To make his movie, Steven Spielberg first had to figure out how to bring dinosaurs to life. For audiences grown accustomed to his bedazzling cinematic trickery, a plodding Godzilla or wooden King Kong just wouldn’t do. Two years ago he called his old friends at ILM, the special-effects empire in Marin County, Calif., founded by George Lucas. The cautious consensus: go with conventional full-size robotic models and stop-motion miniatures that other companies specialized in. ILM would be left to create a few wide-angle stampede sequences, using the computer-graphics skills it pioneered in “Abyss” and “Terminator 2.”
Three months and a billion bytes later, ILM computers produced a 10-foot Gallimimus. Graphic artists inserted it moving against a photo of a green African landscape, which itself had been fed into the computer. Simulating the perspective of two cameras, they then replicated the Gallimimus 10 more times. Spielberg now had Hollywood’s first digital dinosaurs.
But one ILM renegade wanted more. Steve (Spaz) Williams, a 29-year-old computer animator, wanted a shot at creating Tyrannosaurus rex, the real star of “Jurassic Park.” He set off for his basement-level office-renowned for its bottles of Mylanta Double-Strength, bagpipes ablazing and a caged tarantula-to make a believable beast. Working on one of ILM’s 80 high-resolution Silicon Graphics supercomputers (only NASA has more), Williams came up with a close-up, 3-D, T-rex skeleton that thundered across the screen for 10 seconds in broad daylight, belly swaying and tail lifting. The effect was breathtaking but the process altogether mundane. Each T-rex bone had to be drawn, each step separately rendered. For two weeks Williams was part sculptor, part surgeon. " Nobody had tried this before," says the animator, whose Harley-Davidson, ’50s outfit and electronic gadgetry make him a cross between James Dean and Mr. Wizard. “Sweat is what did it.” The lead animator, Stephen Fangmeier, then fully clothed T-rex and brought it to life.
Spielberg was brought in to see the test. “He went nuts,” says Dennis Muren, who supervised the ILM work. “No longer were computer-generated images just a background distraction. They were the actual dinosaurs-living, breathing, totally real. You couldn’t believe a computer had done this. We all sensed we were witnessing cinematic history.” What made T-rex so extraordinary-unlike the computer-animated metal man in “Terminator 2”-was its skin, muscles, texture and range of people-eating motion that any self-respecting 20th-century dinosaur ought to have. Spielberg was so convinced that he cut back on using animatronic models, which were limited in mobility by gravity and mechanics. Spielberg also halted all plans for miniature puppets; ILM’s breakthrough had rendered stop-motion photography, which had been a key special-effects tool since “The Lost World” in 1925, extinct.
More than half of the dinosaur shots in “Jurassic Park” are the pigment of a computer’s imagination-including the most complicated chase scenes starring the T-rex and two Velociraptors with attitude. Even the torso of a human-OK, a lawyer-being thrashed around by T-rex is digitized. While the computer images take up only 6 1/2 minutes of the movie, they took 50 ILMers 18 months on $15 million worth of equipment to create. The last shots were completed two weeks ago. The quarter-trillion bytes of computer storage ILM needed are enough to gobble up the memory of all the PCs in a small town.
Computers give graphic artists digital putty to manipulate both real photographic images and those invented at the keyboard. Not only can dinosaurs be made to do things no 9,000-pound model could, but lighting and color can be corrected long after shooting is finished on the set; ILM’s own software makes 16.7 million different hues. Trouble is, the high-tech process is excruciatingly slow-akin to what cartoon animators go through to paint each frame individually, when every second contains 24 frames. High tech is actually much harder, since the computer images are supposed to look authentic. (After all, nobody’s supposed to think Bugs is a real bunny.) “We created life on a deadline and a budget,” says Williams. “Nobody gave God those limitations.”
Computers have not yet turned full-size models into, well, dinosaurs. In “Jurassic Park,” foam-and-steel models of a sickly Triceratops, a baby raptor and a T-rex all get screen time, courtesy of Stan Winston’s studio in Van Nuys, Calif. They’re especially effective in close-ups that last only a few seconds. When T-rex chomps down on a Ford Explorer, its horrible bite and the rain pelting its snout would have been a difficult effect for ILM. There were other times when Spielberg especially wanted a live creature on the set, so his actors didn’t have to imagine a dinosaur beside them.
While the movie world waits to see ILM’s newest feat, George Lucas dreams of an entire sound stage created by computers. The electronic lot would be a simple blue room in which actors performed. Indeed, a few at ILM see the day when the performers themselves will be computer inventions. How much can the digital wonderboys fool an audience? “I don’t know what the wall is,” Muren says. “The only limit may be the imagination.
