Celluloid Sauropods: A History of Dinosaurs on Film
Birth.Movies.Death. Jurassic Park Commemorative Issue
By Jim Braden @jbraden6
Ever since the identification of dinosaurs in the fossil record, people have been fascinated by the notion of colossal beasts roaming the earth. While museums displaying dino bones have always drawn crowds eager to experience the majesty of these beasts, they couldn’t? satisfy the desire to see the creatures brought to life. It’s no surprise that dinosaurs have been a cinematic obsession from the dawn of motion pictures.
Willis O’Brien was one of the earliest filmmakers to take a serious interest in dinosaurs on film. One of his early films, THE LOST WORLD (1925), was based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel concerning an expedition to a lost valley of dinosaurs and ape men, and the subsequent capture of a brontosaurus. The protagonist brings his prize to London, only for the creature to escape and wreak havoc.
O’Brien created his dinos from thin rubber stretched over metal armatures, then brought them to life via the stop-motion technique, by which models are filmed one frame at a time, with slight adjustments made to the model for each frame to convey movement. THE LOST WORLD was the first feature-length film shot in the United States that featured special effects as the primary visual element, and was a smash hit. In subsequent years, O’Brien would continue to hone his craft with a series of dino-centric films, but his greatest success came in the form of a giant ape named Kong.
KING KONG (1933) represented the ultimate playground for all of O’Brien’s FX techniques, including traveling mattes, rear projection, stop-motion animation and forced-perspective miniature work. His ongoing studies of paleontology prompted him to strive for increased accuracy in depicting his dinosaurs, drawing inspiration from Charles R. Knight’s renowned paintings in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. O’Brien’s models became more elaborate, utilizing foam rubber, cotton and liquid latex for more realistic musculature and skin texture. He even used football bladders inside the models, inflating and deflating them to create the illusion of breathing. The film was an instant classic, and though dinosaurs only appeared in the first half of the picture, Kong’s battle with a Tyrannosaurus was a standout sequence.
O’Brien’s work had a profound effect on audiences, including a young boy named Ray Harryhausen. “I remember vividly my first sight of The Lost World,” Harryhausen recalled. “The main thing that impressed me – I was four or five then – was a big brontosaurus falling off a cliff. I couldn’t believe, at that tender age, that animals like this ever existed. I began to explore paleontology much more.” Harryhausen went to work for O’Brien, serving as an assistant animator on MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949), and eagerly absorbed everything he could from his mentor. Harryhausen ended up doing most of the animation work himself, and the film went on to earn an Oscar for Best Visual Effects.
Harryhausen continued to hone his craft with THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953), the first of the “atomic horror” giant monster films that took over drive-in theaters of the 1950s and 60s. In the film, a mutated dinosaur cuts a swath of destruction through New York City. Harryhausen admits that his primary interest was less science, more spectacle. When called on the inconsistent size of the dinosaurs in his films, Harryhausen brushed it off. “You’re so swept up in the drama that the situation itself intrigues you rather than the visual accuracy.”
To convincingly place the beast in the city, Harryhausen came up with his signature “Dynamation” technique, in which live footage is filmed, then stop-motion elements added to the footage frame by frame. Live actors would pantomime their movements, with the monster later incorporated into the shot in sync with the human elements. This was a huge leap forward in visual effects, and led Harryhausen to move from monsters to mythology with films such as THE SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD (1958) and JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963).
Interest in giant monsters began to wane by the late 1960s, replaced in the popular imagination by robots and spaceships. Phil Tippett was hired to animate creatures for the holographic chess scene in STAR WARS (1977), for which he employed his hero Harryhausen’s stop-motion techniques. When working on THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980), Tippett devised a new method to alleviate the staccato effect endemic to stop-motion. “Go-motion” achieved motion blur by using computers to move a model slightly during the exposure of each frame. Instead of a series of still images, go-motion created a more natural look that enhanced the illusion of life. Tippett employed this technique on the TV documentary DINOSAUR! (1985), which earned him an Emmy.
When Steven Spielberg started pre-production for JURASSIC PARK (1993), Tippett was the obvious choice to provide the dino FX. While Tippett created animatics and built puppets and go-motion setups, ILM was quietly conducting computer animation tests as a proof of concept. When Spielberg saw their CG T-rex footage, it was the death knell of traditional stop- and go-motion animation. “Well, that’s it then,” declared Tippett, “I’m extinct!” But while physical animation was shelved, Spielberg recognized the value in Tippett’s knowledge of animal movements and behavior, and kept him involved in the production. Tippett invented the DID (Direct Input Device) as a form of digital stop-motion, utilizing a physical armature built with encoders at pivot points that translated stop-motion movements into a CG wireframe that could be used as the basis for fully rendered digital dino effects. No one was more impressed with the level of realism than Spielberg himself. “It’s as if I had gone back 65 million years with a 35-millimeter camera and hid behind a tree and shot a brachiosaur walking by.”
In the 25 years since JURASSIC PARK’s release, special effects have only become more impressive and ambitious, as those who work in the field strive for the next evolutionary leap. As the film’s theme park impresario John Hammond says of his failed venture, “Creation is an act of sheer will. Next time, it’ll be flawless.“