New Spielberg Interview Includes Bits on JP1

Was it the original DNA manipulated Jurassic Park, the return of inGen in The Lost-World, or just the worth-wild running around frantically Jurassic Park III that captured your imagination.
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jpIV
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New Spielberg Interview Includes Bits on JP1

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There's a new interview with Steve Spielberg up at Ain't It Cool News. The feature focuses on Jaws (which is great in it's own right), but they veer into Jurassic Park territory for a bit. I've pasted the relevant portion below.

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/49921

"Quint: Losing that creative thinking is something that worries me today when I see so many filmmakers using CG as a crutch. I worry that we lose some of give and take that often times forces creativity. I don’t know if you think about that at all now…

Steven Spielberg: I think that CG is a tool that often becomes a weapon of self-destruction. I certainly have done my share of CG since I was at the forefront of the revolution as a producer of YOUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES, that had the first CG shot ever, and then JURASSIC PARK that the first CG characters ever. Jim Cameron in-between did brilliant CG work on THE ABYSS and then T2…

I’ve actually suffered from the wealth of riches that CG can give a filmmaker to almost over use the technology to get everything out of our brains and on to the screen when sometimes what’s fun is being denied your best ideas and then you’ve got to fall back on a compromise, which often turns out to be an even better idea. I fall victim to that, too.

Quint: I have to say that to this day, for whatever reason… perhaps the combination of the digital effects and Stan Winston’s dinosaurs, but when I watch Jurassic Park I don’t see the CG.

Steven Spielberg: That’s a testament to Dennis Muren, to Phil Tippett and to Stan Winston because the blend between… I mean, 65% of the first Jurassic Park is Stan Winston. I believe there’s only between 58 and 60 digital shots in the whole movie. That’s it. The sequel, that I directed, there were four times more digital shots than that.

In the first film it was actually Stan Winston actually working together with Dennis Muren putting their heads together to try to figure out how to make these blends from mechanical full-sized puppeteering to the digital wider shots.

Quint: Not to diverge too much into Jurassic Park, but there’s something to the personality of the dinosaurs as well. Look at the Raptor scene in the kitchen, for instance. The Raptors have a very stop motion quality, they remind me a lot of Ray Harryhausen’s creatures.

Steven Spielberg: What Ray Harryhausen did, and Ray’s always been a humongous influence on my work and I was so honored to be able to show Ray Harryhausen the very first digital shot that Dennis Muren cranked out as a test. Ray happened to be visiting me that day and I said, “Ray, do you want to see a CG dinosaur?” He said, “Sure,” so he went over to the art department where I was prepping Jurassic Park and I put on the three-quarter inch cassette into the big machine and Ray and I watched the Gallimimus (scene). They were all just rendered as skeletons, they had not been fleshed, but the movement was so smooth that I just got to watch Ray Harryhausen’s face watching the natural evolution from his art to the new era of digital characters.

Harryhausen embraced it immediately as a positive. He wasn’t sad to see the paradigm shift; he was a jubilant as you can imagine a young boy would be. I saw the child in him at that moment, which was for me one of the greatest moments of my life; looking into his eyes as he was watching what Dennis Muren had created.

Quint: I can imagine, man.

Steven Spielberg: What was I talking about before I went into my Ray Harryhausen fugue state? What I was saying was I was inspired by Ray Harryhausen because a lot of Ray Harryhausen’s characters stalked the humans. They just kind of like stalked them and they got into these frozen poses of real frightening imagery. I remembered that and so did Dennis Muren and so did Phil Tippett who really helped Dennis create dinosaurs that were natural and not cinematic."
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