Years on, Jurassic Park and Starship Troopers' effects still impress.
Why do they hold up?
For those two-or-so hours, an entire generation believed that dinosaurs were once again walking the earth.
So why do the effects seen inJurassic ParkandStarship Troopersstill look so good today?
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Jurassic Parkhad a lot of Stan Winston creatures in it, Davis says.
Those things always integrate with the lighting in the scenes perfectly because theyre actually there.
So I think those are the best visual effects, probably, that have ever been done.
[Starship Troopers]is a good example of hybrid moviemaking, Davis tells us.
We had prosthetics and they had all the physical effects artists in that movie.
The movie holds up a lot better than movies that have come out since.
The reason for this?
So you have a benchmark you have to hit.
Its like the birth of the rollercoaster ride visual effects movie, right?
So this all happened while we were still at ILM.
But then wed hit 200, and then 300, and wed be saying, Woah!
300 effects shots in a movie!
Then the next thing you know were doing 900, then a thousand.
By the time wed finished the third Star Wars prequel it was over 2,000 shots and we stopped counting!
Terrifyingly, budget and time constraints meant that they only had one chance to get the shot right.
That was definitely one of the most stressful moments of my career.
It was seven months of work leading up to a couple of seconds of shooting.
In so much of computer graphics, you have to go to a huge effort to really do that.
As Fon Davis puts it, You dont want people to think about visual effects.
You want people to care about the characters.
So if were doing our jobs right, we go completely unnoticed.
