If you are looking for the wizards behind the wonders of “Jurassic Park,” you must come to this California town north of San Francisco, which is home to Industrial Light and Magic.
The brainchild of George Lucas occupies three warehouses along a nondescript commercial street. On the front door is painted the name of a fictitious company. Even the next-door neighbors know little of what ILM’s 350 employees are doing inside, and what they are doing is changing the face of film.
Lucas created ILM 18 years ago because no other special effects studio could achieve the sophistication needed for “Star Wars.” The operation created effects never seen on screen and helped make the “Star Wars” trilogy mega-hits.
“ILM invented an industry,” says Jim Morris, vice president and general manager of the company, during a tour of the facilities. “For a long time it was the only viable purveyor of top-quality visual effects.”
Since then ILM has contributed to more than 90 feature films, including “E.T.,” the “Indiana Jones” series, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” “Willow,” “The Abyss,” “Terminator 2,” and “Death Becomes Her.” In the process ILM earned 17 Oscars.
Wandering the warehouses is like getting lost in the movies. In one corner are two models of the Fokker F-27 airplane from “Alive,” before and after the crash.
Over there is the subway car from “Ghost,” a little larger than a model train. And the boat from “Cocoon.” On the boat are figures about an inch high that look like the actors in the movie, each face painted in painstaking detail. When you thought you saw the boat with its real-life passengers ascend, it was this model. And scattered around are all of the popular creatures and monsters of the movies, some a few inches in height, some a few feet tall, including the droids from Star Wars.
While the visit to ILM several months before the opening of “Jurassic Park” offered a tantalizing look at the firm’s past work, there was no hint of what was to come in the movie, in which dinosaurs are generated from prehistoric DNA and housed in a theme park. All was secrecy then, but now that the film has opened, the ILM execs are willing to reveal a few of the secrets.
Dennis Muren, 46, the senior visual effects supervisor has been with ILM since the beginning, and owns a shelf of Oscars to prove it. He is responsible for the full-motion dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park.” Full-motion dinosaurs were added to the movie after the filming of the live actors on the set.
“Normally,” says Muren, “we would have done it either in stop-motion-which essentially was developed back in the teens and used on `The Lost World,’ and `King Kong’-or go-motion, which we came up with for `Dragon Slayer’ 12 years ago.
“The shots where we did the animals (in `Jurassic’) are completely computer-generated. We didn’t start with any footage or anything. No one is ever going to recognize it was computer-generated, except they’ll know they’ve never seen anything like it before.”
It takes one person about three weeks to generate the image of a dinosaur on a computer. After it is finished, Muren says, another employee spends another three or four weeks on “the paint work,” adding color and texture. Once it looks real, someone else spends another month or so animating the model. Finally, a technical director merges these aspects.
Visual effects supervisor Mark Dippe describes the steps in the creation of a beast: “We went through an intense period of study. We went and hung out with animals, took a lot of photography. We actually had a performance artist, a mime, give us classes on movement to disengage everyone from thinking like a human and more like a beast.
“When you’re an animator in essence you’re the actor. You’re creating the performance of the creature. We went through variations, studies of dinosaur movements. Around that time actual photography began.
“At the end of the process, we generated every single little dot on the screen. There are a lot of steps between the performance and the image on the screen. It’s in the eye of the artist. There’s no pushing a button and out comes a picture.”
There’s more on the screen than computer-generated beasts, however. About 450 miles south of the ILM warehouses, in Van Nuys, Calif., is the Stan Winston Studio. Winston, the Michelangelo of movie monsters, and his staff of 70 were building dinosaurs for “Jurassic”-not models, but full-size, live-action dinosaurs, including a 40-foot long, 9,000-pound tyrannosaurus rex.
Even before the Michael Crichton novel had been published, Winston was making plans for the largest full-size, live-action creature ever to appear on the large screen. (Spielberg purchased the rights to the Michael Crichton novel before publication and huddled with Winston shortly after.)
In the film, Winston’s creatures interact with the ILM creatures, making “Jurassic Park” a ground-breaking film: model monsters and computer-generated beasts on the screen together.
Winston designed the look of all the dinosaurs in the movie. Spielberg and Winston decided where to use full-size, live-action dinosaurs and when to bring in the technology team from ILM.
“If you can achieve full-size live-action dramatically, if the performance can be dynamic and real and you can do live-action, full-size, you always do it that way,” Winston says.
You won’t find Winston’s work stored in a model shop. “There are absolutely no miniature dinosaurs in `Jurassic Park,’ ” he says. “The closest thing in recent history in size to the dinosaurs in `Jurassic’ was the Queen Alien in `Alien’ that was 14 feet tall and real.”
But Winston refuses to explain the process in detail. “(There are) brand-new technologies, but I won’t talk about them. I don’t believe that that’s what this is about. I don’t believe that if you’re going to see a magic show by David Copperfield that you would want to go into that show before you saw it and ask him how it was done. That takes the magic out. It’s like going into a movie and me telling you the ending.”
Both Winston and the ILM staff insist their best efforts can’t salvage a bad movie.
“It’s important for audiences to know it absolutely comes from the director,” Winston says. “It’s going to be a horrible thing if people go into this movie and come out and go `Gosh, you know what made this movie is the dinosaurs.’ What makes a movie good is the script directed by a good director.”
Jim Morris of ILM agrees: “Jurassic Park will change the palette available to the filmmaker to better tell his or her stories, in much the same way `Star Wars’ changed the sensibility in what filmmakers can do or what tools they have to do it. Maybe even in a more profound way because now you have these organic characters that you create synthetically.
Winston continuously stresses the invisible technology in “Jurassic Park”-that what you see on the screen is what the park creator, John Hammond, wanted in the book: “a world of dinosaurs to entertain the public.”
“We have a world of dinosaurs that live on screen,” Winston says, adding, with a smile: “Now we had to take these actors, the T-rex and raptors and all these dinosaur actors which we created with state-of-the-art technology, and once the wrap party on the movie was done, we had to ship them all to this island off the coast of Costa Rica.”
