20 Mind-Blowing Facts About The Jurassic Park Franchise
14. Spielberg Knew Jurassic Park Would Change Movies Forever
When Spielberg agreed to bring the dinosaurs back from extinction, he knew that to call it a daunting task would be an exercise in understatement. He soon realised his original plans to create a host of animatronic dinosaurs to scale were beyond ambitious, so Spielberg put together a crack team of old-school talents and digital pioneers to solve the problem instead. FX legend Stan Winston and visual effects experts Phil Tippett and Michael Lantieri were recruited to oversee on-set practical effects while Dennis Muren of Industrial Light & Magic was charged with breaking new boundaries in CGI to render photoreal dinosaurs. Murens early tests were so impressive that Phil Tippett famously commented that he and his kind would soon be extinct, but the reality is the combined efforts and collective skill of the afore-mentioned experts helped Jurassic Park achieve a new high-water mark for visual effects. Still, Spielberg had already caught a glimpse of the CGI overkill that plagues modern moviemaking:
I don't think we can ring the death knell on production design this soon, but when the time comes where it will be more cost effective to create the sets in a computer as opposed to building the Roman Forum in practical scale, that's a day I will rue and mourn.
I watch movies and I watch sport. I also watch movies about sport, and if there were a sport about movies I'd watch that too. The internet was the closest thing I could find.
