Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Video: How Jurassic Park's Life Size T-Rex Was Built By Stan Winston Studios
Bleeding Cool Comic Book, Movies and TV News and Rumors: Steven Spielberg saw the alien queen that Stan Winston studios had made for Aliens and thought it was a simple step from that 14-foot creation to a 20-foot T-Rex for his movie of Jurassic Park.
But as Winston told Cinefex editor Jody Duncan, however, there was quite a gulf between these two commissions
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3 comments:
This is one of the things that I never really think about while watching a movie. It seems that a lot of recent movies use computer technology to make the things that used to be scale models. For example, the article that was posted last semester about the scale model of Hogwarts from the Harry Potter movies. While it would be easy to assume it was a computer generated item, all of the shots of the school were actually camera shots of the scale model. I am extremely impressed that a 20' T-Rex was able to be built for the movie and had as much detail as it did. It was a huge undertaking, and is the kind of detail that can really make or break a movie. Imagine if Jurassic Park had a T-Rex that looked fake and unimpressive. It would have changed the movie completely.
Like Jess, I was also really impressed with the T-Rex that was built for Jurassic Park. Today, almost everything is computer generated. It is really great to read about movies that put so much time and effort into creating real pieces. In a way, Jurassic Park is almost more appealing to be now that I know that the designers and creators of the dinosaurs made all of their pieces from scratch. My brother was obsessed with this movie when he was younger (he literally thought he was a dinosaur after watching it...) I showed him this article and he thought it was so cool. For the kids who grew up watching Jurassic Park, it is really comforting to know that the dinosaurs were not computer generated.
After seeing this, as well as the behind the scenes look at the making of the velociraptor, its sickening to sit here and think about how amazingly and disturbingly far the film industry has come in the last 20 years. I say amazingly far because I cannot deny that technology is a wonderful thing and with it, in theatre and film, we as artists have produced some amazingly work. However, I use the words sickening and disturbing to express my similar distaste for that advancement. It's difficult not to wonder what these amazing artists are doing now, or rather what they aren't, thank to CG. Slightly so, but not entirely unrelated,after some discussion with my colleague Jacob Rothermel we agreed that it would interesting to do a cost/technical analysis of this to try and determine what it cost then compared to what it what cost now to reproduce the T-Rex, both in material form and digitally.
Having said all that, Jurassic Park will forever be one of my favorite movies and I have even more respect for it now than I ever did.
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