How the 1993 film was made: animatronics, go-motion and the CGI leap

When Jurassic Park opened on June 11, 1993, audiences saw dinosaurs that breathed, blinked and ran across open fields. The film got there by an unusual route. It started with full-size robots and stop-motion puppets, then took a sharp turn when a few computer artists showed Steven Spielberg what software could do. The result was a mix of practical and digital effects that won three Academy Awards and changed how movies put creatures on screen.

No plot spoilers here. This is all about how the film was made.

The original plan: puppets and robots

The production had a long runway. Michael Crichton's novel was sold to Universal and Spielberg in 1990, and production notes cited by the AFI Catalog say two years of planning preceded a four-month shoot. At a 2013 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences event marking the film's 20th anniversary, the panel recalled that the film was first planned around stop-motion, robotic dinosaurs and high-speed puppets, and Stan Winston was brought in to build them.

For the animated shots, the plan was go-motion. Amblin describes it as a form of stop-motion puppet animation developed at Industrial Light & Magic in the early 1980s by Phil Tippett. The key trick, as VFX Voice explains it, was adding motion blur, so the models moved more realistically and less jerkily than in classic stop-motion. Tippett, Jon Berg and Muren had used it to animate the AT-AT walkers and tauntauns in The Empire Strikes Back (1980).

Stan Winston's full-size dinosaurs

Winston's shop spent more than 18 months building the live-action dinosaurs, according to a 1993 Los Angeles Times report cited by the AFI Catalog. The star was a twenty-foot Tyrannosaurus made of a fiberglass frame and 3,000 pounds of clay, covered in a fragile latex skin painted by a team of artists. It was mounted on what the crew called a "dino-simulator," which let twelve operators control its movements through a computer control board. A one-fifth-scale version was built first so the team could rehearse moves before performing them with the full-size animal.

The CG test

Meanwhile, ILM's computer graphics artists were experimenting. ILM's own history of the film says nobody had put "living, breathing synthetic animals" in a live-action film before; creature work had always been mechanical. Then ILM showed Spielberg a test made by CG artists Steve "Spaz" Williams and Mark Dippé, and the digital dinosaurs "looked so natural and moved so freely that there was no turning back."

Amblin's account adds that ILM's Dennis Muren revealed that he and other artists in CG research and development had made tests of photorealistic digital dinosaurs. The decision followed: Winston's full-scale animatronics for the close-up work, computer graphics for the shots that needed animals moving freely through the world.

George Lucas, whose company ILM was, saw the early test shots too. Smithsonian magazine notes he's often quoted as saying it was "like the invention of the light bulb or the first telephone call."

"I think I'm extinct"

That left Phil Tippett, whose go-motion dinosaurs were suddenly out of a job. VFX Voice calls it an oft-told story: when Tippett saw the CG dinosaurs at the ILM test screening, he said, "I think I'm extinct." Tippett told the magazine the story is true, but that the switch didn't come as a surprise, since he'd been working with Muren and knew what the computer graphics team was doing.

Spielberg kept him on anyway, for his filmmaking skills and his knowledge of dinosaurs. Tippett told VFX Voice that Spielberg wanted the dinosaurs portrayed as animals, not monsters, and that his job was keeping everything on track. As Tippett put it, "In the end, I got kicked upstairs." He was credited as Dinosaur Supervisor and oversaw animators at both ILM and his own Tippett Studio.

The Dinosaur Input Device

Tippett's team also found a way to carry stop-motion skills into the computer. The Dinosaur Input Device, or D.I.D. (VFX Voice calls it the Digital-Input-Device), was a stop-motion-style armature with sensors in its joints, wired to a computer animation program. In effect, animators could pose it by hand, much like a stop-motion puppet, and feed those poses into the computer. ILM describes it as a bridge between traditional stop-motion and CG animation. ILM credits the device to a collaboration with Phil Tippett, Randal Dutra, Tom St. Amand and the team at Tippett Studio. VFX Voice notes it later earned Tippett Studio co-founder Craig Hayes and others an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement.

The toolkit ILM built

ILM says the film required a pile of new technology, including:

• Viewpaint, a 3D texturing tool that let artists paint directly on 3D models and see the results in context.
• Camera motion tracking, so digital animals could be placed into moving live-action shots.
• Softimage, a commercial 3D animation package. ILM says Jurassic Park was the first major film to use it.
• Film input scanning, which ILM says the film pioneered.

The digital dinosaurs are surprisingly scarce. ILM says it created fewer than 60 shots of fully CG dinosaurs, and Smithsonian notes that by some counts they're on screen for only about six minutes of the two-hour movie. The rest is Winston's animatronics, practical effects, sound and editing doing the work.

The schedule had its own twist. In February 1993, with post-production still underway, Spielberg started filming Schindler's List in Poland. According to a Daily Variety item cited by the AFI Catalog, ILM developed a system to send video over high-speed phone lines and by satellite, so he could review dailies and composited dinosaur shots from overseas.

A hurricane on location

Filming began on Aug. 24, 1992, on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, according to the AFI Catalog, and location filming was cut short when Hurricane Iniki hit during the week of Sept. 7, 1992. At the Academy's 2013 event, panelists recalled that producer Kathleen Kennedy helped get the money to fly in food and medical supplies, and that the hurricane provided some of the actual turbulent weather seen in the final film. The production moved back to soundstages at Universal Studios.

How the dinosaurs got their voices

Sound designer Gary Rydstrom built the dinosaur voices from real animals. In a 2013 NPR interview, he explained that the T. rex roar starts with something low-frequency, like a tiger, and that "the key element is the high-frequency scream element, which is a baby elephant that we recorded." According to NPR, a single trumpet from a baby elephant at the San Francisco Zoo was used for every T. rex roar in the film.

The other animals got the same treatment. NPR reports that the velociraptors mixed African cranes, tortoises and horses, plus one human: a friend in the studio whom Rydstrom asked, "You make any weird sounds?" The brachiosaurus combined elephants, cows and donkeys, with its singing-like call built only from donkey sounds.

Oscars, box office and the National Film Registry

Jurassic Park won three Academy Awards for 1993. The Academy lists the winners:

• Visual Effects: Dennis Muren, Stan Winston, Phil Tippett and Michael Lantieri.
• Sound: Gary Summers, Gary Rydstrom, Shawn Murphy and Ron Judkins.
• Sound Effects Editing: Gary Rydstrom and Richard Hymns.

It was also a commercial phenomenon. By early October 1993, it had passed Spielberg's own E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial as the top-grossing film worldwide, with $704 million, according to a Wall Street Journal report cited by the AFI Catalog.

In 2018, the Library of Congress added Jurassic Park to the National Film Registry, its list of American films selected for preservation.