Spoil the Magic of Jurassic Park with This Before and After Footage

[harpere]

Spoil the Magic of Jurassic Park with This Before and After Footage

​

Spoiler alert: No dinosaurs were harmed in the making of this movie.

If you're the sort of person who wants to know how magic tricks are done and generally enjoy ruining the mystery of everything, chances are you also enjoy devouring behind the scenes footage from your favorite films. If this describes you, then you should check out this video, which shows off just what 1993's Jurassic Park film looked like before the scene-stealing CGI dinosaurs were added.

Sure, Jurassic Park is old news, but while we take CGI for granted in modern cinema, this movie's star -- that would be Tyrannosaurus Rex -- took six hours per frame of film to render (the movie's smaller dinos took from two to four hours). With CGI all over Hollywood blockbusters today, you may be surprised that a number of the effects in the original Jurassic Park are practical -- the CGI dinos are only seen for about six minutes -- with animatronics [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQlEE4aVgOk] used in favor of digital creations. And despite the lack of a CGI version of absolutely everything, Jurassic Park looks great.

We can expect next summer's Jurassic World [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/134874-Leaked-Jurassic-World-Story-Details-Confirmed], the 4th movie in the franchise, to feature a lot more CGI... but hopefully it will have the same thrills the original did.

Source: io9 [http://io9.com/the-amazing-before-and-after-of-jurassic-parks-special-1592414531]

Permalink

 

[Covarr]

The amazing thing is that the CG in this movie somehow manages to be way more convincing than The Matrix Reloaded was a full ten years later. Heck, even 2005's Revenge of the Sith doesn't look as good as Jurassic Park.

P.S. Thanks

 

[ShadowGandalf01]

Quite fascinating to see the work that goes into making these films. Hours and hours of labour for what amounts to 5 seconds of screen time.

 

[AdagioBoognish]

6 hours per frame for the trex? That's crazy, but totally worth it. was it a technology hang up that made it take so long or the quality of the CGI?

 

[AdmiralCheez]

6 hours per frame for the trex? That's crazy, but totally worth it. was it a technology hang up that made it take so long or the quality of the CGI?

Mostly just the quality. There's a lot of polygons that need to be rendered, with textures, multiple lighting passes, and a bunch of other things. Along the same lines, in Monster's Inc., any frame with Sully in it took about 12 hours to render on account of all the individual hairs that had to be accounted for. That's 12 hours per frame.

Good-looking CGI takes a long time to render for cinema, even with the best supercomputers running it. It's not like videogames, where the models have low polygon counts (comparatively), and thus can be rendered in real time.

 

[Bad Jim]

6 hours per frame for the trex? That's crazy, but totally worth it. was it a technology hang up that made it take so long or the quality of the CGI?

Back then, the height of video game 3D graphics was Doom. That was the best you could get from a PC. And that sort of computer was used to ray trace Jurassic Park.

The amazing thing is that the CG in this movie somehow manages to be way more convincing than The Matrix Reloaded was a full ten years later. Heck, even 2005's Revenge of the Sith doesn't look as good as Jurassic Park.

P.S. Thanks

That's probably because most of the time you are looking at animatronics, which look real because they are physical objects. CG is used when you can see the whole dinosaur, legs and all, since running and leaping around is nigh impossible for animatronics.

Also because Spielberg is a better director than Lucas, and the Matrix movies were intended to look unreal.

 

[josemlopes]

6 hours per frame for the trex? That's crazy, but totally worth it. was it a technology hang up that made it take so long or the quality of the CGI?

Mostly just the quality. There's a lot of polygons that need to be rendered, with textures, multiple lighting passes, and a bunch of other things. Along the same lines, in Monster's Inc., any frame with Sully in it took about 12 hours to render on account of all the individual hairs that had to be accounted for. That's 12 hours per frame.

Add to that the fact that they dont use a single computer to render but a render farm, basicly a shitload of powerfull computers working together to render a single frame for 12h in a movie where that character is present for most of the movie.

 

[Ninjariffic]

It would look more impressive if the video was a little better than 360p. It looks like it was recorded with a potato.

 

[AdagioBoognish]

6 hours per frame for the trex? That's crazy, but totally worth it. was it a technology hang up that made it take so long or the quality of the CGI?

Mostly just the quality. There's a lot of polygons that need to be rendered, with textures, multiple lighting passes, and a bunch of other things. Along the same lines, in Monster's Inc., any frame with Sully in it took about 12 hours to render on account of all the individual hairs that had to be accounted for. That's 12 hours per frame.

Good-looking CGI takes a long time to render for cinema, even with the best supercomputers running it. It's not like videogames, where the models have low polygon counts (comparatively), and thus can be rendered in real time.

I knew rendering took quite a bit of time, but had no idea it went to this level. Absolutely amazing stuff.

 

[Metalrocks]

saw this on the dvd under special features. really amazing how they did it back then. and i still think that they look better animated than todays CGI effects.

 

[Meximagician]

Very impressive, didn't realize they just shot the final T-Rex scene. Nothing to direct the camera or anything. Wonder if they did an animatic for that or just used the storyboards and intuition.

Only now noticed, but during the stampede scene they must have shot that throughout the day. It's short, but just as the camera shows the tree our heroes will using for cover, their shadows are not as pronounced as before.

Little typo in the article, not sure if I should post here or not:

...the movie's smaller dinos took from two two four hours...

 

[idarkphoenixi]

I still can't believe this was from 1993...Well, earlier than that really, 1993 was just the release date. This is some of the most convincing CGI that I've ever seen, even to this day. My mind was totally blown when they showed the T-rex eating the jeep tire, I had no freaking clue that jeep was CGI, I thought it was really there!

 

[Nazulu]

I think the problem with CGI today is that they don't always seem to get the shading right. It always seems like there's this intricately detailed textures and every single bit of it is visible. Every pore on the monster's skin, every hair sticking out of it's nose, every rivet on the machine, every wire, every scratch, every this every that. It's all visible in perfectly rendered quality that it stands out when it really shouldn't.

You put a CGI human face next to a filmed human face and you'll see less detail in the filmed version.

Jurassic Park seemed to get it right because they used lighting and shading properly.

Yes! Thank you. I've been saying there has been lighting/shadow issues for ages. And sometimes the colour filters they put in films make all the lighting look unnatural.

 

[Shinkicker444]

Huh, a lot more of this was CGI than I thought. I was sure the raptors in the kitchen were animatronics, also the car in the rex eating the car scene being cgi surprised me I'd never have picked that.

 

[spartandude]

I still think this is an amazing looking movie, yes its a bit dated but until the past couple of years it was still beating out most new movies.

 

[Dustin Brown]

The upcoming jurassic park movie will never be as good as the original trilogy I'm sorry,the robot dinosaurs looked real and acted real ,cgi might as well distroy Stan winstons legacy