Rob Bredow

This is the early days of CG, computer graphics, and this looks promising, enough to commission a test with skin and lighting.

So they did that test just real quick, and Dennis Mirren, the film's visual effects supervisor, and famous stop-motion animator Phil Tippett, they took this down to Spielberg and to Kathy Kennedy, and they looped it a few times in their screening room.

And as the lights came up, they knew cinema history had changed.

It wasn't going to be the same.

Spielberg caught Tippett's eye, and he could see his expression on his face.

He said, how are you feeling, Phil?

Phil said, I feel like I'm going extinct.

But I think artists right now, many of us are feeling that same threat of extinction.

But there's good news here.

This is not what happened on Jurassic Park.

Innovation thrives when the old and new technologies are blended together.

Jurassic broke all new ground in computer graphics.

All new techniques for the first time had been used at this scale.

But many of the techniques were exactly the same as before.

The animators taped themselves on video for reference.

They drew these amazing storyboards of these shots that are now indelibly imprinted in all of our minds.

Engineers at ILM even went so far as to make the dinosaur input device.

It's a stop-motion armature.

Each of the joints, it has a little encoder on it so it can send the data back to the computer.

So the stop-motion animator can do frame-by-frame animation like they normally would.