By: Jerry Beck,
on 10/14/2016
Mark Dippé and Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams, who created groundbreaking vfx work on "Jurassic Park," "T2," and "The Abyss," talk about what's different about the vfx industry today.
The post ILM’s Rebel ‘Jurassic Park’ Artists Reflect On The State of VFX Art Today appeared first on Cartoon Brew.
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By: Jerry Beck,
on 6/8/2016
We will all be this lady in a few years.
The post The Future of Animation Is Here appeared first on Cartoon Brew.
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By: Jerry Beck,
on 5/31/2016
"Dragonheart," released twenty years ago this week, was a live-action film that had one of the first digital characters you could believe in. We talk to the ILM artists who created it.
The post An Oral History of ILM’s ‘Dragonheart’ On Its 20th Anniversary appeared first on Cartoon Brew.
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By: Jerry Beck,
on 7/12/2015
George Lucas's groundbreaking visual effects company is celebrated in a new one-hour special on the Science Channel
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By: KatherineS,
on 6/19/2015
The latest incarnation (I chose that word advisedly!) of the Jurassic Park franchise has been breaking box-office records and garnering mixed reviews from the critics. On the positive side the film is regarded as scary, entertaining, and a bit comedic at times (isn't that what most movies are supposed to be?). On the negative side the plot is described as rather 'thin', the human characters two-dimensional, and the scientific content (prehistoric animals) unreliable, inaccurate, or lacking entirely in credibility.
The post The Jurassic world of … dinosaurs? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Heidi MacDonald,
on 6/11/2015
I didn’t have high hopes for Jurassic World. Each attempt to reinvigorate the franchise has failed worse than the last, and despite the glimmer of hope provided by Chris Pratt, I wasn’t buying the raptor-taming, motorcycle-riding persona from the trailers. And while it wasn’t as bad as I had feared, it also wasn’t anywhere near as good it could have been. Basically, there’s not much I can add to the conversation about the quality of Jurassic World that you don’t already suspect. It straddles a line of mediocrity, with some moments of fun and others of absurdity. Stupid/Fun.
To be honest, I spent at least half of the most suspenseful scenes wondering how Bryce Dallas Howard was still running in around high heels, constantly scanning to see if she’d chucked them in favor of going barefoot. It sounds stupid, but if you’ve tried wearing stiletto-style high heels on grass, the practicality of it will eat away at you (apparently the secret is staying on your toes, according to Howard). Spoiler: she never chucks the heels. Ever.
But what struck me most about Jurassic World was how much of a hybrid it is of things I’ve seen before, which makes the entire film’s premise sort of meta. Jurassic World focuses on the business of running a successful dinosaur theme park, and the need to create bigger, better, and scarier dinosaurs to satisfy the demands of the public (read: you, the viewer, are the public). So they make a hybrid dinosaur – actually, several – and splice together components of each that they know work, hoping to create something even more spectacular than the original versions, but missing the mark.
So what elements were cobbled together to make this beast?
Something old
Remnants of the original Jurassic Park are littered throughout the film, with one character literally sporting a t-shirt with the original logo. We see the old jeeps, the old facilities, and constant references to Dr. Hammond. But the formula of the first film is the most recycled item. Two scared kids who are going to get chased by dinosaurs a LOT? Check. Romantically linked man and woman, neither of them parents, charged with saving them? Check. Ridiculously evil dude stealing stuff, e.g. Newman? Check. CEO with a huge vision and complete lack of common sense? Check. The list goes on, and on. And on. Fortunately, in that “something old,” Jurassic World only seems to acknowledge the existence of the first movie, essentially setting itself up as a sequel instead of the fourth in a series.
Something new
Well, attempting to train raptors to do tricks definitely counts as new territory for the film. And there is, of course, a new big bad: Indominus Rex. Genetically engineered to be part T-Rex, part it’s-a-secret, it’s larger and scarier than anything in the original, in theory. While almost every character in Jurassic World maps directly onto a character archetype in the original, Howard’s portrayal of an uptight, by-the-numbers, and cold business woman is fairly unique for the series (and unfortunately probably one of the worst new elements).
Something borrowed
I don’t want to spoil anything outright, but I’ll say this: watch the newest film rendition of Godzilla and watch Jurassic World and you’ll see some clear parallels.
Dr. Wu
Technically, there’s only one single character in the film who actually comes back from the original – Dr. Wu (B.D. Wong), the mad scientist who spearheads the genetic recreations in the first film and continues his work here. He’s back to his old tricks, plugging away at his attempt to play god, and looks like he’s barely aged in the process. It’s kind of incredible. He lands some good lines about the dinosaurs – that since the beginning of the park, they’ve always been hybrids; human idealizations and engineering of what dinosaurs should look like. Wu’s appearance, however, felt like it should have been another “remember Jurassic Park?” type of cameo, but extends further, and eventually goes off the rails into an odd side-plot that feels like it’s there mostly to create fodder for a sequel.
…And Wu rhymes with new? So there you go.
Some of those winks and nods mentioned above do help to increase the fun factor; indeed, they borrow heavily on the huge amount of nostalgic good will built in the first film, reminding you of how good dinosaur movies can be, how incredible it was seeing a dinosaur tear apart a jeep, or how intelligent and menacing raptors can are in this world. And in spite of the wooden acting and bad dialogue, the film doesn’t look half bad. But the formula for Jurassic World relies so heavily on its predecessor, it also succeeds in reminding you that it’s nowhere near as good.
If you see the Jurassic World, watch how the final scenes play out (again with the meta), and you’ll realize the filmmakers know it too.
By: PennyF,
on 12/28/2014
Movie producers have altered the way fairy tales are told, but in what ways have they been able to present an illusion that once existed only in the pages of a story? Below is an excerpt from Marina Warner’s Once Upon a Time that explores the magic that movies bring to the tales:
From the earliest experiments by George Meliès in Paris in the 1890s to the present day dominion of Disney Productions and Pixar, fairy tales have been told in the cinema. The concept of illusion carries two distinct, profound, and contradictory meanings in the medium of film: first, the film itself is an illusion, and, bar a few initiates screaming at the appearance of a moving train in the medium’s earliest viewings, everyone in the cinema knows they are being stunned by wonders wrought by science. All appearances in the cinema are conjured by shadow play and artifice, and technologies ever more skilled at illusion: CGI produces living breathing simulacra—of velociraptors (Jurassic Park), elvish castles (Lord of the Rings), soaring bionicmonsters (Avatar), grotesque and terrifying monsters (the Alien series), while the modern Rapunzel wields her mane like a lasso and a whip, or deploys it to make a footbridge. Such visualizations are designed to stun us, and they succeed: so much is being done for us by animators and filmmakers, there is no room for personal imaginings. The wicked queen in Snow White (1937) has become imprinted, and she keeps those exact features when we return to the story; Ariel, Disney’s flame-haired Little Mermaid, has eclipsed her wispy and poignant predecessors, conjured chiefly by the words of Andersen’s story
A counterpoised form of illusion, however, now flourishes rampantly at the core of fairytale films, and has become central to the realization on screen of the stories, especially in entertainment which aims at a crossover or child audience. Contemporary commercial cinema has continued the Victorian shift from irresponsible amusement to responsible instruction, and kept faith with fairy tales’ protest against existing injustices. Many current family films posit spirited, hopeful alternatives (in Shrek Princess Fiona is podgy, liverish, ugly, and delightful; in Tangled, Rapunzel is a super heroine, brainy and brawny; in the hugely successful Disney film Frozen (2013), inspired by The Snow Queen, the younger sister Anna overcomes ice storms, avalanches, and eternal winter to save Elsa, her elder). Screenwriters display iconoclastic verve, but they are working from the premise that screen illusions have power to become fact. ‘Wishing on a star’ is the ideology of the dreamfactory, and has given rise to indignant critique, that fairy tales peddle empty consumerism and wishful thinking. The writer Terri Windling, who specializes in the genre of teen fantasy, deplores the once prevailing tendency towards positive thinking and sunny success:
The fairy tale journey may look like an outward trek across plains and mountains, through castles and forests, but the actual movement is inward, into the lands of the soul. The dark path of the fairytale forest lies in the shadows of our imagination, the depths of our unconscious. To travel to the wood, to face its dangers, is to emerge transformed by this experience. Particularly for children whose world does not resemble the simplified world of television sit-coms . . . this ability to travel inward, to face fear and transform it, is a skill they will use all their lives. We do children—and ourselves—a grave disservice by censoring the old tales, glossing over the darker passages and ambiguities
Fairy tale and film enjoy a profound affinity because the cinema animates phenomena, no matter how inert; made of light and motion, its illusions match the enchanted animism of fairy tale: animals speak, carpets fly, objects move and act of their own accord. One of the darker forerunners of Mozart’s flute is an uncanny instrument that plays in several ballads and stories: a bone that bears witness to a murder. In the Grimms’ tale, ‘The Singing Bone’, the shepherd who finds it doesn’t react in terror and run, but thinks to himself, ‘What a strange little horn, singing of its own accord like that. I must take it to the king.’ The bone sings out the truth of what happened, and the whole skeleton of the victim is dug up, and his murderer—his elder brother and rival in love—is unmasked, sewn into a sack, and drowned.
This version is less than two pages long: a tiny, supersaturated solution of the Grimms: grotesque and macabre detail, uncanny dynamics of life-in-death, moral piety, and rough justice. But the story also presents a vivid metaphor for film itself: singing bones. (It’s therefore apt, if a little eerie, that the celluloid from which film stock was first made was itself composed of rendered-down bones.)
Early animators’ choice of themes reveals how they responded to a deeply laid sympathy between their medium of film and the uncanny vitality of inert things. Lotte Reiniger, the writer-director of the first full-length animated feature (The Adventures of Prince Achmed), made dazzling ‘shadow puppet’ cartoons inspired by the fairy tales of Grimm, Andersen, and Wilhelm Hauff; she continued making films for over a thirty-year period, first in her native Berlin and later in London, for children’s television. Her Cinderella (1922) is a comic—and grisly— masterpiece.
Early Disney films, made by the man himself, reflect traditional fables’ personification of animals—mice and ducks and cats and foxes; in this century, by contrast, things come to life, no matter how inert they are: computerization observes no boundaries to generating lifelike, kinetic, cybernetic, and virtual reality.
Featured image credit: “Dca animation building” by Carterhawk – Own work. Licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The post Techno-magic: Cinema and fairy tale appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Jerry Beck,
on 7/1/2014
Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park," along with other early-to-mid-Nineties films like "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" and "Toy Story," were all part of a breakthrough era in CGI filmmaking. What many people may not realize, however, is that the decision to create computer-animated dinosaurs wasn't made until the film was well into production.
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By: Greg Leitich Smith,
on 4/3/2013
 |
| Me and Leo |
It is agreed by all living humans that the highlight of the movie Jurassic Park (Universal Studios 1993) was the consumption of the lawyer by the true hero of the movie, Tyrannosaurus rex. This brings up the obvious question: how many lawyers would it take to properly feed a captive T.rex?The answer: it depends on whether a T.rex is endothermic or exothermic (i.e., cold or warm-blooded). Their conclusion? If the T.rex is warm-blooded, 292 lawyers per year. If the T.rex is cold-blooded, 73 lawyers per year. Assuming the average lawyer weighs 150 pounds and weighs around 4.5 tons, that is. Now you know.
By: Greg Leitich Smith,
on 7/23/2011
HarperCollins will publish this November the novel Michael Crichton was working on when he died in 2008.
Described as a "high-concept thriller in the vein of Jurassic Park", Micro is co-written by Richard Preston. It follows a group of graduate students hired to work for a mysterious biotech company specialising in micro-robotics.
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Hmm… No jabs at Universal Studios theme parks, or even Disney or SeaWorld?
No eco-warriors protesting the treatment of the animals?
I’ve been disappointed ever since the first movie. I had read the book, and was aghast that they hadn’t recreated the river rafting sequence from the book. (Tailor made for a theme park!)
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So, compare and contrast with the Aliens series?
How in the world does Dr. Wu, in the first Jurassic Park, qualify as ‘the mad scientist who spearheads the genetic recreations’? How do you interpret that role as anything other than a pretty pleasant lab technician?
I’m not sure a pretty pleasant lab tech would bring T-Rexes or Velociraptors back to life, but your mileage may vary on that.
I dunno, I think Wu has a pretty Frankenstein vibe going on in all of the movies :)
Torsten it definitely makes theme parks look ridiculous, but they don’t really focus on that as much IMO. The jabs focus more on… (spoilers!)
I guess Alien has at least TWO really solid classics, each standing up so well on their own, so it’s got that going for it over Jurassic Park? I’ll be interested to see how the new Terminator movie fares, too. The summer sequel showdown begins!