Visual effects are a big part of movies in a whole. If you walk into a random theater, chances are you will see some sort of visual effect. Visual effects are an important part of movies now because they add something extra to the movie. It gives you a sense of wonder to see something that you don’t normally see in everyday life. whether it be a physical object given live through practical effects or animated and added in with special effects. It could be explosions, to a monster to even the darkness of space and could even be creatures that went extinct millions of years ago and brings them right to the modern age. In this case I’m talking about Jurassic Park. This movie revolutionize film making with its combination of advanced practical effects and new technologies in special effects and CGI. Today we will take a look at one of the greatest film ever made. Welcome to Jurassic Park.
This movie came from one of the greatest minds in film making, a man by the name of Steven Spielberg, who also made Jaws and E.T., and through him he brought dinosaurs back from extinction through some the greatest visual effect of its time. To create most of its movie monsters, they use a new way to animate. Using a combination of Claymation and sensors they made the movement of the creatures feel fluent and natural and after that added in the beautiful textures that at the time made them look lifelike and even still today the animation holds up. in other cases they used amazing animatronics such as the Triceratops scene and some scenes with the T.Rex to give a sense of realism to the creatures and to give the actors something real to interact with. They also blended the two effects in other ways to make it look like the CGI dinosaurs where interacting with the real world. One example was the T.Rex chase scene, where they broke a giant tree in half to make it look like the T.Rex broke through it, or even the skeleton scene towards the end of the movie they make it look like the Velociraptor broke the skeleton to make the actors go spinning.
There were some limitations to the effects they could do and at those points they had to blend both effects together at times because there were times that they couldn’t use puppetry because it would be seen in the shot and times they couldn’t use CGI in order to make the dinosaurs look real. They did hide the limitations of CGI at some points using other effects like rain with the T.Rex scene and speed shot with the Gallimimus scene. With the practical effects they had trouble because of the size of most of the creatures. The T.Rex was only half a body because a full-sized one would weight thousands of pound and they couldn’t make it anyway and in the rain scene they constantly had to stop filming to dry of the massive monster. Practical effect though really brought the creatures to life and made it look like real monsters were causing mayhem and the special effect gave them beautiful movement that they couldn’t get with an animatronic.
Overall the film is a great part of film history and shows the massive potential visual effect have and how far we have come in film making. Every effect is still being used and the effect are still exciting and amazing people young and old and some that have seen the movie hundreds of times and I can attest to that. They used so many effect and made new ones to make this one of the greatest movies of all time and is still bringing wonder to millions. If you have seen it then you know how great the movie is and if you haven’t, what are you waiting for.
Film Appreciation Theodore 