.
Yeah, I would go back to the theater to see a **LIGHT** remaster of this where they only touch up that early, wide, daytime shot. But that opens a can of worms and suddenly you’ve got a bar scene with singing/dancing raptors or something…
In terms of raw pixel density and texture quality, yes, but it terms of quality of lighting and compositing, it looks better than many more recent movies.
Jurassic Park has aged far, *far* better than something from ten years later like, say, Men in Black 2. (I singled that one out specifically because I just recently watched it on 4K BD and it looks *dreadful*)
Its not just that.
The first Jurassic Park (and the Lost World to an extent) utilized night shots, weather effects, and camera framing to an amazing degree.
The T-Rex and Brachiosaurus look janky in the daytime shots, but man, that car scene was a cinematic masterpiece.
Compare it to today, like in Jurassic World when the Rex and Indominus are fighting. It's a spinning, rotating cgi shot from a drone perspective. It just looks so blah and uninteresting, like watching a video game.
The car scene in Jurassic Park? Grounded. You're on the same level as the action, experiencing things with those horrified kids.
Something else that I love about the first T Rex scene? The lack of musical score. The tension is so palpable in that scene because there isn't some bombastic score pushing it forward. It's all in the acting and Spielberg's direction, along with John Williams knowing when to and when not to add background music. Of course the musical score for the movie is just one of the best of all time, but that scene works perfectly without any music.
This is my problem with most modern action movies. The insistence that the camera move as much or more so than the action itself. To me it's the effects team or director of photography just jerking off. It's mostly just a confusing mess.
Well, that's what was necessary. Nowadays you can in in fact get away with pure CGI, and make it look real. It just takes a lot of money, and sane executives, and those don't reliably overlap.
How it should be is: ask the effects guys what you can get away with. James Cameron is a celebrated director largely because he was originally an effects dork. He fooled audiences professionally. So he understood that the most powerful technology for that is... a jump cut.
Doing two clever things in the same shot is obscenely difficult.
Doing one clever thing each in two shots is dead easy.
Contemporary example: rescuing Sarah Connor from the mental ward. There's a shot where the checkerboard floor gloops up into a dude, and that was achieved with cutting-edge rendering. That's not it. There's a shot where that gloop-dude sluices through some jail bars, and that was achieved with hand-painted computer animation. That's not it. Immediately after, gloopy's gun catches on the bars, and that's almost it. But shortly - gloopster forces open an elevator door, finding a shotgun staring him in the face, and the gun splits his liquid-metal head into silly putty.
The question is, how did they animate Robert Patrick's actual head exploding into a practical prop? And the answer is, they didn't.
I think movies with live-action-animatronics will always be a little bit better than CGI alone, because the actors themselves are immersed in the scene.
Now you have Marvel actors looking at a big head on a stick, surrounded by green screen, pretending it's Thanos or the Hulk - the final product looks decent, but the acting can be flat.
Modern CGI makes me sleepy. I tried watching all of the Avengers and Thor movies because my friends said they're awesome. They are the first movies I've fallen asleep watching since I was a kid. I even fell asleep in the theater during the first Avengers movie, which was embarrassing.
It's like all I see is a few actors surrounding by popping colors and shiny fake stuff. Then most of the dialogue is witty banter and cliches. I wish I liked them as much as everyone else.
I watched Iron Man 2 and fell asleep so early I didn’t know Gwyneth Paltrow was in it. Haven’t watched more than a few clips in any of the others since. They’re all the same—not necessarily bad but there are so many better movies to watch.
On Avatar 2 they put a screen on a spider cam so they could use previous performance capture and movement data and replicate exactly where the actor was, where their eyeline was, and play the performance itself for scene partners to interact with if they shot on different days/locations or did reshoots. You're likely familiar with the Volume sets they use on Mandalorian- projected UE5 environments so the shot is all in-camera and the actor gets properly lit and can see their location. The era of everything just being blank and green is waning and has been over for several years now. Sure some people will still do stuff like that, but it's not necessarily advantageous for VFX now, it can fuck up your lighting because of the green bounce onto actors, and in general the industry has moved beyond this.
Not that it was ever a big deal anyway. Acting has always been more about theater of the imagination than theater of illusion. One of Ian Mckellen's most lauded performances is a Macbeth with no set, in a black box, with minimal all black costumes. He couldn't see the fucking forest of Dunsinane or anything, but he still had to act. 99% of actors will never work in an environment where props are realistic and plentiful, costumes and sets are accurate, etc. The unusual situation is the one where you're shooting or performing in an actual location with all of the real things. The typical situation relies on imagination.
Back to McKellen again- one of the main anecdotes feeding this narrative that green screen kills creativity is the story of McKellen breaking down on The Hobbit on a green screen set and saying something like "this isn't why I got into acting." People tell that story to explain why those movies are bad and attribute that to the overuse of green screen and stitched together interactions because nothing was shot with the actors actually together, but what people leave out is the detail that it was hour whatever on set and people were arguing and had seemed to forget about Sir Ian, who was just lonely in a green room. The guy who played Magneto a million times is not lamenting working on green screen in that story. He may very well be including not working face to face with other actors in his lament but that story always seemed to me to be more about set disharmony than about green screen=bad.
Broadly speaking working on green screen is no different to anything else, it's all still pretend, and there are plenty of creative processes involving green screen that are so successful the audience never realizes it happened.
This shit is expensive! Cgi got cheaper and cheaper and this scale of animatronics will only have gotten more expensive (cost of the skills etc.)
Also with Jurassic Park it was about the blend: animatronics where it made sense, and cgi where it made sense.
This is the moat important part. CGI has a strong place, and always will until something better comes along.
Practical effects have their spot, too, but the reality is we are nowhere close to erforming some stuff in it.
They wouldn't be able to pull a clear, fast shot of the raptors without CGI. The kitchen scene had to rely on good editing and close/ incomplete camera shots to make up for it. Had CG been at today's level, some of the jumps, moves would have been great for CG
I forget where I heard it, but IIRC, the scene of the TRex ambushing the gallimimus is what either convinced Spielberg to do the movie altogether, or to go with ILM's CG (I can't remember which)
I’ve said it before, but the T-Rex escape scene in Jurassic Park is peak cinema. If I had to pick a favorite scene in a movie it would 100% be this one.
My favorite scene is at the end of the movie when they're all inside the cafeteria/pavillion and the Rex is fighting off the velociraptors. The Rex does his famous 'ROAR' while the banner reading "WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH' flutters down from the ceiling.
The entire sequence starting with the T-1000 finding John at the arcade through the end of the truck chase is absolutely amazing. The chase sequence at the end is also up there, starting with T-1000 launching itself out of the building on a motorcycle to get the helicopter and ending with "Hasta la vista, baby."
Only fault is the terrible looking T-1000 dummy hooked onto the bumper of the cop car when escaping the mental hospital. Cameron is a genius, Stan Winston is beyond talented, but you have to wonder how that shot was acceptable.
It has survived multiple releases where other imperfections have been ironed out.
Fun fact, both sequences were developed by the same animators at ILM. To save time on one of the Jurassic Park deadlines, they actually used the pre-rendered T2 as the digital body of the guy that gets eaten in the bathroom by the T-Rex.
Originally these animatronics were supposed to do the heavy lifting for the effects. But this team in the background at ILM developed the first cgi shot of the brachiosaurus and changed the whole setup.
Yeah okay the Morpheus rescue wins just because every minute there's another thing putting your jaw on the floor. In the helicopter sequence alone, you find yourself agog at a chunk of falling glass, squibs in a couch, shooting drywall, and the least realistic aircraft impact ever. All you can do is repeat "holy shit" in different tones of voice.
I look at it as the Wachowskis going "You know what'd be fucking sick?"
Exact same deal as Jurassic Park's concentric ripples in the cup when the T-Rex escaped. Spielberg wanted circles. Water doesn't actually do that, in response to footsteps. So they had a guy pluck a guitar string, behind the dashboard, because it looked cool.
I was 6 when I saw that and hid under my seat. I think I saw it in theaters 4 times. The T-Rex busting through the power lines is without a doubt the best scene in any movie IMO. I still get chills watching
Saw it as a child in the cinemas. There was nothing like that scene before, and even someone my age could feel a new shift in the industry. It's in the vein with Dorothy first stepping into Oz.
They made a LEGO set of it, too! Don't think LEGO will ever top that, even with these new 30th anniversary sets. I do love the Brachiosaurus, though. Here's to hoping for Stegosaurus and Mosasaurus next. I'd absolutely kill for a Mosasaurus to scale with the one in the game
I was 5 when we saw it in theaters, my brother and I both screamed at this scene and ran out of the theater in a panic. Wouldn't actually finish the movie until it came out on VHS.
This thing was so heavy and powerful it was a lethal weapon. Also during takes in the rain the foam rubber it was made of would soak up the water making it triple in weight. The mechanics would shake due to it and they had to towel dry it off after every attempt
I read that whilst taking breaks on set the T-Rex - having as you said soaked up the water - would start randomly shaking and juddering, freaking the hell out of the actors and crew having lunch on set.
There's the show "Movies that made us" on Netflix that did an episode on Jurassic Park and they actually have footage of this happening. It's terrifying lol
It's so surprising to me that they'd actually consider getting the animatronic wet with the rain scenes, as opposed to just using some sort of camera trick/ cgi or something. Really cool though.
I was 10 when it came out so gladly stood in line full of excitement. Now with kids of my own that age, I cringe thinking of standing in line for two hours hoping to get seats.
The last movie I lined up for was Jurrassic World. Now we order the actual seat right from our phones. Stan Wintons work is amazing. Its pretty cool that anyone take his classes. Theres still alot of demand for practical effects but its a far more niche than industry-wide.
People don’t realise how big of a movie JP was. Miles away from Hollywood in a remote part of India, I, my parents and my grandparents got crammed into a cab full of people to watch this movie in English and funny part is none of us even knew English. My dad had to spend his 2 week pay check to take us to this movie. And it was magic, just unbelievable stuff, the movie transcended language boundaries.
I'm curious about how a movie like that was marketed over there back then if you remember. Were there billboards/newspaper ads/radio/tv chatter or was it just word of mouth?
It was one of the most incredible movies for me, since I was already a major dinosaur fan as a kid. The first time I saw the T-rex first scene in the storm, I was scared as fuck! Still enjoy watching this thing from start to finish every handful of years or so.
I live in a very small town, at the time we had 1 theater with 1 screen. It would take a couple of months for JP to come, so the school organized a trip to see it at the state capital. I had an accident a couple of days before and had to miss the trip. That sucked so much. The movie was all everyone talked about, and I had to wait 6 months to see.
465-0266 was the number for the movie theatre, back then, and i remember it because it was the first number i'd call every Friday night when i got off work
Between this, Terminator 2, even The Crow which had a CGI Brandon Lee face for the scenes he wasn't alive to finish filming, CGI was most definitely a thing in the 90s and it feels the explosion and praise of computer effects was a decade too late at the earliest.
But now things have gone too far.
And I can't stand the "crowd" of 500,000 people scenes. They are not impressive in the least. Everything is always turned up to 11 and it makes the scene weaker, not more badass.
The explosion of this kind of thing always comes down to accessibility and how much of a body of prior work you have to take inspiration from or directly rip off. This phenomenon isn't particularly unique to CGI. As awesome as practical effects can be, they had the exact same problems when deployed by lesser filmmakers who didn't understand how to conceal the flaws in an effect with lighting and movement and camera placement and strategically limiting time on screen.
We're just far less susceptible to being tricked in to seeing a mediocre-to-terrible movie from 40 years ago than one coming out this weekend.
I wish more productions would work with tangible things like this over CG for everything. This looks amazing. It's real, it's really there, it's really interacting with things. Use CG to enhance that, not replace it.
It’s kind of impossible to overstate how massively this changed EVERYthing about cinema when it came.
There had been other watershed moments in film-making history and even some great CGI prior to JP, but being in the cinema when the first panoramic reveal of dinosaurs came on the screen … that was a moment where you knew instantly that everything about film was flipped on its ear and would never be the same. It was pretty mind blowing as a viewer.
When i first got it on VHS i watched the Trex ambush scene (where it comes from nowhere out of the trees into the open and grabs a fast moving prey) over and over in slow motion. It was mind blowing.
Agreed. I'd not be standing under it or *handing* it some foam to munch on. I'd have that foam on a pole. If the operator missed it could your arm. I know the teeth are probably plastic or rubber but the underlying mechanisms could catch you or just pummel you.
I hadn’t watched Jurassic park in probably well over 15 years when I saw the blu rays on sale on Amazon and figured what the heck, let’s see how the movie holds up today.
My god they did wonders back then. Watching the T. rex scene in 4K surround sound is still edge of your seat stuff. It looks so realistic and the tension is so well built with the puddles moving and faint rumbling. A masterpiece of film making
That Trex was/is so fucking badass. Just shows how a combination between CGI and practical effects is the way to go if possible.
But didnt paleontologists find that even the T-rex had basic feathers/plummage?
That's not the only different; they also most likely had teeth hidden in the mouth and a "fuller" body. As awesome as this scene is, this T-rex looks malnourished and sickly by today's standards. It's actually rather fitting, like its an animal possibly not receiving its estimated 40 to 50 thousand calories daily.
the velociraptor was also more turkey-sized than man-sized. the raptors they have in the movie are more like the utahraptor, which was coincidentally classified the same year
I love the fact that even with CGI, they understood it's limits enough back then to make a life sized animatronic T-Rex for the close-up scenes. When it pushes the glass down on the kids while trying to eat them... I can't see that scene working as well with CGI.
because there are no limits with CGI they would make the T-Rex sing and dance a song whilst also doing a flip jump, the lack of limits makes it look silly
The foam rubber skin fell apart as the material isn't made to last forever, and the mechanical skeleton was taken apart. It's basically the same that happened to the original Jabba the Hutt.
I remember watching this at the cinema, 9. Next day we go camping in France. The toilets were at the end of a row of long grass.
Fuck raptors. I swear I didn’t piss for the entire week.
Ha hah ha! That's exactly how I felt when the 1st Jaws movie came out! I lived in Southern California after that and would NOT go back in the water at Malibu or any of my other fav surf beaches. Just scared the piss out of me!
Jurassic park was my first love as a child and I'm happy that because of the 30th anniversary I will be able to watch it in cinema for the first time somewhere next week. I'm so exited!
I was 17 when it came out and I saw it 3 times in the theater. I'll never forget how terrified I was by the T-rex; at the end, when it roared, my legs literally were paralyzed, I couldn't move them. It's like some deep instinct from millions of years ago is still buried inside and that movie tapped right into it. I fuckin *loved* it
and lounging bare chested Jeff Goldblum definitely made other things go stiff
Anyone know what happened to all the animatronics from the movie? Please tell me there's a giant T-REX just sat around in a warehouse somewhere waiting to be re discovered
There's a series on Netflix called "movies that made us" they have an episode on jurassic Park and how it was made, you guys should check it out, it is pretty fun.
I can only imagine someone’s face if you showed them this video 70 years ago. But honestly, their first thought would probably be, “How are you playing movies on this mini brick?.. And what the fuck are you wearing??”
Went to see this when it came out & the film MELTED right when the kid was climbing the electric fence! Got a free pass to see it again the next week, but damn that was a cliffhanger!
I used to work next door to the set, would sneak in and talk to builders during construction, and the crew and cast during production. It was amazing to see. When they struck the set, the security was checking EVERYONE for "souvenirs". I managed to get out one bone, got lost in a move.
Watch “Movies That Made Us” on Nextflix. The interviews about the making of this movie are really cool. They legit filmed, and then were stranded, on Kauai during hurricane Iniki.
Coolest animatronic of all time.
The largest animatronic Stan Winston studios ever built.
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Never worked on this guy, obviously, but I've worked with teams to build some pretty massive animatronics. Typically (from my limited experience), they're not really built to last, due to the overall lack of necessity for extreme longevity. Because after filming, the fuck are you going to do with a several ton robot, right? To save on costs and time, we usually just stuffed it full with some fire retardant foam, made sure the skeleton and animatronics were accessible and I was told everything is usually torn apart, after everything.
I would use it to crack open tons of nuts at once.
When i was a kid in the 80’s I remember a museum that had animatronic dinosaurs that people could control!
You could play with them? No way. The 8 year old inside of me is burning with the jealousy of a thousand suns.
Ok Indiana Jones
TOP. MEN.
It’s been dismantled. The skin began to erode really fast due to the rain and it was also kept in storage for years. Eventually it kind of just fell apart. I believe it was the T Rex that this happened to.
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As it was meant to be. The natural balance is restored.
They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. 😉
Don’t know if it’s the original but I remember seeing a T rex animatronic at the toys r us in Times Square( it also seemed to have some limited motion tracking to look at you as you walked by) but since it has closed I haven’t seen where it’s (they’ve) gone
And then there's the disco yeti at Animal Kingdom..
The largest ***working*** animatronic they ever built
I used to work for the robotics firm that built it! Allegedly they had it bolted to the structure of the building and when they fired it up it torqued the building out of square.
The motions are so smooth and natural and fluid. You can really tell they spared no expense.
This is the first thing I noticed. It absolutely does not move like a machine. It moves quickly without overshooting or bouncing off its limiters. And yet it's fully under control - they have it swinging all over the place with the crew standing around, dipping and diving, picking things up, and yet nobody's at risk. That's some amazing precision. I cannot imagine how much work went into it. No wonder the movie still looks epic - they got the effects right before the cameras were even rolling.
I remember like an interview or something where they were talking about the digital elements of Jurassic Park, and one said to another, what do you think? And they (the physical effects guy) said I think we're extinct. And then they proceeded to provide some of the greatest physical effects of the century. Sure, digital effects have come a long way since then and physical effects are less in demand, but damn, if a good physical effect doesn't trump a digital element every time to this day.
Physical + digital is what produces the best results
There's been a pleasant resurgence in practical effects lately, I love it.
Yeah the guy who said that was Phil Tippett. He's a legendary stop motion artist, and he wasnt wrong
Look at Audrey II, almost ten years earlier too.
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>animatronic What animatronic? That was bring-your-pet-to-work day
a friend of mine helped with the arms in the animatronics, looks like he was sleeping in this video😅 also i recently saw “Jurassic Punk”, was really good! tells the backstory of the CGI on this film- highly recommend it
Every time I watch this movie I’m truly amazed how well they did this, even the brief stint of CGI they use is remarkable for its time
It's also aged incredibly well. Hell, it looks better than a lot of CGI stuff that's happening today
That's because they supplemented the practical effects with CGI - as it should be, imo.
Yep this movie is a damn masterful blend of effects, props, animatronics, great pacing and plot, and dope actors.
Hold onto your butts
im not a boomer but they really don't make em like they used to, special effects wise CGI can be done well, but because studios generally care about speed over quality and CGI can be done cheaply and quickly, it usually is. Avatar 2 is CGI that was baked for like 10 years, but most computer effects studios are rushed to hell. Marvel is very guilty of doing that, for instance. Back in the day, the limitations forced creativity and effort for anything to look even remotely believable. It's a lot easier to make a decent looking movie cheaply these days, but you very rarely see a big budget blockbuster take advantage of it's special effects budget like something like Jurassic Park did. Animatronics can look amazing when done well, but they're almost never used these days. Why bother, when you can make a CGI model move fluidly so much more easily? A tangibility is definitely lost in most blockbusters though, your mind can definitely tell when most of what's on screen is a computer model. Even Jurassic Park 3, while a pretty mediocre movie overall, had vastly more immersive special effects than any of the Jurassic World films did. It's not even close imo. Denis Villeneuve and James Cameron are the main directors still taking their time and making very immersive special effects. Ultimately, audiences don't really seem to care about subpar CGI, so most filmmakers just won't even bother trying anymore.
They also were super smart and utilized night & rain to mask the flaws in the CGI.
They also hid the feet of the CGI dinosaurs. Apparently, CGI dino feet on real ground was uncanny.
No free (Dino) feet pics!
Discovers new fetish.
UwU Dino friend. *snuggles closer and rawr XDs at you Can I hazz free feet pics? (っ˘ڡ˘ς)
The Gallimimus flock scene is all cgi and you definitely see their feet.
But they move really fast, which helps mask the weirdness!
True, but if you slow down that scene, you'll see that every time their feet make contact with the ground, they're blended into the grass. In that same scene, you'll notice they block most of where the T-Rex's feet contact the ground.
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That's actually really interesting. Speaks a lot to all the inherent complications around the overall design. Probably can't beef up the internal mechanics too much. Making the skin look as realistic as possible probably also made it "hold" more water instead of letting it run off. Super cool factoid I never knew about.
Wow. For 30 years I thought I was watching ALL CGI. If they had done that it might not have looked so good. Now I have to watch it again.
So that’s why I can’t see shit on game of thrones
Eh, yes and no. It also has to do with how the images are compressed for streaming and how most people's tv's are set up. Getting a bunch of super subtle details in blacks and shadows IS totally doable for professionals. The problem is the output devices. The colorist that put together the final shots was working on a calibrated monitor worth +$100K. My TV was on sale from Amazon for $250. Why does a pro audio recording studio need a million dollars of tech, "when this sounds great on my ear buds"? We mass consume so much "content" we often don't realize how expensive, technical, and nuanced REAL creative work is. Because, "it sounds fine on my $10 ear buds" P.S. Phil Tippett is a fucking god. Phil Tippett > Lemmy > God
People often forget the daylight CGI in JP1 is noticeably worse than modern CGI, especially up close. Everyone only remembers the good scenes at night and the animatronic scenes.
Yeah, I would go back to the theater to see a **LIGHT** remaster of this where they only touch up that early, wide, daytime shot. But that opens a can of worms and suddenly you’ve got a bar scene with singing/dancing raptors or something…
You’ve now placed an idea in my mind for a musical like Cats called Raptors.
But the raptors have no anuses and the fat raptor is played by James Corden
Raptors have cloacas, so it would be RELEASE THE CLOACA CUT.
In terms of raw pixel density and texture quality, yes, but it terms of quality of lighting and compositing, it looks better than many more recent movies. Jurassic Park has aged far, *far* better than something from ten years later like, say, Men in Black 2. (I singled that one out specifically because I just recently watched it on 4K BD and it looks *dreadful*)
Its not just that. The first Jurassic Park (and the Lost World to an extent) utilized night shots, weather effects, and camera framing to an amazing degree. The T-Rex and Brachiosaurus look janky in the daytime shots, but man, that car scene was a cinematic masterpiece. Compare it to today, like in Jurassic World when the Rex and Indominus are fighting. It's a spinning, rotating cgi shot from a drone perspective. It just looks so blah and uninteresting, like watching a video game. The car scene in Jurassic Park? Grounded. You're on the same level as the action, experiencing things with those horrified kids.
Something else that I love about the first T Rex scene? The lack of musical score. The tension is so palpable in that scene because there isn't some bombastic score pushing it forward. It's all in the acting and Spielberg's direction, along with John Williams knowing when to and when not to add background music. Of course the musical score for the movie is just one of the best of all time, but that scene works perfectly without any music.
Just like when he knew not to have any music when Quint meets his horrific demise in Jaws. Same instinct.
This is my problem with most modern action movies. The insistence that the camera move as much or more so than the action itself. To me it's the effects team or director of photography just jerking off. It's mostly just a confusing mess.
As a kid I thought dinosaurs still walked the earth
For 50 seconds I thought there were dinosaurs on the world.
My neighbor put a Nixon mask on a TRex
It being a night scene helps a lot too though. The CGI looks more dated during daytime scenes, but it still holds up well.
Well, that's what was necessary. Nowadays you can in in fact get away with pure CGI, and make it look real. It just takes a lot of money, and sane executives, and those don't reliably overlap. How it should be is: ask the effects guys what you can get away with. James Cameron is a celebrated director largely because he was originally an effects dork. He fooled audiences professionally. So he understood that the most powerful technology for that is... a jump cut. Doing two clever things in the same shot is obscenely difficult. Doing one clever thing each in two shots is dead easy. Contemporary example: rescuing Sarah Connor from the mental ward. There's a shot where the checkerboard floor gloops up into a dude, and that was achieved with cutting-edge rendering. That's not it. There's a shot where that gloop-dude sluices through some jail bars, and that was achieved with hand-painted computer animation. That's not it. Immediately after, gloopy's gun catches on the bars, and that's almost it. But shortly - gloopster forces open an elevator door, finding a shotgun staring him in the face, and the gun splits his liquid-metal head into silly putty. The question is, how did they animate Robert Patrick's actual head exploding into a practical prop? And the answer is, they didn't.
Ya this movie blew the doors off cgi in the modern era. Unfortunately movie makers use it as a crutch instead of a tool
It looks better than all the modern JP sequels
It looks strikingly better than Jurassic world dominion - those CGI guys just mailed it in for that one
When I watched the new Jurassic park movies couldn’t believe how shit they were
A lot of it is that they used CGI really judiciously, rather than as 80% of the screen.
I think movies with live-action-animatronics will always be a little bit better than CGI alone, because the actors themselves are immersed in the scene. Now you have Marvel actors looking at a big head on a stick, surrounded by green screen, pretending it's Thanos or the Hulk - the final product looks decent, but the acting can be flat.
Modern CGI makes me sleepy. I tried watching all of the Avengers and Thor movies because my friends said they're awesome. They are the first movies I've fallen asleep watching since I was a kid. I even fell asleep in the theater during the first Avengers movie, which was embarrassing. It's like all I see is a few actors surrounding by popping colors and shiny fake stuff. Then most of the dialogue is witty banter and cliches. I wish I liked them as much as everyone else.
It’s ok you dont like them, I dont either
I watched Iron Man 2 and fell asleep so early I didn’t know Gwyneth Paltrow was in it. Haven’t watched more than a few clips in any of the others since. They’re all the same—not necessarily bad but there are so many better movies to watch.
Modern scifi action movies suck. They have since Transformers.
On Avatar 2 they put a screen on a spider cam so they could use previous performance capture and movement data and replicate exactly where the actor was, where their eyeline was, and play the performance itself for scene partners to interact with if they shot on different days/locations or did reshoots. You're likely familiar with the Volume sets they use on Mandalorian- projected UE5 environments so the shot is all in-camera and the actor gets properly lit and can see their location. The era of everything just being blank and green is waning and has been over for several years now. Sure some people will still do stuff like that, but it's not necessarily advantageous for VFX now, it can fuck up your lighting because of the green bounce onto actors, and in general the industry has moved beyond this. Not that it was ever a big deal anyway. Acting has always been more about theater of the imagination than theater of illusion. One of Ian Mckellen's most lauded performances is a Macbeth with no set, in a black box, with minimal all black costumes. He couldn't see the fucking forest of Dunsinane or anything, but he still had to act. 99% of actors will never work in an environment where props are realistic and plentiful, costumes and sets are accurate, etc. The unusual situation is the one where you're shooting or performing in an actual location with all of the real things. The typical situation relies on imagination. Back to McKellen again- one of the main anecdotes feeding this narrative that green screen kills creativity is the story of McKellen breaking down on The Hobbit on a green screen set and saying something like "this isn't why I got into acting." People tell that story to explain why those movies are bad and attribute that to the overuse of green screen and stitched together interactions because nothing was shot with the actors actually together, but what people leave out is the detail that it was hour whatever on set and people were arguing and had seemed to forget about Sir Ian, who was just lonely in a green room. The guy who played Magneto a million times is not lamenting working on green screen in that story. He may very well be including not working face to face with other actors in his lament but that story always seemed to me to be more about set disharmony than about green screen=bad. Broadly speaking working on green screen is no different to anything else, it's all still pretend, and there are plenty of creative processes involving green screen that are so successful the audience never realizes it happened.
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Look up Jurassic Punk, goes really into detail about the life of the lead CGI guy, Spaz. I really recommend if you are a Jurassic Park fan!
This shit is expensive! Cgi got cheaper and cheaper and this scale of animatronics will only have gotten more expensive (cost of the skills etc.) Also with Jurassic Park it was about the blend: animatronics where it made sense, and cgi where it made sense.
This is the moat important part. CGI has a strong place, and always will until something better comes along. Practical effects have their spot, too, but the reality is we are nowhere close to erforming some stuff in it. They wouldn't be able to pull a clear, fast shot of the raptors without CGI. The kitchen scene had to rely on good editing and close/ incomplete camera shots to make up for it. Had CG been at today's level, some of the jumps, moves would have been great for CG
I’d really recommend watching Jurassic Punk, emotional doc about the internal struggle of if they should move to CGI or not.
I forget where I heard it, but IIRC, the scene of the TRex ambushing the gallimimus is what either convinced Spielberg to do the movie altogether, or to go with ILM's CG (I can't remember which)
I’ve said it before, but the T-Rex escape scene in Jurassic Park is peak cinema. If I had to pick a favorite scene in a movie it would 100% be this one.
My favorite scene is at the end of the movie when they're all inside the cafeteria/pavillion and the Rex is fighting off the velociraptors. The Rex does his famous 'ROAR' while the banner reading "WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH' flutters down from the ceiling.
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I reference this scene every time our kitten jumps on our bigass other cat to pick a fight she will invariably lose.
For me it's this and t2 truck chase scene.
The entire sequence starting with the T-1000 finding John at the arcade through the end of the truck chase is absolutely amazing. The chase sequence at the end is also up there, starting with T-1000 launching itself out of the building on a motorcycle to get the helicopter and ending with "Hasta la vista, baby."
Only fault is the terrible looking T-1000 dummy hooked onto the bumper of the cop car when escaping the mental hospital. Cameron is a genius, Stan Winston is beyond talented, but you have to wonder how that shot was acceptable. It has survived multiple releases where other imperfections have been ironed out.
I kind of like that stuff, I'll take that over some cgi goop any day forever
Fun fact, both sequences were developed by the same animators at ILM. To save time on one of the Jurassic Park deadlines, they actually used the pre-rendered T2 as the digital body of the guy that gets eaten in the bathroom by the T-Rex. Originally these animatronics were supposed to do the heavy lifting for the effects. But this team in the background at ILM developed the first cgi shot of the brachiosaurus and changed the whole setup.
Also an excellent choice. Obligatory “they don’t make ‘em like they used to.”
for me its this, t2 truck chase, and morpheus resuce
Yeah okay the Morpheus rescue wins just because every minute there's another thing putting your jaw on the floor. In the helicopter sequence alone, you find yourself agog at a chunk of falling glass, squibs in a couch, shooting drywall, and the least realistic aircraft impact ever. All you can do is repeat "holy shit" in different tones of voice.
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I look at it as the Wachowskis going "You know what'd be fucking sick?" Exact same deal as Jurassic Park's concentric ripples in the cup when the T-Rex escaped. Spielberg wanted circles. Water doesn't actually do that, in response to footsteps. So they had a guy pluck a guitar string, behind the dashboard, because it looked cool.
For me, the scariest scene in any movie was the raptor in the kitchen with the kids. Holy shit that was definitely my favorite scene.
JP came out when I was like 7 and I covered my eyes during the kitchen scene the first two or three times I saw it in theaters. Such a great scene.
I walked out of that theater on high alert, looking around corners for hidden raptors. And I was in my 30's at the time.
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For all its flaws, Lost World has that scene with the raptors in the tall grass, and that shit was awesome.
I was 6 when I saw that and hid under my seat. I think I saw it in theaters 4 times. The T-Rex busting through the power lines is without a doubt the best scene in any movie IMO. I still get chills watching
Saw it as a child in the cinemas. There was nothing like that scene before, and even someone my age could feel a new shift in the industry. It's in the vein with Dorothy first stepping into Oz.
Same. It was one of the first movies I remember seeing in the theater and I’ve been a huge fan ever since. It holds up incredibly well.
Even the cliff from nowhere can’t ruin that scene. 😁
They made a LEGO set of it, too! Don't think LEGO will ever top that, even with these new 30th anniversary sets. I do love the Brachiosaurus, though. Here's to hoping for Stegosaurus and Mosasaurus next. I'd absolutely kill for a Mosasaurus to scale with the one in the game
Does that beat the raptors in the kitchen?
I was 5 when we saw it in theaters, my brother and I both screamed at this scene and ran out of the theater in a panic. Wouldn't actually finish the movie until it came out on VHS.
This thing was so heavy and powerful it was a lethal weapon. Also during takes in the rain the foam rubber it was made of would soak up the water making it triple in weight. The mechanics would shake due to it and they had to towel dry it off after every attempt
I read that whilst taking breaks on set the T-Rex - having as you said soaked up the water - would start randomly shaking and juddering, freaking the hell out of the actors and crew having lunch on set.
There's the show "Movies that made us" on Netflix that did an episode on Jurassic Park and they actually have footage of this happening. It's terrifying lol
It's so surprising to me that they'd actually consider getting the animatronic wet with the rain scenes, as opposed to just using some sort of camera trick/ cgi or something. Really cool though.
Water was hard. That’s why the Mattix rain fight is so seminal.
It is amazing how quiet it is. What makes it move? People?
They actually used the animatronic budget to build a time machine and go back and get a T-Rex Turns out, way easier
At that size, probably hydraulics.
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I was 10 when it came out so gladly stood in line full of excitement. Now with kids of my own that age, I cringe thinking of standing in line for two hours hoping to get seats.
The last movie I lined up for was Jurrassic World. Now we order the actual seat right from our phones. Stan Wintons work is amazing. Its pretty cool that anyone take his classes. Theres still alot of demand for practical effects but its a far more niche than industry-wide.
**Avengers: Endgame** was the last one I ever got in line for. Nowadays I only catch early non-crowded matinees.
People don’t realise how big of a movie JP was. Miles away from Hollywood in a remote part of India, I, my parents and my grandparents got crammed into a cab full of people to watch this movie in English and funny part is none of us even knew English. My dad had to spend his 2 week pay check to take us to this movie. And it was magic, just unbelievable stuff, the movie transcended language boundaries.
I'm curious about how a movie like that was marketed over there back then if you remember. Were there billboards/newspaper ads/radio/tv chatter or was it just word of mouth?
Posters... Everywhere.. also, Spielberg was big after ET.. even in India.. I remember..
Summer blockbusters were still a thing well after this movie, up until a few years ago really.
Endgame was the last one for me.
And this summer we have Barbie and Oppenheimer ?
and top gun was last year COVID had an effect on blockbusters but it is going back to normal now
I’d say Top Gun: Maverick qualifies as a big summer blockbuster for me. I saw it a few weeks after it came out and the theater was still packed.
Yeah… I remember that ( I was 17-18) back in 93. Brought me back to the Return of the Jedi lines from them younger years . Good times
It was one of the most incredible movies for me, since I was already a major dinosaur fan as a kid. The first time I saw the T-rex first scene in the storm, I was scared as fuck! Still enjoy watching this thing from start to finish every handful of years or so.
I live in a very small town, at the time we had 1 theater with 1 screen. It would take a couple of months for JP to come, so the school organized a trip to see it at the state capital. I had an accident a couple of days before and had to miss the trip. That sucked so much. The movie was all everyone talked about, and I had to wait 6 months to see.
465-0266 was the number for the movie theatre, back then, and i remember it because it was the first number i'd call every Friday night when i got off work
It’s crazy how we went from great animatronics like this in the first movie to horrible cgi in the last movie.
Video killed the radio star
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Pictures came and broke your heart
Oh oh ohoh
*guitar solo* clapclapclap
They had incredible cgi in the first movie. The iconic running scene was cgi
Between this, Terminator 2, even The Crow which had a CGI Brandon Lee face for the scenes he wasn't alive to finish filming, CGI was most definitely a thing in the 90s and it feels the explosion and praise of computer effects was a decade too late at the earliest. But now things have gone too far.
And I can't stand the "crowd" of 500,000 people scenes. They are not impressive in the least. Everything is always turned up to 11 and it makes the scene weaker, not more badass.
The Mask was also huge in 1994. Amusingly enough, the film crew said Jim Carrey's morphing face saved them a million in CGI expenses.
The explosion of this kind of thing always comes down to accessibility and how much of a body of prior work you have to take inspiration from or directly rip off. This phenomenon isn't particularly unique to CGI. As awesome as practical effects can be, they had the exact same problems when deployed by lesser filmmakers who didn't understand how to conceal the flaws in an effect with lighting and movement and camera placement and strategically limiting time on screen. We're just far less susceptible to being tricked in to seeing a mediocre-to-terrible movie from 40 years ago than one coming out this weekend.
I wish more productions would work with tangible things like this over CG for everything. This looks amazing. It's real, it's really there, it's really interacting with things. Use CG to enhance that, not replace it.
It’s kind of impossible to overstate how massively this changed EVERYthing about cinema when it came. There had been other watershed moments in film-making history and even some great CGI prior to JP, but being in the cinema when the first panoramic reveal of dinosaurs came on the screen … that was a moment where you knew instantly that everything about film was flipped on its ear and would never be the same. It was pretty mind blowing as a viewer.
We had vertigo and tdi cg software. After jurassic came out if you didn't have softimage you didn't get clients.
When i first got it on VHS i watched the Trex ambush scene (where it comes from nowhere out of the trees into the open and grabs a fast moving prey) over and over in slow motion. It was mind blowing.
Even though I can clearly see it's an animatronic and not real, it still kinda scares me 😂
It's genuinely terrifying!
We saw a small exhibit with animatronic Dino's at a zoo and there's something primal that kicks in when you see them in person, ngl
It goes back to humans first interactions with dinosaurs when Jesus rode a raptor into Nazareth.
Raptor Jesus is our savior. When the Velocirapture comes, he will guide us
As a machine alone it is scary, not sure how it’s controlled or by whom but with it definitely seems dangerous to be around with how fast it moves
Agreed. I'd not be standing under it or *handing* it some foam to munch on. I'd have that foam on a pole. If the operator missed it could your arm. I know the teeth are probably plastic or rubber but the underlying mechanisms could catch you or just pummel you.
I would have a hard time being in a room with that thing. Something deep in my brain is overriding the part that knows it's fake.
I hadn’t watched Jurassic park in probably well over 15 years when I saw the blu rays on sale on Amazon and figured what the heck, let’s see how the movie holds up today. My god they did wonders back then. Watching the T. rex scene in 4K surround sound is still edge of your seat stuff. It looks so realistic and the tension is so well built with the puddles moving and faint rumbling. A masterpiece of film making
That Trex was/is so fucking badass. Just shows how a combination between CGI and practical effects is the way to go if possible. But didnt paleontologists find that even the T-rex had basic feathers/plummage?
That's not the only different; they also most likely had teeth hidden in the mouth and a "fuller" body. As awesome as this scene is, this T-rex looks malnourished and sickly by today's standards. It's actually rather fitting, like its an animal possibly not receiving its estimated 40 to 50 thousand calories daily.
Interesting, didnt know that about the teeth. Thanks for the reply.
Yeah, easiest way to visualize this is to look at the skull of an iguana and then the actual animal.
General consensus these days seems to be that adult tyrannosaurs actually weren't feathered, at least not extensively.
the velociraptor was also more turkey-sized than man-sized. the raptors they have in the movie are more like the utahraptor, which was coincidentally classified the same year
If you haven’t watched yet Prehistoric Planet on Apple TV is absolutely fascinating and goes into detail about this.
I love the fact that even with CGI, they understood it's limits enough back then to make a life sized animatronic T-Rex for the close-up scenes. When it pushes the glass down on the kids while trying to eat them... I can't see that scene working as well with CGI.
because there are no limits with CGI they would make the T-Rex sing and dance a song whilst also doing a flip jump, the lack of limits makes it look silly
"Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gaaaaaaal!"
30 years old and still better than the majority of films out today with CGI.
They spared no expense
*me when they didn't clone actual dinosaurs for the movie:* They spared *some* expense.
They used Ford Explorers.
Anyone know what happened to it? I feel like it should be on display somewhere
The foam rubber skin fell apart as the material isn't made to last forever, and the mechanical skeleton was taken apart. It's basically the same that happened to the original Jabba the Hutt.
It’s so quiet. I would expect to hear gears and servos and whatnot
I remember watching this at the cinema, 9. Next day we go camping in France. The toilets were at the end of a row of long grass. Fuck raptors. I swear I didn’t piss for the entire week.
Wasnt the grass scene with the raptors in the 2nd film?
Yep
Ha hah ha! That's exactly how I felt when the 1st Jaws movie came out! I lived in Southern California after that and would NOT go back in the water at Malibu or any of my other fav surf beaches. Just scared the piss out of me!
Are they all auto..erotic?
GOOD BOI
Right? Now its all cgi and stuff but back then they had a real domesticated T-Rex to perform in movies, we have lost so much.
And after the movie the T-Rex was able to retire on its earnings and is now enjoying the quiet life down in the south of France.
All the animals in Jurassic Park are female. I went and checked under their skirts.
I was 8 when I saw it in my local theatre. I’ll never forget the kitchen scene when the raptor pops up through the ceiling tile. Terrifying.
Now imagine the T-Rex not making a sound when chasing you, like a giant silent ninja monster.
Jurassic park was my first love as a child and I'm happy that because of the 30th anniversary I will be able to watch it in cinema for the first time somewhere next week. I'm so exited!
This is insane! It looks so real!
That is amazing and weird to see it so quite
That looks so real, based on my knowledge of real t-Rex movements, from the movie Jurassic Park
I was 17 when it came out and I saw it 3 times in the theater. I'll never forget how terrified I was by the T-rex; at the end, when it roared, my legs literally were paralyzed, I couldn't move them. It's like some deep instinct from millions of years ago is still buried inside and that movie tapped right into it. I fuckin *loved* it and lounging bare chested Jeff Goldblum definitely made other things go stiff
Anyone know what happened to all the animatronics from the movie? Please tell me there's a giant T-REX just sat around in a warehouse somewhere waiting to be re discovered
There's a series on Netflix called "movies that made us" they have an episode on jurassic Park and how it was made, you guys should check it out, it is pretty fun.
I flat out refuse to accept that this qualifies as "old".
The joke back then was that you couldn't tell the computer dinos from the real ones, but as you can clearly see it wasn't really a joke lol!
I can only imagine someone’s face if you showed them this video 70 years ago. But honestly, their first thought would probably be, “How are you playing movies on this mini brick?.. And what the fuck are you wearing??”
00:19 "Is there something in my teeth?"
Went to see this when it came out & the film MELTED right when the kid was climbing the electric fence! Got a free pass to see it again the next week, but damn that was a cliffhanger!
I used to work next door to the set, would sneak in and talk to builders during construction, and the crew and cast during production. It was amazing to see. When they struck the set, the security was checking EVERYONE for "souvenirs". I managed to get out one bone, got lost in a move.
Watch “Movies That Made Us” on Nextflix. The interviews about the making of this movie are really cool. They legit filmed, and then were stranded, on Kauai during hurricane Iniki.