Remember in 1993 when Jurassic Park was likeā¦the end all, be all of special effects?
not gonna lie that still looks intimately real
Iām still somewhat convinced that someone sold their soul to create the special effects in Jurassic Park because that shit is over 20 years old and it still really,Ā reallyĀ holds up, better than the stuff in a lot of current movies, even.
Fucking witchcraft, man.Ā
fucking look at this shit though
Literally see this post flying around with a few different responses added to the bottom each time so Iāll say it for this one myself:
THEY ACTUALLY BUILT A GIANT MASSIVELY DETAILED FUCKING ANIMATRONIC T-REX FOR ALL OF THIS THATāS WHY THE EFFECTS ARE SO GOOD. CAUSE IT AINāT CGI. AND IT AINāT GUY IN A COSTUME. ITāS A BIG FUCKING ROBOT DINOSAUR. AND EVERY PART IS DESIGNED TO MOVE. IT COST LIKE HALF THE BUDGET OF THE FILM.
amazing
And they had the film it in small increments, especially in the outdoor scenes, because the rain fall kept soaking into the āskinā of the rex and would slow down and mess up its movements. So they would stop filming and have a crew out there drying off this massive, fake dinosaur, and then theyād start filming again until it was too wet. Repeat until the end of the scene.
They used animatronics and detailed costumes for most if not all of the dinosaurs in the first movie.
The triceratops for instance, was also animatronic.
And the raptors were dudes in suits. I shit you not.
One of my favorite anecdotes Iāve read on tumblr is how the t-rex robot from Jurassic park would malfunction while it was drying out. How did it malfunction, you might wonder?
Motherfucker randomly started moving.
So apparently if you were on the jp set you would sometimes hear people screaming bloody murder even though they were all well aware that it was a giant animatronic puppet and wouldnāt actually, you know, eat them.
(link to said post about malfunctioning t-rex)
Did not know this, had to reblog for awesome movie history insights.
So, I knew about the animatronics bit but I did not know the raptors were guys in suits and the malfunctioning t-rex sounds terrifying.
And i just googled malfunctioning t-rex and was not disappointed. Apparently in order to put the skin on over the steel frame a guy had to crawl inside the t-rex while it was turned on and glue the skin down. And if somebody turned the t-rex off or the power went out the guy in the t-rex stood a very real chance of getting mangled and killed by the hydraulics.
So of course, the power goes out.
And this guy is still in there gluing the skin down.
Apparently the way to survive getting sheered to death by huge sheets of metal while youāre inside a giant t-rex robot is to curl into a ball and hope for the best.
And this guy hoped for the best and got it.
Some other people on stage pried open the t-rex jaws and glue guy crawled out of its mouth and was totally okay.
This is getting better and better.
I think they only had like 6 minutes of CGI
Iām just waiting for the T-Rex to come to life and leave its stand.
@spinosaurus-the-fisher is this the kind of content you love?
Realism comes at a cost, it seems.
i mean ok but why has nobody posted this:
Itās a three piece raptor suit.
Old movies had the best special effects
The thing about this that gets my special effects nerd going is the fact that EVERY single dinosaur was sculpted by artists based on the current existent archeological evidence of the time.
@jurassicparkandrecreation
@shepfax
Even better than that, this movie ADVANCED our best understanding of dinosaurs at the time. Ā They were blowing out a budget bigger than anything Hollywood had ever seen, and along with employing almost the last hurrah of incredible physical FX, they had a bank of those newfangled digital SFX computers. Ā Nobodyād ever really created convincing dinosaurs in a movie before. Ā Itād all been stop-motion animation, and even when the models were exquisitely crafted, you could just tell there was something OFF about them. Ā Spielberg wanted THE BEST DINOSAURS EVER, and he figured on using the cutting edge of digital modeling and animation technology to build them for him.
So they got hold of some of the best paleontologists they could find and said,Ā āWe want you guys to take this tech that your labs could pretty much never afford and use it to build us the most realistic, accurate dinosaur models the world has ever seen.ā
The paleontologists knew an opportunity when it bit them in the ass. Ā They plugged in everything they knew about dinosaurs, all the skeletons and their best guesses about soft tissue and all that. Ā And when theyād created those dinosaur models, they had the computer start moving them as they realistically would with anatomy like that. Ā One guy took a look at those walking t-rexes and velociraptors (really utahraptors, but whatevs, fam), and he said,Ā āWait a minute, Iāve seen movement like that before.ā
He called up film of a chicken walking. Ā Everyone in the room said,Ā āHoly shit.ā
Prior to 1989, the idea that birds were descended from dinosaurs existedāwe knew about archaeopteryx, we knew there was some minor connection thereābut the idea that DINOSAURS LIVE IN THE MODERN WORLD AND THEY ARE CALLED BIRDS was not pre-eminent. Ā Jurassic Park changed our scientific understanding of dinosaurs.
That paleontologistsād be Kevin Padian. Who is awesome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Padian
This post just gets better and better with time
this is so cool, must reblog to drop the knowledge. :)
Reblogging for the sheer wow factor of this post
Re-Blogging for the Wow factor!!! This is SO frickin awesome!!!
It doesnāt have to do with special effects, but fun fact about the raptors: at the time Jurassic Park was in production, the only known velociraptors were much smaller than those shown in the movie. Spielberg wanted everything to be as factual as possible but the effect just required bigger raptors so fact was put aside for this one detail. Except that a group of paleontologists, including one of my college professors, were on a dig in Utah and found enough Utahraptor fossils to claim naming rights (or something, Iām fuzzy on the details). Because their discovery validated Spielbergās depiction of raptors, they offered to name it Utahraptor spielbergii in exchange for funds to improve working conditions on the dig site. They never reached an agreement so the funds werenāt secured and they named it Utahraptor ostrammaysi, but my professor apparently still has a t-shirt with the original proposed name.
