Jurassic Park animatics
Raptor puppets have seen better days.
Foam rubber doesn't last, paint went very dark. Thanks UV light!
What remains of the TRex stop motion puppet...crumbling latex foam rubber over a metal armature.
Foam rubber Trex, sculpted at Stan Winston studio.
Machinist Bart Trickel working on one of the D.I.D's...(Dinosaur Input Device)
Stop Motion animators Tom St Amand and Randy Dutra used these to animate using tradition stop motion skills.
Tippett Studio VFX supervisor Craig Hayes posing with one of the DID's he designed. He won an Oscar for that invention.
Naked velocerapter armature. Hard to nail down who did what on this. Bart Trickel, Tom St Amand and...?
Me and Adam Valdez and additional Winston puppets that were never actually used in the Tippett animatics..
Adam Valdez working on DID animation data of the Tire Bite scene with Phil Tippett. Adam went on to be animation department head at Weta Digital on the Lord of the Rings trilogy and recently won an Oscar for Disney's The Lion King remake. Fancy!
These shots hold up extremely well even today IMO
My friend Scott Leberecht directed this great documentary about those transition days and one of the key players Steve “Spaz” Williams, the guy responsible for Jpark going digital. Highly recommended.
From the olden days! I usually post my own design work of course but this is a little different. I worked at Tippett Studio on Jurassic Park. I was initially hired to make molds and fabricate puppets from Stan Winston Studio's amazing sculpts when the job initially was to be a stop/go-motion project. But soon after getting hired things changed drastically when Spielberg decided to take the plunge into digital effects. The studio quickly retooled and ended up creating stop motion animations of key shots for the film. My job was running foam rubber, roughly painting and then maintaining the puppets. The dino's and the shots we did looked pretty rough, toys for props, quick and dirty human puppets etc; but their only use was to help production plan out the live action and subsequent digital effects to go with them. In the early 90s rendering shots like those in the movie was a completely new thing took ages of computing time, so having these moving story boards proved very helpful to plan carefully. Personally speaking, that experience also marked the beginning of my own transition to digital as well.