Jurassic Park (1993) continues to rule the Jurassic franchise; but one of its best innovations doesn’t hold up the way you think it does. That’s right, I’m going to get blasphemous – Jurassic Park‘s CGI just doesn’t hold up anymore.
The following is an opinion piece and does not reflect the opinions of Naik Media
Greetings, readers! Welcome back to the Naik Media blog! It’s been a while since we last sat down and had a chat, but here we are, back again. Summer is now officially over, and with it, so ends our slate of big-budget Summer blockbusters. One of those that came and went surprisingly quickly was the much-maligned sequel, Jurassic World: Dominion. I saw the movie in a cinema, and even though it isn’t the best Jurassic movie, it got me thinking about one of the biggest complaints about modern cinema as a whole. So, I thought I’d take a bit of time out of the usual Naik Media content and talk to you about something a little left-field – computer generated imagery.
We don’t deal with CGI a lot here at Naik Media – we prefer the good old-fashioned practical ways (or at least I do – Sam). But it’s something I’ve been interested in for a long time but have only just started looking into as a technical exercise, and it’s actually pretty interesting.
One of the granddaddies of the technologies was a little-known film that was released in 1993. One of Steven Spielberg’s lesser-known movies*, Jurassic Park set the standard when it came to computer-generated imagery – forgoing stop-motion effects for dinosaurs rendered almost entirely in a computer, it revolutionised the way filmmakers made films for years – for better or for worse. So, whilst the title of this blog might seem a little dramatic, I’m not here to say that what Jurassic Park did wasn’t ingenious and revolutionary – it absolutely was. But look at any trailers or clips from any of the newer movies in the franchise, and there will invariably be the same comment – “we had better CGI in 1993, this looks worse”. What I am here to say is no we didn’t and no it doesn’t.
*Not really…
CGI is a fairly complicated thing, allowing us to create stunning new worlds, like Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar. But for every Avatar, there’s a Mortal Kombat movie to show you that CGI isn’t for the inexperienced. When done right, it’s unnoticeable, but when done wrong, it sticks out like a badly-rendered thumb. So, with that in mind, let’s talk about Jurassic Park. There are three reasons, in my view, why people who still carry the torch for it as being the pinnacle of great CGI need to let the flame die out (like the franchise, really). Of course, there are more, but here are three reasons I’ve identified:
- Technology has moved on
- CGI is a tool
- Juvenoia
You might be asking “what the hell is he on about?” Well wonder no more. Let’s dig into this in a bit more detail;
Technology has moved on
Back in the ’90’s, CGI was very much in its infancy. In order to generate fantastical elements on screen, you would need to use Harryhousen-esque stop-motion effects (see: Jason and the Argonauts, King Kong, Clash of the Titans, etc). Using innovative rear projection and matte-techniques, images could be created that simply couldn’t be captured on camera. These could be augmented by miniature effects, people in creature costumes or puppets. A mainstay of comping in movies was the humble blue-screen, which at the beginning was an entirely chemical process involving printing a film negative onto a high-contrast black and white negative, filtering out only the blue frequencies, double-exposing onto a colour positive film to create a female matte containing the isolated image. Exposing that onto another high-contrast film created a male matte that when exposed through the female matte onto a third piece of film created the final image. You don’t need to understand any of that, but it’s a fascinating technology that has become easier since the advent of digital chroma-keying.
Blue-screen compositing was developed in the 1930s and is still used today (looking at you George Lucas). But the biggest leap forward in what I call non-real imagery was computer generation (fun fact – the first wholly CGI shot in any movie was in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan – the shot of the Genesis device terraforming a planet, though brief, is arguably the most important shot in modern cinema). In it’s various forms, CGI has been with us for decades, though it was popularised by Dennis Muren and his work with ILM on Jurassic Park. Combined with the superb animatronic work by Stan Winston, dinosaurs were finally realised on screen as photo-real creatures (fun fact #2: Upon seeing the CGI creature tests, Spielberg said to Phil Tippett, who was to create stop-motion creatures, “you’re out of a job”, to which Tippett replied “don’t you mean extinct?”, leading to the exchange between Alan Grant and Ian Malcolm to be written into the movie).
With CGI in its infancy, the filmmakers relied on the fact that no film had ever used CG on the scale that it would be used in the movie to sell the spectacle – and the movie largely succeeds. The initial Brachiosaurus shot will go down in history as being one of the most awe-inspiring in history.
But look again – any CG dinosaur in the movie now looks plasticky – shadows don’t really work, the creature models stretch in unrealistic ways, the lighting is often wrong and in some cases, models are actually missing in certain frames (check out this actual frame from the movie, in which the raptor model vanishes).
Over time, these problems have been solved by technology and the way CGI is used. The issue is, Jurassic Park was one of the first uses of CGI on a large scale – but it was working with what it had. There was no such thing as ambient occlusion*, subsurface scattering**, muscle rigging and the render farms were simply woefully inadequate to produce good renders and specular highlights*** lent a waxy look to the skins of dinosaurs.
*Ambient Occlusion: How exposed a surface is to ambient lighting; the inside of a tube is darker than the outside due to light sources being on the outside; the tube is darker the further into it you look.
** Subsurface scattering: The property of translucent surfaces absorbing, bouncing internally and then emitting light; skin will absorb light and it will bounce around beneath your skin, giving it a glow under strong light.
*** Specular highlights: Bright spots of lights on a surface; wet surfaces have more specular highlights than a dry surface.
Let’s compare a scene from Jurassic Park an another scene from 2018’s Fallen Kingdom:
One thing you’ll notice is how shiny the Brachiosaurus looks in Jurassic Park; the black levels (darkest shadow area) do not match the black levels of the surrounding environment; specular highlights give it a shiny, plastic look, and as it reaches up, the model stretches and deforms. Contrasted with the Fallen Kingdom scene, the model blends in far better. Its lighting matches the scene, and muscular rigs allow the skin to stretch whilst sub-layers move independently, giving it far greater anatomically-correct movement.
Of course, there are other factors at play here; modern day render engines allow for more intense, realistic renders, and the animation of the model also varies – in my opinion, Fallen Kingdom does it better.
CGI is a Tool
You’ll be pleased to know that that’s broadly the end of the heavy stuff. Let’s take a quick dive into CGI as a tool; I always have been, and always will be, a proponent for practical effects in cinema. I think it’s way too easy to say let’s fix it in post, or have an actor respond to something you’ll just put in later. But like everything in filmmaking (apart from Michael Bay, perhaps), CGI has a place. It’s another tool in the filmmaking toolkit, something to use if there is literally no other way – but like any tool, you need to know how and when to use it. Give a baby a hammer and a nail, and they’ll inevitably poke your eye out with the nail and break your toe with the hammer. But give them to a builder, and you’ll have a house in no time (or something like that).
Knowing when to use CGI is as important as knowing how to use it; the Jurassic Park team did a great job balancing the when; blended with practical effects, they found a way to use CGI minimally but effectively; it might surprise you to know, but Park had a full six minutes of CGI work in the 120 minute runtime. Contrast that with 2015’s Jurassic World, which might as well have been an animated movie. In that case, only one dinosaur was created with animatronics and even that gave the baby in American Sniper a run for its money as the worst puppet committed to film in the last ten years.
But what the CGI gets right in later Jurassic movies is that the crews behind them have a much better understanding of the technology; creatures are more detailed, more realistically modelled, and even though their use is more prevalent, the understanding behind the technology is so much further along. Of course, the OG Park crew aren’t exactly to blame here; they were innovators, whilst newer artists (to paraphrase Ian Malcolm) stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something. Or something like that…
Finally, let’s talk a bit of psychology.
Juvenoia…
…is almost another word for nostalgia. Juvenoia is, as a literal definition, the aversion to something new; to put it simply, the idea that things were better in the good old days. But I think it has something to do with CGI as well.
This may be where you start to think my god, he’s scraping the barrel here. But bear with me…
I was born in 1997, which puts me as relatively young – I certainly wasn’t around when Jurassic Park came along, so perhaps I don’t see it in the same way as others do. I certainly appreciate it as the revolution in filmmaking that it is, and it is objectively better than any instalment that came after it. But I guess I never got to see a real-life dinosaur on screen in a way I’d never seen one before; CGI-heavy movies have exploded onto the scene and it has seen increasing use in superhero movies and big blockbusters, so I’ve been rather spoiled for choice. I’ve seen so many movies with CGI that is objectively an improvement over the CG in JP, so perhaps to me it looks a little outdated.
The converse is also true; you lucky ones who got to see that Brachiosaurus in a cinema for the first time would have been quite rightly in awe of the spectacle, realising that something special was up there without knowing how it would revolutionise the industry. Maybe that’s why it’s held on such a high pedestal; it’s the first use of CGI on a big scale, even though, as with most pioneering efforts, it’s been surpassed by something better and let’s be honest, nobody really likes being told something they love isn’t actually that great anymore.
Let me leave you with this; the last five Jurassic movies haven’t been that great. They’re thinly written, the characters haven’t been that interesting and they just haven’t been quite as magical as the first. But how do you define ‘magical’? Maybe it’s the way the movie makes you feel; maybe it isn’t that ‘CGI was better in the good old days’, it’s just that the films were?
What do you think? Let us know in the comments if you agree or disagree and be sure to let us know which Jurassic Park movie was your favourite!