I Think I'm Extinct

Phil Tippett had spent twenty years building stop-motion creatures. He'd done the Imperial Walkers in Empire, the chess scene in Star Wars, and the ED-209 in RoboCop. When Steven Spielberg started preproduction on Jurassic Park in 1991, Tippett was hired to handle the long shots — animatronics from Stan Winston's shop for the close-ups, his team's stop-motion for the wider gallops. That was the plan everyone signed off on.

While Tippett was working on tests in his studio, Dennis Muren at Industrial Light & Magic had a few of his computer animators build something on the side. They produced about ten seconds of a Tyrannosaurus walking toward camera in daylight. Muren brought the test to Spielberg's office without warning. Spielberg watched it, called Tippett and Winston in, and screened it again.

Tippett's quote afterward — "I think I'm extinct" — went straight into David Koepp's screenplay. It's the line Sam Neill's Dr. Grant delivers in the film when he sees the live brachiosaurus and realizes everything he's published is wrong: "I think we're out of a job."

Spielberg didn't fire Tippett. He kept him as the show's dinosaur supervisor and asked him to teach the ILM animators how dinosaurs ought to move. Tippett's team then built a piece of hardware called the Dinosaur Input Device — a stop-motion armature wired with sensors, so an animator could pose it the old way and the computer would treat each pose as a keyframe. The motion the audience saw on a 1993 IMAX screen was being driven, frame by frame, by an animator's hands on a metal skeleton.

Jurassic Park released June 11, 1993, with about six minutes of CGI dinosaurs. By the end of the decade, almost no studio film was using stop-motion for creatures anymore.