Jurassic Park

    Jurassic Park, starring Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum, was directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 1993. In Jurassic Park, a large part of the film consists of the main characters running for their lives from several different species of dinosaurs— most notably, the t-rex and the velociraptors. In order to accomplish this, Jurassic Park used CGI combined with stop-motion, and animatronics. The CGI is really impressive for its time, but there are a few things I noticed that pulled me out of the action. Using the scene with the velociraptors in the kitchen as an example, I want to focus on how the team behind the film made the velociraptors appear to be interacting with their environment.
    This one is just an observation, not an actual criticism, but I thought it was interesting that when the velociraptor was opening the door, the door handle’s movement stopped and started in weird places. It reminded me a lot of the claymation style of stop motion, like in The Nightmare Before Christmas. I can’t really explain why, because I don’t have any proof that the door handle was stop motion, but the movement had the same feeling to it as a lot of the movements in that film. Regardless, it really conveyed the idea of the velociraptor figuring out how to open the door.
    After the velociraptors entered the kitchen and were fully visible, they felt very fake to me. I couldn’t quite place why at first. Their graphics weren’t any worse than the t-rex’s had been during its daytime shot, and the animation was still fairly well done. So why did they feel more fake than the t-rex had? I think it’s due to a couple of small things. When the velociraptor jumps up onto the counter, she doesn’t cast any sort of shadow on the surface below her, which is odd considering they took the time to animate her reflection in both countertops. She also slides when she lands, but if the counter really were that slippery, the combination of her weight and her momentum should have either made her legs slide out from underneath her, or  caused her to have slipped off the front of the counter. She’s not animated as grabbing onto the counter or digging her claws in to stabilize herself, so we’re left to assume that magic velociraptor physics kept her from falling. Finally, when she turns to begin walking along the counter, her right foot appears to slide for a moment and doesn’t interact with the surface of the counter the way it should if she were actually pushing against it in order to walk forward, while her left foot almost seems to clip into the pots she knocks off the counter. Really small animation details, but details that caught my subconscious attention and somewhat ruined my immersion nonetheless.
    The last part of this scene that I want to focus on is when the velociraptor knocks a bunch of dishes onto the kids. When her tail hits the tray and the dishes, it’s curved in a hook shape to her right. When her tail moves back the other direction, it retains the hook shape. The whole movement looks very stiff, like someone had a velociraptor tail on a stick, or a puppet of some kind, rather than an actual tail movement. We’re shown throughout the film that the animators are capable of creating lively tail movements that follow a more whip-like flow. That, combined with the way the tail wiggles after hitting the dishes, makes me think the tail isn’t actually CGI. In addition, the position of the velociraptor’s head after the strike seems a bit far away. The movement of her tail doesn’t imply any steps being taken, just that she turned to look from side to side. Why, then, is her head further from the camera than it was before her tail hit the dishes? It gives the appearance that the tail isn’t actually connected to her at all.
    Overall, the CGI really shines during the shots with darker lighting, where texturing issues and small movement details can be obscured. Even during the daytime shots, the combination of texturing and distance from the dinosaurs gives the CGI a realistic enough feeling to be immersive. The details I mentioned above were small and would be easy to overlook for someone who isn’t interested in animation. Jurassic Park’s CGI is exceptionally well done for the time it was created.