r/todayilearned • u/joe_at_large • 4h ago
TIL that most “CGI” in Jurassic Park (1993) was actually practical effects and animatronics, with CGI used only for a few shots, which is why the movie still looks convincing today.
https://screenrant.com/jurassic-park-movie-dinosaurs-create-cgi-effects-explained/?utm_source=chatgpt.com126
u/Key-Analysis-5864 4h ago
If I remember all the facts correctly, there are only about 63 CGI shots in the whole movie, and most of the screen time is full scale animatronics.
The T-rex “shake” (hope i am describing it correctly) in the rain scene was partially because the animatronic’s foam skin absorbed water and started wobbling, which accidentally made it look even more alive.
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u/FX114 Works for the NSA 4h ago
The rain would also cause the hydraulics to go off at unexpected times in between takes.
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u/jerry-jim-bob 2h ago
Which would cause it to shudder, making it appear to sneeze.
It also gained a lot of weight due to the foam absorbing a lot of water and its cgi double had to be bulked up a bit
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u/Caelinus 3h ago
I think this sort of misses the point. The CGI shots in the move still look good. They are obviously much lower fidelity than they could be now, but they look absolutely fine and in no way detract from the movie.
So it is not that the movie looks good because it is mostly practical. All the SFX looks kind of amazing in it, practical and cgi.
The movie looks amazing because they spent the time and money to make it look amazing. The director and the SFX people were clearly on the same page, and so everything was set up from the start to make sure that the shots that needed a particular tool were set up to make that tool work to the best of its ability. Which takes time and planning, and then a whole lot more time and effort to get it right.
There are like 6 minutes of CGI in Jurassic Park. It took ILM a year to do that.
The reason people think CGI looks bad now is because you only ever see bad CGI. The good stuff is invisible and indistinguishable from practical effects. Most movies that look really good use both at the same time throughout.
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u/Greyrock99 3h ago
I like your points but I want to add one thing extra to it. Many of the scenes in Jurassic Park look great but just because of the technical quality of the CGI, but because Spielberg is a an absolute world class director (with a world class lighting and camera crew with him) and the models, background, lighting, angles etc are all exactly what you need to be to make that dinosaur be a work of art.
You can spend ten years and a billion dollars trying to animate Jar Jar Binks but it isn’t going to work because the audience is going to find the writing, directing and characterisation of absolutely second rate, no matter how perfect the pixels are.
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u/mmicoandthegirl 2h ago
SFX = Sound effects GFX = Graphic effects
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u/junglespycamp 19m ago
SFX can mean sound but the more common usage nowadays, and the one I think they mean, is special effects. Which is the on set or in camera effects work. Which would include animatronics. Whereas VFX means the post production computer work including CGI.
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u/CakeMadeOfHam 3h ago
But if you check out Starship Troopers that was released a couple years after, it's all CGI and it still holds up. Same team that did Jurassic Park.
The reason it actually holds up is because they were given enough time to make it look good. They worked like 2 years on it. And there wasn't physics engines that generated a bunch of stuff.
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u/SonovaVondruke 3h ago
Starshio Troopers has plenty of practical special effects.
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u/CakeMadeOfHam 2h ago
Today you'd say that yeah, but when released it was the movie with the most CGI shots ever.
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u/watto_84 29m ago
I watched that for the first time in years the other night. One of my favourite movies ever. The space scenes look like they were made in the 90s but most of the ground scenes still hold up.
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u/junglespycamp 18m ago
I think you can tell it’s of an era and there are far better looking movies nowadays. But it’s a movie with smart people behind the camera and it doesn’t matter how the CGI aged. It still works. Just like a 40s movie might obviously be on a soundstage for exterior scenes but it’s fine in the movie.
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u/barnfodder 1h ago
Bingo
Back then, CGI was novel enough that you had to work really hard to make it look good, or audiences would call it shitty.
Now it's so much cheaper and quicker to get something on screen, studios will settle for poor quality effects because audiences expect it.
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u/CakeMadeOfHam 1h ago
The fact that a lot of companies still uses Unreal Engine 5 is a problem too. It has a lot of tools that help them make stuff quicker, but it won't get you all the way photo realistically. Everything got that rubbery feel to it.
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u/MyBrainItches 3m ago
You’re absolutely correct on the audience expectations at the time. Portions of the CGI in Starship Troopers did look fake, like elements of the propaganda ‘news’ broadcasts, but they were designed to look fake.
Compare this to the end of the movie Spawn. Even in the theater people were expressing their disgust on how crappy it looked. I was on of them!
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u/jimicus 3h ago
There's a whole generation growing up that don't realise that CGI is a modern invention.
Jurassic Park only had a few CGI shots, but it was still absolutely cutting-edge in terms of what it did - it would have been difficult, if not impossible to make ten years earlier. CGI simply wasn't terribly advanced technology compared to today - you simply could not have made the whole damn thing with CGI dinosaurs.
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u/Fast_Garlic_5639 2h ago
It would have been impossible even a year or two earlier- Spielberg had a world class claymation team signed up before seeing a demo of the CGI t-rex that the animator left playing on a computer screen (presumably with fingers crossed) at an event prior to filming.
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u/Too-Much-Plastic 1h ago
This is why Jurassic Park is one of the few films where I love the making of as a sit-down experience. It actually has its own storyline rather than just being interviews; there was an entire section about the special effects teams pivoting technologies mid-way through and a whole load of claymation work shown off that's great...but then they show the demo videos they did of the T-rex walking about and the bones coming to life and you can immediately see why they changed.
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u/KingCroesus 3h ago
I would go as far as to none of the CGI was practical effects, as CGI is computer generated image. Im sure the title ment to say, 'Most of the "Special effects" or "visual effects" in Jurrasic park weren't CGI but actually practical'
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u/RashestHippo 4h ago
If you are interested in this type of stuff I can't recommend https://www.youtube.com/@piercefilm/videos enough, and the video/doc called "sense of scale"
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u/joe_at_large 4h ago
Thanks man. I am intrigued by these things a lot. I’ll definitely take a look!!
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u/Roy4Pris 3h ago
True story: waaaaay back in the day I worked at Random House when we received the uncorrected proof of Jurassic Park. I read it and correctly predicted that Steven Spielberg would direct a movie version.
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u/DaftFunky 34m ago
The story behind the T Rex CGI is still one of the best moments in film history.
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u/hueythecat 4h ago
Practical effects have their place. Most modern gore cgi looks obvious
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u/Target880 2h ago
Most modern CGI will not be noticed in movies today. Set extension with CGI are extremly common and you will in most cases not notice them at all. Good CGI is somting you will never know is there. That is CGI used for stuff that could exist in reality.
It is when you see stuff that you know does not exist, you know it is an effect that would be practical effect, a visual effect (that includes CGI) or a combination of both.
A spaceship in a movie is clearly not a real space shi,p but a car in a move today might be CGI, and you never notice it is not a real car.
It is like how people say they can spot a toupee. They can spot a toupee that did not look natural but they never know when somone have a good toupee that they do not notice.
A lot of what you know it CGI is stuff that would be almost impossible to make practically,l and does not look like what we expecxt stuff to look and behave like in the real word.
Look at the YouTube series "NO CGI" is really just INVISIBLE CGI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ttG90raCNo and you will se a lot of suff that is CGI that you never would have spotted.
Most of the time not a technological limit today but a financial limit. It takes more time and costs more to make it look and behave perfectly. Budgets are limited so what you get is what is possible within the budget.
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u/rigorcorvus 3h ago
Movie blood (practical or not) usually looks terrible and nothing like real blood. Like that super dark cherry syrup shit
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u/Caelinus 3h ago
This is definitely a survivorship bias. We just can't visually tell the difference between good practical effects and good CGI effects. We can tell the difference between bad practical and bad CGI.
Because of that it makes all the good SFX look like a single category, and because CGI everyone's favorite punching bag, all the good stuff gets attributed to practical effects.
It has gotten so bad that studios will market that they "did everything with practical effects" and fail to mention that they overwrote all those practical effects with CGI. (Top Gun Maverick is particularly egregious with that.) They just know that saying it is all practical is a good marketing thing. And they are technically not lying, they did do the scenes practically, just with a bunch of placeholders they used as references for the CGI.
Most gore now is a mix of both, because practical gore effects work extremely well in a pretty narrow subset of all gore that movies want to do. In certain lighting setups, for example, it looks a lot worse. But if you use a mix you can get the strengths of both.
The bad gore is where they have some guy stand there, act like something is horrible, then paste it on later in the couple of days they have to work on the shot with a shoestring budget.
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u/BigBirdsBrain 3h ago
They built it first, then used CGI to support it. That’s why it still holds up! the weight and texture are real.
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u/sjw_7 3h ago
There was only six minutes of CGI in Jurassic Park because it was very difficult to do at the time but as it was used for the shots that practical effects couldn't do the film looked incredible. The shot where they pan round to the Brachiosaurus early in the film really was like nothing we had seen before.
I had a bit of a disagreement with someone on here a while ago who was saying that Jurassic Parks CGI wasn't very good. They couldn't grasp how ground breaking it was at the time probably because they had been born just a couple of years before Avatar came out so CGI was as normal to them as colour film is to someone born fifty years ago.
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u/Glad_Cauliflower2490 2h ago
Yeah, I remember the animatronics was a big thing at the time. It's similar to the original Star Wars films or Start Trek using models with tiny explosions, etc.
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u/clamsandwich 2h ago
The practical and CGI effects look so good because the director is one of the best ever and knew how to use those tools and assemble a good team. Also look at Phantom Menace for great CGI mixed with even greater practical effects (as well as Mythbusters working on that). Jumanji came out right after Jurassic Park and the CGI looked terrible in comparison. It's all about the director. You know who directed Jurassic Park and Phantom Menace off the top of your head, I'm betting you don't know who directed Jumanji - there's a reason for that.
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u/businessJedi 2h ago
The Phantom Menace has horrible CGI. The Gungan vs Droid battle at the end looks terrible.
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u/markhomer2002 2h ago
You'll all never be able to unsee the T-Rex throwing Ian into the air when it bursts into the toilet.
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u/nimbat1003 2h ago
I mean the CGI scenes are fairly obvious but still look good cause they have so much real models and lighting to base the CG on, the worst CG in the movie is the 2 raptors interacting in the kitchen since they are fully light and interact with each other.
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u/grayhaze2000 1h ago
And how many of the practical effects and animatronics were actually CGI? What a strange title.
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u/RecordWrangler95 1h ago
The CGI was informed by stop-motion. It was a unique (AFAIK) best-of-both-worlds situation where a new technology was informed by the old masters. Unfortunately, most CGI that followed wasn't, which is why it doesn't look as good. Comparison: Stop-Motion animatics vs final product
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u/gukakke 1h ago
Wasn’t it the first movie to use CGI?
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u/jstnryan 55m ago
Not even close (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-generated_imagery), it’s just commonly referred to as one of the best/most-convincing, especially for that era of film.
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u/HewchyFPS 47m ago
I will always firmly disagree with the idea that it holds up and looks convincing today, however it's definitely infinitely better than if they had used CGI. Was the only viable option.
Made this realization for myself on my last watch a few years back. Very much clearly seems like animatronics and puppets frequently
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u/ResplendentShade 37m ago
I saw this in the theater as a kid when it came out. It’ll always be one of my most cherished cinema memories. I was obsessed for months, even years (once the VHS was released) afterwards.
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u/The_RealAnim8me2 36m ago
It holds up (for the most part) because of the skill of the artists. It was a combination of practical fx/VFX/CG and helped push the CG tools. The industry isn’t a monolith and you can find better and worse examples of CG from JP to today:
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u/MyBrainItches 14m ago edited 2m ago
I’m on the older side to most here now, but I was fortunate to be able to see Jurassic Park in its original theatrical run, and even more fortunate to see it in a Dolby-certified theater. The special effects in JP truly were special, and getting to experience that at 11 years old was more awesome than any roller coaster.
But something I will always remember is the sound effects. If you hear the movie the way it is intended to be heard, in the rain scene at the T-Rex paddock, you can feel the T-Rex approaching before the glass of water starts to vibrate. I know this is possible to reproduce with a 4K Blu Ray copy of the film today, but I don’t know if other formats’ audio tracks can accurately reproduce it.
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u/cheezballs 6m ago
A few of the cgi shots are a little iffy, but that's only when you compare it to modern cgi. What an absolute masterpiece of a movie. See it in the theater if you get a chance during a rerelease.
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u/mepo_pines 1h ago
This is why I stopped watching movies. Too much fake shit and not enough shit people make to trick the eye.
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u/pearlhaven- 2h ago
OMG yesss, that’s why JP is a freakin' classic nothing beats real materials over CGI gives it that raw, gritty vibe that CGI just can’t replicate!
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u/pdpi 3h ago
That’s half of why the film looks convincing today. The other half is that the animatronics used were absolutely top tier.
You don’t just casually make animatronics that big or that good, let alone both at the same time. That film is an absolute technical triumph.