In 1993, dinosaurs were born. Not in real life, of course—those have been extinct for millions of years. However, with the release of the 1993 film Jurassic Park, the modern image of dinosaurs came to life in the public’s imagination. In the film, scientists discover how to clone dinosaurs using new gene technology. Character John Hammond capitalizes on this opportunity by creating a dinosaur theme park—an island full of living dinosaurs. When the security grid fails, dinosaurs try to kill the cast of characters. As the surviving characters escape the island, Hammond finally accepts that his park, though scientifically innovative, is too dangerous. Jurassic Park’s story is entertaining, but the film’s realistic dinosaur depictions were revolutionary. In past films, such as King Kong (1933) where Kong and a Tyrannosaurus fight, dinosaurs had strange pimpled appearances, stiff movements, and fantasy-like roars (The Making 00:06:30-06:46). Though Director Steven Spielberg was inspired by King Kong to direct Jurassic Park, he strived to improve special effects in his film (00:07:04-07:13). Through Spielberg and his effect team’s efforts, Jurassic Park won three Oscars in 1994: Best Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing, and Best Visual Effects (“Jurassic Park Awards”). Nearly three decades earlier, writer and critic Susan Sontag published a short essay called “Against Interpretation.” In the essay, Sontag details that when the audience over-interpret an artwork’s content to create alternate meanings, they “destroy” the artwork (4). To avoid over-interpretation, Sontag suggests that audiences should focus more on an artwork’s form, such as how it is made (8). According to Sontag, focusing on form will “recover [the audience’s] senses” and teach the audience “to see more, to hear more, to feel more” (10). In “Against Interpretation,” Sontag specifically addresses the audience, but the special effects in Jurassic Park bring creators into the spotlight as well. Jurassic Park’s robotic animatronics, computer-generated imagery, and sound design extend Sontag’s argument by demonstrating how Spielberg and the special effects team’s focus on form stimulates the audience’s senses to bring dinosaurs to life.
For Jurassic Park’s visual effects, creating robotic animatronics was the critical first step to designing realistic-looking dinosaurs and allowing physical interactions between the dinosaurs and the actors. In The Making of Jurassic Park documentary, special effects artists sculpted life-sized dinosaur models in great detail, carefully adding texture to the skin and creases around the eyes (00:09:20-09:29). Molds of the models were taken to make the skin of robotic animatronics. Stan Winston, the special effects artist in charge of the live-action dinosaurs, emphasized, “If [the dinosaurs] didn’t look real—if you didn’t believe […] everything about them—no matter how good the performances were, they wouldn’t be real” (00:09:18-09:30). Creating animatronics forced artists to think about how dinosaurs would exist in a physical space, such as their size and anatomy. As seen in the documentary, working on physical models also allowed artists to zero in on the minute details of the dinosaurs’ appearances from all angles. If dinosaurs didn’t look real in real life, how could they look real on screen? Animatronics helped artists lay the foundation for making the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park more realistic to the audience’s visual senses. With that, the audience can “see more” and “feel more” of the dinosaurs in the film, as Sontag wished (10). In addition to making the look of the dinosaurs realistic, robotic animatronics created the ability for the actors to physically touch the dinosaurs. For example, in the Jurassic Park film, the cast of characters stumble upon a sick Triceratops shortly after arriving on the island. The paleontologists touch the dinosaur’s face, tongue, and horns in awe (Jurassic Park 00:50:05-50:57). The male paleontologist, Alan Grant, even lays his upper body on top of the Triceratops’s body to feel its chest move as it breathes (00:51:12-51:17). The many physical interactions between the actors and the Triceratops grounds the dinosaur in reality. Especially in a time of unrefined computer-generated imagery, if something looked real and could be touched on screen, it was more believable to be real. Jurassic Park’s robotic animatronics were foundational in manipulating the audience’s sight into believing the dinosaurs on screen, which reinforces Sontag’s argument about the connection between form and the audience’s senses. However, the animatronics’ effects also highlight the artists’ role in making the dinosaurs look real in the first place.
In addition to robotic animatronics, the special effects team’s development of computer-generated imagery techniques makes dinosaur movements and behaviors realistic, which expands the life-like visual experience of the dinosaurs for the audience. Computer-generated imagery (CGI) is computer graphics that digitally renders media. Mark A.Z. Dippé, Jurassic Park’s visual effects co-supervisor, claimed that no movie has created a living creature on screen using CGI before Jurassic Park (The Making 00:16:06-16:17). To recreate living creatures, the computer graphics team reviewed footage of running ostriches (00:35:23-35:37), recorded themselves jumping over a log (00:33:45-34:14), and took mime classes before creating the Gallimimus stampede in the film (00:33:21-33:29). Eric Armstrong, a computer graphics animator for the film, explained, “Taking those classes helped us be aware of what we were doing, how we were moving, and how our foot moves when we take a step. Those are things the animator has to think about, because those are the things they have to duplicate to get reality” (00:33:30-33:43). And reality, Jurassic Park achieves. Basing the dinosaurs’ movements on animal and human movements caused the Gallimimus’s run to look more natural to the audience, not fantastical. Studying animal and human movements also helped the computer graphics team make the dinosaurs’ movements smooth, not stiff and jerky like how the Tyrannosaurus was in King Kong. Although the audience may not consciously recognize why these dinosaurs’ movements are extraordinary, they can subconsciously “feel more” of the dinosaurs’ realism (Sontag 10). After the Gallimimus stampede, the Tyrannosaurus catches a Gallimimus in its jaws, shakes it around, and kills it by ripping its spine out (Jurassic Park 01:35:23-35:32). When discussing the Tyrannosaurus animatronic, Winston mentioned that weight change affected the movements, causing the animatronic to shake abnormally (The Making 00:28:15-28:36). But if dinosaurs were alive, they would interact with each other all the time, such as the predator-prey relationship shown in the Gallimimus and Tyrannosaurus sequence. The computer animation team used CGI to avoid the consequences of weight change when the Tyrannosaurus picked up and killed the Gallimimus, allowing dinosaurs to behave realistically. When the Tyrannosaurus first broke out of containment earlier in the film, it also killed Donald Gennaro, the lawyer evaluating the safety of Jurassic Park. The Tyrannosaurus smashes the outhouse that Gennaro hid in, chomps down on the upper half of Gennaro’s body, and swings him around in the air (Jurassic Park 01:07:45-07:55). According to Alex Seiden, the computer graphics supervisor, the scene is half real and half CGI. Gennaro’s actor is real until the fully CGI Tyrannosaurus bites him, at which point the character also becomes CGI (The Making 00:44:28-44:37). If the Jurassic Park special effects team only stuck to animatronics, they would be drastically limited to what movements the dinosaurs and humans in the film could do. But CGI allows the actions of the Tyrannosaurus to reflect the realistic behavior of an apex predator. By using CGI, the Tyrannosaurus avoids the consequences of weight change when picking another creature up once again. Not using the real actor in this scene is also critical to preventing injuries, since the character is wildly swung around. Because CGI was critical for creating believable dinosaur movements and behaviors, Jurassic Park supports Sontag’s argument of how impactful form can be on the audience’s senses. But innovating CGI instead of sticking to traditional technologies was a significant decision that Spielberg and his effects team made to bring the dinosaurs alive on screen, proving that the creators’ attention to form is just as important as the audience’s.
Even with visual effects like animatronics and CGI, dinosaurs wouldn’t truly be believable until the Jurassic Park team added sound. Sound effects help animate the dinosaurs and allow the audience to become emotionally attuned to the film scenes. Unfortunately, paleontologists don’t know how dinosaurs sound, as vocal cords don’t fossilize. Gary Rydstrom, a sound designer for the film, explained, “The directions we got [from Spielberg] were the same that the visual effect people got, which was to make [the dinosaur] like an animal” (The Making 00:40:19-40:25). Spielberg added that he wanted sounds that weren’t similar to “Godzilla or Rodan” (00:40:26-40:30). So the Jurassic Park’s sound design team recorded animal sounds and combined them in unique ways to get dinosaur sounds (00:40:44-40:49). For example, in the scenes where antagonist Dennis Nedry comes face-to-face with the Dilophosaurus and its venomous spit, the dinosaur’s roar included swan calls, hawk screeches, rattlesnake rattle, and howler monkey roars (00:40:50-40:59). Even though audience members may not be able to identify what animal sounds are in the dinosaur roars, if they “hear more,” they may notice that the roars are not fantastical (Sontag 10). By not using fantastical sounds, Spielberg and the sound team avoid causing the audience to associate Jurassic Park dinosaurs with the unrealistic fantasy monsters in other films. Through basing the dinosaur sounds on real animals, Spielberg takes a step to further ground dinosaurs into reality. In addition, choosing which animal sounds to include for the Dilophosaurus was important for invoking the right emotions in the audience for the scene. The sounds that the sound design team settled on were screeching and piercing noises, which helps provide a sense of fear for the audience during this dangerous scenario with a venom-spitting dinosaur. Jurassic Park’s dinosaur sound design adds the last dimension of realism and influences the audience’s emotions, demonstrating the relationship between form and the audience’s senses identified by Sontag. Ultimately, though, Spielberg and the sound design team were the ones who carefully determined the sound effects, showing that creators must pay attention to form too.
The form of Jurassic Park, or the methods used by the special effects team, brought dinosaurs back from extinction. Jurassic Park’s depiction of dinosaurs had widespread effects. Watching Jurassic Park was the first time people saw realistic dinosaurs on screen, which “created a new baseline for what dinosaurs were and how they acted” (Black). Because of these realistic depictions, audience members became fascinated with dinosaurs. This fascination revived paleontology by boosting the number of people going into the field, getting more funds for the field, and improving technology in the field (Cummings and Zoledziowski). Not only did Jurassic Park impact the public perception of dinosaurs, its special effects revolutionized the film industry. Most significantly, Jurassic Park’s use of CGI to create living creatures was the first of its kind, expanding the potential of what CGI can create in film. Sontag argues that form influences the audience’s senses, and the huge impact of Jurassic Park demonstrates how significant this relationship is. Sontag also recognizes the variety of forms in film, pointing out that “cinema, unlike the novel, possesses a vocabulary of forms” (8). However, she does not connect form to the creators behind the scene. On the other hand, Jurassic Park’s special effects emphasize the role of the creator, showing how creators hold the power to utilize form in a transformative way. Without Spielberg’s and the special effects team’s dedication to realism and innovation, the form of Jurassic Park would not be as influential, no matter how much the audience pays attention to it. As a result, the making of Jurassic Park highlights how creators—not just the audience—need to focus more on the form of their artwork, especially if they want to transform the audience’s sensory experience.
Works Cited
Black, Riley. “Why Do We Keep Going Back to Jurassic Park?.” Smithsonian Magazine, 25 Oct. 2011, www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-do-we-keep-going-back-to-jurassic-park-117247927/. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
Cummings, Madeleine, and Anya Zoledziowski. “The ‘Jurassic Park Effect’: How a Generation Fell in Love with Dinosaurs.” CBC News, CBC, 29 Aug. 2019, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/jurassic-park-effect-alberta-1.5264341. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
Jurassic Park. Directed by Steven Spielberg, performances by Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Richard Attenborough, Martin Ferrero, and Wayne Knight, Universal Pictures, 1993.
“Jurassic Park Awards.” IMDb, www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/awards/. Accessed 17 Oct. 2024.
Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” Against Interpretation, Picador, 1966, pp. 1-10.
The Making of Jurassic Park. Directed by John Schultz, DailyMotion, 2015.