10 CGI Movie Shots You Never Noticed
9. The Jeep - Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park truly is one of the all-time great marvels of Hollywood effects, and over 30 years since it first came out, it's lost little of its awe-striking lustre.
While of course the focal dinosaurs were achieved through a mixture of practical animatronics and VFX wizardry, there's one shot which has way more CGI going on than you surely noticed.
After the T-rex turns over the Ford Explorer jeep containing Tim (Joseph Mazzello) and Lex (Ariana Richards), it continues to attack the jeep while trying to get to a terrified Tim and Lex who are attempting to escape through the back window.
Most surely assumed that this was achieved by practically shooting the jeep being jostled around with wires and then adding in the dinosaur digitally, but that's not giving the magicians at Industrial Light and Magic nearly enough credit.
As it turns out, the jeep was also an entirely digital asset, while the stunt performers for Tim and Lex also shot their performances on a blue screen, which were then composited inside the jeep.
Basically, the only thing that's "real" in this shot is the background - the dinosaur, jeep, and humans were all added in later.
And yet, it's an astonishingly believable effect, especially for 1993, with ILM smartly helping sell the illusion through the scene's dark lighting and cover of rain. Incredible.