Yep, Trenchfoot beat me to it.
"I think I'm extinct.", at least according to the making of.
From a recent interview with Cinefex:
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With the T-rex test, ILM had gone a long way toward rendering a monster; and it convinced Spielberg that all the non-practical dinosaur shots could be done through computer animation. Stop- and go-motion techniques - and, presumably Tippett Studio - were out. "That was a really excruciating moment," recalled Jules Roman. "We knew that ILM was exploring computer graphics, of course, and we knew it was coming along; but we had no idea it was moving along to the point where they could use it for the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. But they produced this T-rex test and that was it. It was [ILM's] poor Dennis [Muren] who had to make the call to Phil; and Phil's immediate response was: "Well, that's it then. I'm a dinosaur."
"My first reaction," Tippett affirmed, "was: 'Fine, I guess I'll just go off and die. Screw you guys.' And then I got really sick. I contracted pneumonia, and my doctor said: 'You have two choices - either you go into the hospital, or you go home and go to bed for three weeks.' So I went to bed. It was just a total physical and emotional implosion."
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BTW, Jules Roman is the co-founder of Tippett Studio, alongside Phil Tippett, of course.
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Originally Posted by Crispy Onion
I wish the DID's would be used today, or even if they just could do some research on living animals.
Today, whenever you see ILM animating something in a Making-Of they're just stupidly smirking and telling everyone how easy this stuff is.
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You make it sound like no studio does research anymore. To me WETA is the new ILM, and just look at what amazing animation they did on "King Kong".
I just think that most movies today are focusing less on "animals" and more on "monsters" nowadays, something that "Jurassic Park" deliberately wanted to avoid. And as always you have to consider that JP featured only around 10 minutes of CG dinosaurs, so years of research went into making these 10 minutes as believable as possible. Now, with CG being everyday's business, it would help to train new animators better. And still: The lack in quality of CG effects is - in my opinion - due to time and budget constrains. CG is now the "cheap" way to do it, while back then it was the "state of the art" way, which produced the most stunningly realistic results.
What helped JP mostly though, isn't the use of the DID itself, but the fact that the DID allowed the best animators in the world (who didn't know anything about animating inside a computer) to animate those dinosaurs. As always: It's not the tools, it's the artists behind the tools.