Why doe Jurassic Park look better than any movie released today?

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I remember watching this in the theatre and everyone giving it a standing ovation at the end. It was like that scene in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. Everyone was quiet and than erupted in applause. Of course, the practical effects are the unsung heroes of that movie. These days I imagine the entire thing would be shot against a green screen.
 
Koodo said:
They obviously "look" more realistic because they're actual, tangible objects. But they never animate better than the best CGI nowadays. This isn't a problem in Jurassic Park because their effects are centered on creatures that don't display emotions and are just mean to scare the audience (I also realize the movie uses some CGI as well, and that has really aged); but when it comes to sentient characters, animatronics are rarely better than the best CGI found nowadays.

If anyone pretends "classic" Yoda looks more realistic than a Na'Vi, then well, you're just wrong.
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The likes of classic Yoda and Salacious Crumb definitely moved like Muppets, but it was quite charming as well.
ILM's CGI has also always had a certain dynamic "smoothness" to it as well.
 
friskykillface said:
Watching it right now, one of my favorite movies, wish I could have seen this in Theaters, I was 4 or 5.
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Oh man, yes, you missed out. As a kid, it was my favorite movie ever. We have a theater here that plays 'older' movies for a month or so after they've gone out of the main theaters, but Jurassic Park played for a full year, and I saw it more than 10 times in the theater total. It was packed most of the time, as well.

The movie was mind-blowing at the time.
 
jett said:
It's not indefensible, but to prop up the LOTR trilogy as a bastion of modest and revered use CG is laughable.
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Jackson could've used CG in pretty much everything (a la Star Wars prequels) but almost all of the sets were real, miniatures and bigatures were used for those epic sweeping camera shots and the size difference between hobbits and humans was mostly done by camera placement and optical tricks. There's surprisingly little CG in LotR.
 
Aselith said:
Ok. So, you're one in a million.
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Yeah, I know.
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Gigglepoo said:
Buster Keaton's special effects are better than just about everything today.
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Don't know if this is a joke post or not, but I saw One Week for the first time last year and thought it was pretty impressive, especially for 1920.
 
Teddman said:
Another flaw in JP was that there were no pterodactyls.

They had a great plot justification in that the animals could fly and easily escape. But understand that the practical reason was that there was no way back then to make a flying dinosaur with wings render as convincingly as the less complex land-bound dinosaurs. Had they attempted pterodactyls, the movie's efx would not hold up as well.
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Pterodactyls aren't dinosaurs.

Only the ones that could not fly or swim are classed as dinosaurs.
 
Teddman said:
None of it looks fake because no one has ever seen a dinosaur. Combined with the close-ups being animatronics, that's about all there is to avoiding anything looking "fake."

There are also a comparatively small amount of CG dinosaurs on screen at any one time, as opposed to the huge crowds most current blockbusters will throw out. Such as the Helm's Deep sequence in LOTR.

So if Jurassic Park has aged in any way, it's the lack of a lot of dinos on screen at once. It was very smartly done for its time.
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Really though? What about the stampeding dinosaurs? Also this movie definitely proves the point of less is more in a lot of cases.
 
jett said:
terminator_two_judgement_day.jpg
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This and Jurassic Park are the two films of that era that hold up. The Abyss also for the most part. It is strange how the very limited technology Cameron had for those two films is still more believable yet so much more simplistic then what you see in many of todays films. I have been waiting for Jurassic Park on BR to pass judgment on how that one holds up, but on DVD outside of a couple of the Raptor segments still looks great. Actually I think the worst effect in JP is the triceratops robot, not any of the CG.
 
I thought there really wasn't that much CGI in the film. All the closeups are done with animatronics. The CGI they did use blended well in the film and wasn't that obvious.
 
Full Recovery said:
Doesn't the bluray come out this fall?
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God I hope so.

One thing that's always bugged me about the T. Rex scene is, when the T.Rex breaks through the fence, the inside of the fence is level with the outside, but then the car gets pushed through it and there's suddenly a 40 foot drop. What the hell?

EDIT: The CG in The Frighteners still holds up pretty well.
2iuex44.jpg
Granted it wasn't going for realism, but it does what it was intended for well.
 
Synth_floyd said:
I thought there really wasn't that much CGI in the film. All the closeups are done with animatronics. The CGI they did use blended well in the film and wasn't that obvious.
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I think there is a ton of CG in it. Almost every effect outside of the triceratops, which I mentioned earlier, that is not a closeup of the dino's face is CG.
 
I have never been impressed by a film's special effects more and no movie since has been able to capture my imagination the same way.

The problem is that there's no longer any sense of "how'd they do that?" when going to the movies. The answer is always CGI.
 
Tron 2.0 said:
I have never been impressed by a film's special effects more and no movie since has been able to capture my imagination the same way.

The problem is that there's no longer any sense of "how'd they do that?" when going to the movies. The answer is always CGI.
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That's why watching Buster Keaton's The General was so mind-blowing for me; it has the most real action setpieces of any movie that I've ever seen because they WERE real, and Keaton was putting his own life in jeopardy in every scene.
 
Blader5489 said:
Nobody pointed them out to me, I spotted those things easily the first time I saw the movie.



No it isn't.
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I've seen T2 a shit ton of times and I don't even know what you guys are talking about. Point is not everyone analyzes this kinda shit. I will watch out for it next time. If you ruined one of my favorite movies I'll kill you! :lol
 
Snowman Prophet of Doom said:
That's why watching Buster Keaton's The General was so mind-blowing for me; it has the most real action setpieces of any movie that I've ever seen because they WERE real, and Keaton was putting his own life in jeopardy in every scene.
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It is funny to think about what the budget of something like "The General" would be in todays film world. It would have a 100 million dollar plus budget even without all the sound design and dialog that modern films have.
 
friskykillface said:
:lol :lol I just said the same thing to my brother

Watching it right now, one of my favorite movies, wish I could have seen this in Theaters, I was 4 or 5.
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I saw it when it first came out, I was in 2nd grade. The theater we went to... when the T-Rex roared, the whole theater SHOOK. It was INSANE.

That never happened again in the second or third movies. Such a shame.

(Never mind that I hate, hate, HATE the second movie, as Lost World is one of my favorite books ever and the movie is such a piece of shit... but this isn't the time or place for that....)
 
Blader5489 said:
Don't know if this is a joke post or not, but I saw One Week for the first time last year and thought it was pretty impressive, especially for 1920.
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No, I was completely serious. I think it was Sherlock Jr. that had a scene where I couldn't figure out how he did it. There are so many amazing camera tricks going on. I guess Michel Gandry is like that now (to some extent), but there aren't many other mainstream directors who do stuff like this any more.
 
Wii said:
Several reasons IMO

Good animators, they sent the animators to mime class to learn about weight distribution (that's why most CG feels weightless), they studied animal movements, and they had stop motion animator guru Phil Tippet as well to guide them.

Darkness, it hides some of the shortcomings of the CG rendering, but still the dinosaurs in broad daylight look pretty damn good. They don't look like they're made of jelly.

Reasonable number of shots, so they had heaps of time to get things absolutely perfect, JP has less than 100 CG shots IIRC. By comparison, StarWars Episode III had about 2000 CG shots.

They put more effort rehearsing the scenes (they used small dinosaur marionettes to plan the shots) so the actor's performances would match up with the CG later. With some recent films, it seems they just improvise on the set and let the animator have a migraine squeezing the CG into the shot.

I miss 80s/90s ILM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFqJtcRTqZg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miVlDKGa8F4

The result...

Jurassic Park - Before And After
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz5Asn03qF4
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Wow, more was CG than I thought. I thought the car was real.
 
Im going to watch all 3 movies tonight. I loved the first film its a classic. The other two I only saw once at the cinema. Should be good to sit through them all again.
 
The real credit for Jurassic Park should go to Stan Winston for designing the puppets and animatronics which were used in all the close-up shots. CG was limited to mostly distance shots and used only sparingly.

Terminator 2 was the same way, most of the effects were practical effects and CG was used only where practical effects couldn't be. More than anyone else, James Cameron has always understood where CG was appropriate and where it wasn't, just look at Titanic which they built a whole ship set for. He waited a decade to make Avatar because he decided that CG just hadn't reached a point where it would look decent enough for his purposes.
 
ColtraineGF said:
Wait...in that scene with the T. rex biting the car, the car was CG too?

@_@

I'llsay that even though the movie is one of my favorites, and has great atmosphere, I'd say that most of the effects, when seen today, are a bit ...lacking. Like that 'stampede' scene, or any one involving smooth 'animal' motion.
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ohhhh the car was cgi too. amazing!
 
Apart from the car, the ladles being CG is mindblowing, I would never have guessed otherwise. I would say that some of the gallimimus stampede footage doesn't hold up well at all, but on the whole it's still a great technological achievement.
 
Insecurity often makes you more careful, but after Jurassic Park Hollywood lost any insecurity towards CGI-effects (early results were the Power Rangers Movie, Dragon Heart or the Star Wars SE Trilogy).
 
1. It doesn't.
2. Animatronics.
3. The "Jaws" effect.

To elaborate on the last point, JP looks so great today because it had a lot of the same constraints that Jaws had (which looks equally as great today). With Jaws, "Bruce" the animatronic shark basically was a disaster that barely worked. This was a blessing in disguise. At first the shark was to be shown much more prominently in a more effects heavy film, but it malfunctioning all the time forced Spielberg to take a more Hitchcockian approach of implying more than showing, which makes the film so much better (you're always more afraid of what you don't see). Similarly on JP, CG just wasn't at the level yet where Spielberg could use it for the entire movie, so he had to rely on practical effects/animatronics more often than not, and to great effect.

tl;dr Spielberg always excels most when his technological reach exceeds his grasp.
 
Solo said:
1. It doesn't.
2. Animatronics.
3. The "Jaws" effect.

To elaborate on the last point, JP looks so great today because it had a lot of the same constraints that Jaws had (which looks equally as great today). With Jaws, "Bruce" the animatronic shark basically was a disaster that barely worked.
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:lol

1. It does.
2. There's very little use of animatronics. In fact, it's the animatronics that look the most dated, because they're too static.
3. Jaws looks like shit today. The animatronic shark is terrible - again, way too static.
 
1. Take off your nostalgia glasses. You've got serious mental issues if you think a movie from 1993 looks better than any movie released in the past 17 years.
2. The movie is filled with practical effects, so I don't even know what fiction you are trying to spin.
3. :lol :lol :lol

And unlike JP, Jaws is actually a great film.
 
brandonh83 said:
because ILM is god.
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Credit where credit's due. Spielberg made the call to go CG instead of stop frame (like James and the Giant Peach) but it was ILM who did the dinosaur walking around some park in California.
Unknown Soldier said:
The real credit for Jurassic Park should go to Stan Winston for designing the puppets and animatronics which were used in all the close-up shots. CG was limited to mostly distance shots and used only sparingly.

Terminator 2 was the same way, most of the effects were practical effects and CG was used only where practical effects couldn't be. More than anyone else, James Cameron has always understood where CG was appropriate and where it wasn't, just look at Titanic which they built a whole ship set for. He waited a decade to make Avatar because he decided that CG just hadn't reached a point where it would look decent enough for his purposes.
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Thank you.
 
Goldrusher said:
:lol

1. It does.
2. There's very little use of animatronics. In fact, it's the animatronics that look the most dated, because they're too static.
3. Jaws looks like shit today. The animatronic shark is terrible - again, way too static.
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There are only 55 computer generated shots in Jurassic Park. So, no, there's a lot of animatronics use in the movie.
 
Solo said:
1. Take off your nostalgia glasses. You've got serious mental issues if you think a movie from 1993 looks better than any movie released in the past 17 years.
2. The movie is filled with practical effects, so I don't even know what fiction you are trying to spin.
3. :lol :lol :lol
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you really think THE THING doesn't look better than anything released in the past 17 years? i'd say it looks better than 99.99999% of special effects heavy movies in the past 17 years. i could be applying my own prejudice here, though--i'll always take something that obviously exists in the same physical plane of existence with slightly less fluid movement over wiggly paste-on cg any day of the week.
 
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