T. Rex circling the Land-Rover from one of the planned story board scenes in the movie. Computer animators at ILM, hired to embellish Tippett’s effects, were instead conjuring ways for digital graphics to supplant them. Spielberg had scheduled the computer artists to do only a couple of herd shots, but the results of their experiments knocked him out. He cancelled the go motion. The way Spielberg has told the story, he and Tippett watched tests of computer-generated dinosaurs moving smoothly through bright sunlight. Then Tippett turned to him and said, “I’m extinct.” Cut to 1997 -- and Tippett lives. And thrives: His most recent film Starship Troopers opened with a $22 million opening weekend gross. Tippett described himself as being “physically debilitated” when Spielberg decided to work primarily with computers on Jurassic Park. “It was such a horrendous proposal,” he said. “Basically, everything I’d done practically since I was able to walk was not to be used anymore.” How Tippett got from there to here is the story both of one man’s reinvention of himself, and of his fight to keep movie art in the computer age honest, messy, and true.In the early days of Jurassic Park, there was a terrible crash at the intersection of art and technology. It soon became clear that computer animators weren’t immediately qualified to visualize mammoth reptiles dynamically and persuasively. As Spielberg’s “Dinosaur Supervisor” (as his credit on the film read), Tippett schooled a corps of ILM and Tippett Studio animators in animal motion and behavior, encouraging them to prepare to “play” dinosaurs as actors would, with everything from mime and dance classes to field trips to animal sanctuaries and museums. “Before this,” one ILM animator admitted, “I tended to just move my little mouse around and not use my body.” The ILMe...
