Student:
Student Number:
Alexander Cullen
N00103460
Module/Project Leader: Sherra Murphy
Course:
Year: modelmaking, Design and Digital Effects
2 nd
Year
Critical and Cultural Studies Project:

Jurassic Park is a sci-fi, fantasy, adventure film released in 1993 and directed by Steven Spielberg. The film is based around Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic
Park. The film takes place on a fictitious island off the cost of Costa Rica called Isla
Nublar, there an affluent Philanthropist along with a group of scientists have created an amusement park of cloned dinosaurs.
Jurassic Park as a film that is a cornerstone in the film industry. It was the first time Computer-Generated Images (CGI) had been used to such an extent, and it was the first time so many different types of film effects were used together. Creating new methods of film making transforming old ones and bringing film making in to the 21 st century. Since Harry O. Hoyt's 1925 Lost World, film making and puppetry has developed and so has peoples expectations of the industry. Spielberg's initial inspirational thoughts for the for the movie was the classic 1933 King Kong that he loved. But up until jurassic park no film had been abel to depict creatures such as dinosaurs in such an animal life like way. Up until this they were depicted in a mythological, unbelievable, fantasy monster style. Spielberg wanted to show the world not movie monsters but the actual living, breathing creatures to the best of his abilities.

While Spielberg was trying to conceive some sort of idea of how he was going to create this project and bring these dinosaurs to life he was inspired and impressed with Bob Gehr's enormous, life size animatronic King Kong Puppet at Universal
Studios. Spielberg and Bob Gehr met up and discussed doing the whole movie using full-sized animatronic dinosaurs but after awhile Spielberg decided it was going to be far to costly to do the whole film this way. And so Spielberg put together a group of hollywoods best special effects people, for a never before seen collaboration of talent and effects. The design team consisted of Stan Winston who was in charge of creating full-size robotic animatronic puppets, Phil Tippett's who's initial role was traditional based stop-motion style moveable miniatures, Michael Lantieri was to supervise the interaction of the different styles of puppetry along with the actors and set. And Dennis Muren would lead the team at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) in combining the efforts on film in post production.
During the preproduction of the film the primary objective in Stan Winston's

studio was to ensure that the look and feel of the dinosaurs was as accurate as was understood about dinosaurs. Great lengths and measures were taken to guarantee the audience would believe and really feel as if they were looking at real dinosaurs. From the intensely detailed dinosaur sculptures the moulds were taken and from the moulds stan winston's studio created skins in which they would use to cover the robotic animatronic armature. These creatures were a perfect combination of art and technology. The robotic armature standing in as the creatures muscle and skeleton and the moulded skin as it's exterior. Phil Tippett created three-dimensional story boards using go-motion which were called animatics. The animatics that were later supposed to be evolved to appear in the film. Go-motion which was a variation of stop-motion puppetry was later after experimentation dismissed from the final project
Spielberg felt that this was unsatisfactory special effects technology for a film of these requirements. The Go-motion story boards were still used to help convey the requirements of the actors to them. In post production the miniatures created by stan and phil were sent to ILM to be scanned so the digital images and live action puppets would be in sync for the final film.
To ensure a Naturalistic element in the movements of the puppets and puppeteers and to keep it as scientifically accurate as possible, Spielberg enlisted the help of world renowned paleontologist Jack Homer. One of the worlds leading dinosaur experts. For Jurassic's design team breaking the common association of reptilian stereotypes would be key in maintaing scientific accuracy. Jack homer believed that dinosaurs share a closer relationship to birds then lizards in regards to the animals we can make reference to today. During the making of the film, one of the film's model makers created a scene where the Velociraptors have this lizard like tongue which slithers in and out like a snakes would, but Jack Homer suggested this be taken out as he knew this is inaccurate.
After the characteristics of the dinosaurs had been decided on, it was time to put them to the test and see what they looked like in motion. As they now were

unsure weather to use Phil Tippett's Go-motion technique but had no other option at that point. It was Dennis Muren who then made the suggestion of doing the full sized dinosaurs in CGI. The first experiment was a herd of Gallimimus stampeding through an open field. Spielberg saw the the experiment and was impressed with the motion and smooth movement of the Gallimimus but he still wasn't completely sold on the idea of doing such a large portion of the movie using experimental techniques.
Muren and his team then went onto making a walk-cycle of the T-Rex. Putting the two shots together with the Gallimimus and the T-Rex which was the final bit of evidence to convince Spielberg that CGI was the future and that digital puppetry is the only thing that was going to bring Spielberg's Vision to life.
(Dennis Muren at ILM in the computer room)
Phil Tippett's and all his model-makers and puppeteers due to the decision to make the movie with no Go-motion and use CGI thought they were out of a job, but because of ILM's untrained animators who didn't yet know how to make the CGI models behave naturally Phil Tippett became the CGI dinosaur director. Phil Tippett's

animator's puppeteers and Model-makers would join forces with ILM's Computer artists. ILM even created a unique mechanical piece of hardware to bridge the gap between computer animation and movable miniatures which was nick named “The
Dinosaur Input device” (DID) they took a normal puppet armature and electrically encoded it so the traditional puppeteers could move it and the movement would then be easily digitalized eliminating the need for the keyboard.
Spielberg later went on to create a sequel which was released in 1997 called
The Lost World Jurassic Park. CGI from the success in the first movie had developed significantly, the Sequel comprised mainly of CGI. This is mentioned in Steve Tillis's
The Art of Puppetry in the Age of Media Production
, “ it is of a new breed of figures that perform primarily in the media of film, video, and cybernetics (i.e., computers).
More specifically, it is like certain of the dinosaurs in Stephen Spielberg's The Lost
World(I997)” There was later a Third movie released in 2001 and there is now a forth in the making and due to be released in 2013.
The First day of shooting in Hawaii began with Stan Winston's life size animatronic triceratops which had the cast and crew anxious, but to everyones relief the puppet behaved perfectly with no glitches. All the puppets used for that day of shooting breathed perfectly, the eyes dilated and the puppets moved just as they were supposed to. Back in California some of the sets were recreated, the scene where the
T-Rex attacks the tour car from Hawaii was recreated. The reason for this was that this was a logistically complex sequence and required both live-action puppetry and

CGI interacting heavily with actors and the set, and so the film makers wanted complete control over everything in the shot.
In the industry of film and more specifically CGI, Media figures commonly enact non-naturalistic roles or in regards to Jurassic Park enact the large creatures in which living beings would be physically unable to portray. But as its said in The Art of Puppetry in the Age of Media Production “It has proved difficult, however at least from the perspective of puppetry, to make much theoretical sense of media figures:
How are they like or unlike puppets as we have known puppets, and on what basis might some or all of them be considered puppets? Media figures share with puppetry the crucial trait of presenting characters through a site of signification other than actual living beings. So in regards to this, CGI creatures and characters would admissibly be considered a style of puppetry.
Stephen Kaplin in an essay entitled “Puppetry into the Next Millennium” from
1994 Wrote That he considered there to be four subgenera's to Puppetry in which he wrote ““Docu-puppetry”, which makes use of sampling, cropping, and re-editing of media images and involves the depiction in puppet performance of factual and authoritative material, illustrating historical, social or cultural phenomena. The second emerging subgenera is “virtual puppetry,” which involves performing objects that exist only within the computer, generated out of digitized bitmaps, given tightly controlled behavior parameters and linked by manual controls to the outside, human world. this is, in essence, a description of computer graphics figures. The third of

imagination.
Kaplin's subgenera is “hyper-puppetry,” which is a collective extension, a corporate entity [of a computer-generated puppet], created out of the merged energies of [a theoretically 'unlimited' number of] users/ participants. Finally, Kaplin writes of
“cyber-puppetry, by which he means networked-computer puppetry with an online, interactive dimension that allows for the artist to conceive of performances as collaborative creations with the audience.”
From my research its evident that Jurassic Park was a key element in the development in Puppetry and further more the special effects film industry. The advancements and developments made during the creation of the film were some of the most significant improvements made in the special effects industry to date. It showed what could be achieved and the full potential of special effects. That now the only limitations to creating masterpieces of sound and vision was the human

References:
(Text) - Kaplin, Stephen (1994) - “Puppetry into the next millennium” Puppetry
international I:37-39.
(Text) - Tillis, Steve (1999) - “The Art of Puppetry in the Age of Media Production”
(Vidio) - Schultz, John (1995) - “T he Making of Jurassic Park”
Amblin Entertainment
(Vidio) – Spielberg, Steven – “Jurassic Park” Universal Pictures
(Web) – www.screened.com : http://www.screened.com/jurassic-park/16-168826/
(Web) – www.imdb.com : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/