Transcript of Episode 021 June 2015

The Optical episode 021, transcript v02, 2015-07-03

Jody Duncan: This is Jody Duncan, editor of Cinefex Magazine and you are listening to The Optical.

Mark Boszko: Welcome to episode 021 of The Optical podcast where we’re revisiting the history of VFX films and movie technology through the lens of Cinefex Magazine. I’ve almost got that memorized. Thanks to Cinefex for providing us access to their out of print back issues and tune for your chance to win a one year print subscription to Cinefex Magazine later in the show.

If you haven’t yet, check out the latest issue of our newsletter at news.opticalpodcast.com where we’re posting interesting links about VFX and film technology, and you can subscribe right from that page. This episode we’re jumping ahead a bit to talk about {{film:jurassic-park-1993}} and {{film:jurassic-world-2015}} and how visual effects have evolved in the time between the two.

Joining us will be editor of Cinefex Magazine, {{person:jody-duncan}}, who not only wrote the Cinefex articles and the making of books for the first two Jurassic films plus the article for this new one, but also has been involved with Cinefex Magazine from the very beginning.

Narrator, Jurassic Park teaser trailer: The first discovery was made in the spring of 1990. From a mine in South America came a piece of amber containing the fossilized remains of a pre-historic mosquito, one of many that had fed upon the blood of dinosaurs. From the DNA of that blood, science was able to recreate those giants and for the first time, man and dinosaur shared the earth. It happened at a place called Jurassic Park. This summer, Director Steven Spielberg will take you there.

Mark Boszko: We had a small glitch in first few minutes of the podcast recording, so we’re going to jump right in where Jody was telling me about how Mark Dippe at ILM really helped her understand how the new digital effects technology of Jurassic Park worked.

Jody Duncan: He just broke it down into its components. Here’s a model. Here’s how you build a model. I remember there was things called Sock, which is how you make all the different parts of the model stick together and then Enveloping, which is what they called it in the early days, at ILM anyway, to give the outward appearance. He explained shaders and texturing and animation. He just broke it down into all of its separate components, like a recipe for baking a coconut cream pie or something. [laughter] That I could understand.

Mark Boszko: Yeah. I was really curious at reading the original book, The Making of Jurassic Park, and the articles in Cinefex. It seems like Sock was taking a point cloud, what would be called a point cloud now, and creating a surfaced model out of that. Enveloping was actually like taking all those pieces and then creating a skin over top of them.

Jody Duncan: Yeah, kind of like that. That’s probably the simple way to put it.

Mark Boszko: That’s how they would do the muscles underneath the skin for the dinosaurs and such.

Jody Duncan: Right. It was all so labor intensive which makes those 57 CG shots in Jurassic Park all the more amazing because this was labor intensive stuff. I remember the T-Rex animator, Steve Williams, saying that he spent everyday all day trying to make the skin on the ass of a dinosaur jiggle, which he did not find terribly rewarding, as I recall.

Mark Boszko: No? I watched the original Jurassic Park and then watched Jurassic World again yesterday. In the original, as things have gotten more sophisticated, I can pick put now which shots are the CGI shots and the difference in the level of detail in the way that it’s textured and things like that, but it still holds up remarkably well.

Jody Duncan: You know that’s always what amazes me when I watch it too. I tend to tune into at least part of it whenever it shows up on TV. I’m astonished at how well those dinosaurs hold up. It’s really amazing. You’d think that they’d look absolutely terrible. Someone pointed out, I heard someone being interviewed the other day about the new Jurassic World and they made the point that what really dates Jurassic Park is the little girl saying, “What’s the name of that program? I know this program.”

Mark Boszko: “This is a Unix system! I know this!”

Jody Duncan: Yes, exactly. They said that actually dates the movie more than the CGI dinosaurs too. Just true.

Mark Boszko: There’s a lot of stuff that’s Unix now. Your Mac is based on Unix. There’s a dozen different splintered names for it now. She would have said it’s a Linux system or it’s a free BSTs.

Jody Duncan: Right, exactly. It’s the nomenclature that’s changed, basically.

Mark Boszko: It’s interesting to see too that my daughter saw the new Jurassic World with me and we were talking a little bit about the effects of the original Jurassic Park and she, I think, just automatically assumes that everything is CG and didn’t realize that so much of the dinosaur footage that’s in Jurassic Park is actual, physical stuff whether it’s animatronics or a guy in a suit or a puppet, whatever it is. Like you said, there’s only 57 shots that are digital in that film. How many shots are in the — did they break that out, like dinosaur shots that are in Jurassic World?

Jody Duncan: Oh gosh, I think it’s just under … man, I should’ve known you were going to ask me that. I don’t remember but it’s hundreds and hundreds. I’ll feel safe saying that. I think it’s close to 3,000 visual effect shots but of course a lot of that is environment stuff and things like that. Actual dinosaur shots, I don’t think they broke that down, but it’s a lot of them.

Even they said that was something that was interesting when I started interviewing people for the Jurassic World article for Cinefex, I went into it thinking, “Well, this is a whole new generation for one thing.” There are a few people that had worked on the original Jurassic Park that were still there for this, but most were younger people or hadn’t been at ILM at the time.

I thought I really went in thinking they were going to [diss 00:07:26] Jurassic Park, to tell you the truth. That they’d be, “Oh, we can do so much more with our dinosaurs now than they could do back then.” I was very pleasantly surprised that it was just the opposite. They all had such respect for Jurassic Park. They all remembered where they were and where they saw it and the impact it had on them. There was such respect for it. It was very nice. Their main thing was they just didn’t want to screw it up. They weren’t being all arrogant about, “Oh well, look what we can do now.” Rather, they just want to make sure they did the original justice really.

Mark Boszko: I found it interesting that the plot of Jurassic World seem to very closely mirror the plot of the original Jurassic Park with the addition of well, they have actually successfully opened the park and had 20,000 people there before things went horribly wrong.

Jody Duncan: Right. Yes.

Mark Boszko: It was interesting to see the differences and how things may play out.

Jody Duncan: Right. You’re right. I don’t want to use the word formula in a bad way, because I don’t mean it in a bad way, but when there are certain story beats that work so well hitting them in the first … One thing that is made clear in the original Jurassic Park book, I mean the Making of book, is how hard it was the come up with that script. Michael Crichton took a stab at it. They brought in another writer took a stab at it.

I mean, for a long time, for months and months and months and then finally David Koepp who finally cracked it. It’s not like it was easy coming up with that translation from Crichton’s novel to the screen to begin with. I think once they found the formula that worked that they were very wise to return those elements for Jurassic World.

Mark Boszko: Yeah. I certainly don’t mean that it’s exactly the same plot or anything.

Jody Duncan: No, of course not.

Mark Boszko: It’s just there are the big story beats that they seem to come together on.

Jody Duncan: Right.

Mark Boszko: Going back for a moment to talking about what was animatronics or puppetry versus what was CG, I was really surprised to find, in reading your article in the new Cinefex, that in Jurassic World there was only one dinosaur that was a practical effect.

Jody Duncan: In Jurassic World, yes. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mark Boszko: There’s one dinosaur that they’re in contact with for a long time, actually touching, and I understand that. If you’ve seen from the trailers you know that they’re interacting with raptors and there are some point where they have the raptors in these muscles that I really thought that was a practical dinosaur because they’re stroking its muscle and part of this training deal. I had no idea that was a CG. That really did fool me.

Going back the second time to see the film after reading your article, I’m trying to pick out, okay what is going on here that is not … where does the physicality break at all? It was very, very hard to find. There’s maybe finger dips into a point where I would think an actual physical model you would have a hard surface there, but it was very, very hard to see and they did an amazing job with that.

Jody Duncan: Right. If you’ll recall from the article, I think this made it into the final draft. They actually had a pretty hard time with that. They’d add some kind of physical harnesses and muscles and then to try to squeeze that digital character into that to make it look like there was actually tension and it was pulling on it and all of that was pretty tricky for them and I think at some cases they did just have to finally go to a digital muscle as well. They tried to make that connection between the digital character and something that was physically there on set and it was pretty tricky.

As far as just in general how few practical effects they used, they used them a lot for reference and for lighting and all of that, but that’s just the way of the visual effects world now, isn’t it? From the time of Jaws and the Dino De Laurentiis King Kong, having practical things on set is time consuming and even the best it’s just the nature of things. Most directors, with very few exceptions, just don’t want to be bothered with that on the day they’re trying to get through so many pages.

It’s so much easier and it’s so tempting to say, “We’ll worry about this in post.” It’s like a time credit card in a way. It’s like, “I don’t have the money for this now. I’ll just put it on my credit card and worry about it later,” and that’s what they do. It’s like, “I don’t have time to deal with this creature physically right now. Let me get through my day and we’ll worry about that later at the other end.” I think there’s a price paid for that sometimes.

Mark Boszko: Do you feel it not harmful, but do you think it’s to the detriment of some films not to have a physical item?

Jody Duncan: Sometimes I think it is. I think it’s to the detriment of actors. I remember when I was working on one of the books for one of the new Star Wars movies. By new, not part of the original trilogy is what I mean.

Mark Boszko: The prequel trilogy.

Jody Duncan: I know that’s why Christopher Nolan likes [inaudible 00:13:57] to use miniatures and use practical effects as much as he can in his movies because it’s better for the actors. Everything has to be so planned if it’s going to be digital because you’ve got to stick to certain camera angles and all of that. If it’s a practical effect that’s actually there they can maybe get an idea they haven’t thought of before and work on the fly and they can frame at it and shoot it however they want because it’s actually there. Yeah, I think there is a downside.

Mark Boszko: It seems to have been that maybe even just in the last year or so there seems to be a bit of a public backlash against CG and that there are people that are actively seeking out films that use practical effects and there’s been a compilation or two on YouTube where people are putting together. This is why CG is terrible now. It’s unrealistic physics.” It just seems like I’m not sure why people are getting a bit vitriolic about that because none of this is going to be precisely real anyway because well, dinosaurs and orcs and stuff. I wonder do you think there’s been these movements to criticize CG as something that’s maybe too easy or not being realistic enough?

Jody Duncan: I think anyone who thinks it’s too easy are not realistic enough for one thing that’s ridiculous because I mean, really, I know it’s much beloved and all of that, but you compare some of the Ray Harryhausen stuff and compare it to Jurassic World as far as creatures go, there’s no comparison into what looks real. There is a fondness for it. I’m sure that when the model T came up there were people complaining that horse and buggies were better too, you know.

It’s weird. You know Cinefex, we are on Facebook and things like that. We are the targets of a lot of whining and complaining about CGI. Almost like they get mad at us, but it’s like what are we supposed to do? That’s where the visual effects industry went. As a writer, of course it’s more interesting for me to be able to write about physical things. It’s pretty difficult to write stories about people who are sitting in rooms that, as one visual effects supervisor said once, basically look like typing pools.

It’s a lot more fun to see John Rosengrant in a raptor suite and see him doing that sort of thing. I understand that it was more fun and interesting, but this is where it’s gone and I think modern day audiences, the same people who complain about this in many cases, would not put up with the suspension of disbelief you had to do think that some of the early stop motion stuff and everything to think that that was really real.

Also I think there’s just a certain, people who are fans. I just think it makes them sad to see that art form fade away. It makes me sad to see that art form fade away. I do think maybe there’s a little bit of resurgence of it though. Tom and Alec at ADI have recently made movies specifically to do practical effects and sets their background. I do think there’s a resurgence of it.

Mark Boszko: I can see some of the very smaller complaints about like maybe the physics looks a little world when Legolas is jumping over the falling bricks and stuff and things like that. Yeah, I just don’t get why people get so upset about it. I think it’s fascinating to see, as we’ve been going back through this history a bit, how computers did creep in pretty early and how they interacted with the physical stuff creating go motion and things like that where they’re working together and it’s not just computers came in and pushed out everything else. It’s been an evolution and they’ve worked together for a long time.

Jody Duncan: Right. Actually, it was a pretty short period though, unless you want to count motion control and that sort of thing. Really, like the DID, the dinosaur input device, that they created for Jurassic Park which was a way to use the skills of stop motion animators at Phil Tippett’s company because they still had a little puppet that they could move but then that movement was translated into the movement of the computer character in the computer. They only use that for Jurassic Park. I don’t even think by the time they got to Jurassic World they took that intermediate step. In that regard, the [pandum 00:19:45] tracks did not last really very long, it just became simpler to go straight to the computer in a lot of ways.

Mark Boszko: Yeah, I was curious about that. I wondered if other people had used that or they wouldn’t. I’m guessing that it was [inaudible 00:20:00] expensive thing because they built a custom input device for each dinosaur, didn’t they?

Jody Duncan: Right or for the ones that they were doing. That wasn’t for every dinosaur, but yeah. No, I mean not even every dinosaur in the movie but I think the T-Rex, I think, and the raptors possibly. It was probably though a very good, I’m not saying it was a wasted effort because it was a very good transitional device because here you have these animators with all of these animation skills but they had only worked by moving puppets for stop motion or go motion, right? How do you extract the talents of those people and make it work in a computer situation?

It was good for making that transition. Of course, after that animators who were going to be in this field at all just learned to do animation on the computer to begin with. Here you were dealing with all of these people, Randy Dutra and Tom St. Amand and Phil Tippett who had only worked in stop motion. They didn’t have a clue how to animate in a computer. It was certainly useful to make that transition until we had a pool of animators who knew how to animate directly in the computer.

Mark Boszko: The small step from Jurassic Park to the Lost World, what were the advances that happened between those two?

Jody Duncan: Speed was always the early problem. The speed at which you could render something because in the old days it just took forever. It would take days and days and says sometimes to render something and then until it’s rendered you can’t really look at it and then you see it rendered in what you thought was okay animation when it was still in its kind of point patch match form. Once you saw it rendered you see there’s problems with skin hair and there’s problems there, so then they’d have to make those adjustments and then re-render it and spend all kinds of time waiting to get that back. It’s a very slow process.

I think, I don’t know how much specifically the speed capabilities had increased I guess it was four or five years, between Jurassic Park and Lost World, but I know that that was something they were all working on early on and the faster they could make it, the better it was for the whole process. I would imagine that was just the speed at which they could render.

Also, you know, what happened pretty quickly too was that initially, everyone had this million dollar silicon graphic machines to do this work on and I remember Dennis Muren saying that he wasn’t surprised that visual effects went all digital, but what he was surprised was how quickly it went from silicon graphics type huge, you had to be a big company to even afford this thing, to what were basically personal computers. It didn’t take long before that leap was made and I would imagine more of the work on Lost World was done on what were the equivalent of personal computers than what had been done on Jurassic Park.

Mark Boszko: Were they already able to see a preview as they’re animating of the way the shading was and everything? Are they still working on wire frames at that point?

Jody Duncan: Pretty much working with wire frames early on, yeah. Absolutely. Which of course you can imagine, something may look a certain a way in wire frame form but it’s not going to look the same once it’s all skinned and textured and all of that.

Mark Boszko: Right. My understanding is on Jurassic Park they had very basic bump mapping. It wouldn’t actually distort the skin but as light is falling on it, it would calculate the way it would look if there was texture there, but if you look at the very edge of the creature it might look a little smoother than you would otherwise expect because it didn’t actually affect the geometry. By the time of the Lost World they had some form of distortion mapping, I believe.

Jody Duncan: Yes. I think they did, yeah.

Mark Boszko: It was even more detailed and more realistic in the way the textures would interact with the light.

Jody Duncan: Right. Still of course now with Jurassic World I think Tim Alexander, the visual effects supervisor, said to me that that’s really where the improvements are is just how it looks. I mean, as far as the animation goes, even when you look at Jurassic Park, as far as how the thing is moving, that’s pretty dead-on even back then. It’s all to do with how it looks and how it looks in different lighting where they’ve really made the improvements.

Mark Boszko: You said in your article that they’re even using vector distortions now which gives you a map that is scalable so that even as you zoom in to the tiniest parts of the creature you can retain that degree of detail and really see that you have the little bumps and the ripples on it.

Jody Duncan: Exactly. Of course that gives them flexibility to continue playing with shots. They’re not tied into I’m sorry, we rendered it for this camera angle and this camera distance and that’s what you’re getting.

Mark Boszko: Right. If you zoom and it looks fuzzy.

Jody Duncan: Right. Fright. Exactly.

Mark Boszko: How can they get around that?

Jody Duncan: Yes.

Mark Boszko: We’ll be back in a moment with more Jurassic goodness, but now it’s time for the Optical trivia contest brought to you by Cinefex. Cinefex 142 is on newsstands right now, digging deep into the summer’s biggest movies. First up is Jurassic World which reunites a team including ILM, Phil Tippett and key Stan Winston Studio crew members who were there for the first Jurassic go around.

Next up is Avengers: Age of Ultron for which VFX supervisor, Christopher Townsend, assembles a team that includes ILM, Double Negative, Animal Logic, Luma Pictures and Frame Store, with special effects supervisor Paul Corbould and the mechanical wizards and Legacy Effects lending practical effect support.

For Mad Max: Fury Road, Cinefex gathers intel from special effects supervisors, the picture vehicle supervisor, hair and makeup designer and prosthetic team for the mutant characters and an array of visual effects artists that brought the incredible post-apocalyptic adventure to life.

Finally, there’s San Andreas which sees special effects supervisors Brian Cox and Matt Kutcher creating practical earthquake destruction and flood effects while visual effects producer Randall Starr overseas digital enhancements at several visual effects studios.

All of these in Cinefex 142. Order your copy today from Cinefex.com. Congratulations to our May contest winner, David McSweeney. Enjoy your new Cinefex subscription. If you want a chance to win your own one year print subscription to Cinefex Magazine, all you have to do is answer this question: name the animator and visual effects legend who was credited as dinosaur supervisor on both Jurassic Park and Jurassic World.

Send your answer to feedback@opticalpodcast.com or use the feedback form on our website by midnight, pacific time, June 30th, 2015 then you’ll be entered to win. One winner will be chosen from the correct entries. Please forgive me for saying distortion map when I really meant displacement map. Management regrets the error. Now back to our chat with Jody Duncan.

The other big thing in your article that I thought was fascinating is that ILM is starting to build a virtual reality system. I saw another news article about that this week where they’re trying to make more of that public and actually build this immersive 3D worlds that you can enter with the new virtual reality systems like the Oculus Rift, things like that.

It seems like that may have come out of I think it’s called Cineview that allows them to take the camera data from onset and put the dinosaur models right in there and see what the end composite will look like roughly. That’s fascinating. It’s like to the point where on Jurassic Park they had to carry some sticks around and guys with raptor hats on their heads to figure out where the framing would be, but now they can just dump it into the frame and say, “Okay, we got this framed this in the camera, right?”

Jody Duncan: Right. Yes, absolutely. It helps with that Ewan McGregor’s soul crushing comment because the actors can look and see, “Oh, okay. This is what I’m reacted to and this is where it’s going to be.” I know Hulk for the last Avengers movie they had it right there in real time basically, what they call the monster mirror, so that Mark Ruffalo could see how everything he was doing translated to Hulk, which was very helpful for him as a performer.

All of this, what does it really comes down to? You still need good performances from actors so that they’re telling a story that as an audience member you’re emotionally connected to and that you believe. That’s no small thing. It’s not like yeah, yeah, yeah. The actors want to go back to their trailers. That’s an important part of all of this. It’s what it’s all for. What’s the point of having amazing CG dinosaurs if you can’t get believable performances out of actors and feel like they were all there really at the same time?

Mark Boszko: This has always been a thing since the first CG came in that’s like the juggling balls, the demo that was done in the early …

Jody Duncan: Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. I can’t remember who it was either.

Mark Boszko: I think his name was Adam Powers or something like that.

Jody Duncan: That was a long time ago, Mark.

Mark Boszko: I think this is against that point. People’s like, “When are we going to get CG actors?” We got that now. We don’t have humans that are at that level of believability just yet, I don’t think. Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies and Caesar and the other apes in the recent Planet of the Apes movies are just taking the actors and merging them with the computer graphic side of it. I don’t think we are ever going to have a computer graphic that is all on its own an actor. You still have to have a human powering it for the emotional side of it.

Jody Duncan: You know, I can’t think why we want to have that except for maybe the gimmick of it one time or maybe it would become a financial thing. Maybe you could get a digital leading lady for cheaper than you can get Julia Roberts or something, I don’t know. There might be budgetary reasons to do it. It’s like this thing that it’s almost like some people want to do it just to see if they can do it.

Don and I have talked about this, Don Shay, the publisher of Cinefex, that one of the fun things that used to be about the Bond movies was they’d always open with these amazing stunt sequences, right? That was part of the fun. It’s like, “Okay, what’s the big stunt sequence going to be this time?” It’s either some amazing scheme thing or whatever it is. What’s part of the fun of those is that you knew that some stunt guys were actually out there doing that stuff. Is it less fun if it’s an old digital sequence just because you know nobody was really putting themselves in that danger?

I think it’s partly what Tom Cruise understands and also I think Tom Cruise is just an adrenaline junkie, probably, you know. I mean, I don’t know so I don’t know. It’s like this new Mission Impossible that’s going to come out and him doing this airplane thing or when he climbed the building in Dubai, there is something, I think as an audience member, that adds to it when you know that Tom Cruise actually did that or even knowing that a stunt guy did it. If it’s just a digital character climbing a digital tower, does it have the same emotional impact? I don’t know. Even if it looks totally real, I don’t know if does have the same impact.

Mark Boszko: I got that from the recent remake of King Kong, that end sequence. It’s a digital character falling from a great height and everything and this circus is acting in it is what really sold it for me even though it’s obviously he was never in danger.

Jody Duncan: In danger of getting tired of wearing tracking [crosstalk 00:34:19]. I get tired of the motion control suit but yeah, knowing real mortal danger, yeah. I don’t know. You know what? This may be a generational thing too. It may be that it’s only those of us who starter our lives with movies that were made a certain way and now they’re made so differently and going back to the people that complain, “How come you don’t do the practical effects anymore?”

Maybe there is just a nostalgia thing there that just isn’t there for people that never experience that and this is how movies have always been made since they’ve been watching them. It may be. There were things my grandmother had nostalgia for that I never did, so maybe it is just a generational thing. I don’t know.

Mark Boszko: Maybe it is. I’m just going to think about my daughter and how she views movies and she just assumes all the dinosaurs are CG and didn’t really think about which ones are CG and which ones are puppets or whatever. It doesn’t even enter her head. I guess I’m on the nostalgia side of it. This whole podcast is an exercise in that.

Jody Duncan: Yes, of course, it is. For more reasons than just as an audience member, as I said it’s more fun to write about practical effects. What I try to do in my articles for Cinefex, because this remains the same regardless of the tool that’s being used, it’s like what are the creative decisions and what were the reasons behind those creative decisions? That to me is still the interesting part about visual effects. Here’s what we are trying to do, here’s why, here’s the mood we wanted to convey. Whether it’s a puppet dinosaur or a CGI dinosaur it doesn’t really matter. There are still artistic and creative decisions that have to be made.

I’m actually a little less techy in my articles than Joe tends to be in his, probably because Joe is just a techier person than I am and understands it all better than I do, but I just am more interested in the creative side of it.

Talking about that generational thing and your daughter, she’s gotten over it now because she’s 27 and she’s a grownup and everything and has learned to appreciate it, but up until clear through her teens, my daughter would not watch a black and white movie. Absolutely refused. There are all these Christmas movies. I want to introduce her to the Bishop’s Wife or It’s a Wonderful Life. There are all these things I wanted to share with her and as soon as she saw it was black and white, that’s it. She was done. She had no interest whatsoever.

Mark Boszko: Even when she was little?

Jody Duncan: Especially when she was little. That’s what I’m saying. It looks so odd to her in the same way that the original King Kong might look add to a young person now. She’s a much broader, open-minded human being now at 27 than she was at 9 so now she loves some of that stuff. It was such an assault to her eyes, I think, you know. It’s like, “What the hell is this? Real life has color and movies have color and what is this black and white thing?” She just couldn’t appreciate it visually at all and it ruined the movie for her. I guess what forms in our brains is to appreciate things when we’re very young I think follows this through.

Mark Boszko: How do you think things have changed over the course that you’ve been covering the effects industry just in terms of … ? As you say it’s like you get people sitting in front of computers and Don had told me that you guys have tried really hard not to have any shots for people just sitting in front of computers.

Jody Duncan: Yeah. I think it’s been 18 years now since we had a shot of someone sitting in the computer. I’m not kidding, 18 years and we still hear about it. How come you guys only show people? It’s like, do you read this magazine? Because we have not done that in like 18 years, so yeah.

Mark Boszko: I assume that makes it harder to cover in some ways just because so much of it is that. How do you seek out the parts that are not?

Jody Duncan: It’s very difficult. Yeah, it really is. It’s very difficult. I always use this as my example, but to me it’s such a great example. In the original Poltergeist they needed the house to implode and they were very clear that they wanted it to not blow up and go out. They wanted it have this look of imploding. They went round and round about how they’re going to do this and they wound up building a miniature and Richard Edlin went out and got his Safari gun and shot it, shot the miniature.

See, that’s a story in and of itself, right? That’s a cool thing. As a journal it’s like, “Okay, that’s something I can write about.” When somebody’s sitting at a keyboard or clicking a mouse to make a house implode, how do you write about that? It’s been very difficult.

Like I say, I still try to get to the decision making part of it, the artistic side of it. This is what the director wanted to convey here and this is what we did to do that. It’s almost like the technical part, at least in my articles, is almost an aside as far as what software they used or anything like that because I don’t think most people really … well, I probably shouldn’t say that. Maybe there are people who care about that a great deal. These days, the answer is always Houdini or Meyer, Vray. It’s all going to be the same thing anyway.

If they develop a new technique like you were talking about Cineview at ILM, that’s still interesting because that’s something new. Sometimes there’s been pretty new performance capture stuff that’s interesting, but it’s a real fishing expedition. I always look at it that I cast out a very wide net and ask a lot of questions, I’m mixing metaphors here, but I mine for gold there out of that. Am I fishing or am I mining? I do. I try to get a lot of information and then I pick out what to me seems like the interesting parts of that. Yeah, it’s very difficult.

Mark Boszko: What have you found to be some of the most interesting advances between these two bookends of Jurassic series?

Jody Duncan: Well …

Mark Boszko: I know that’s a huge question. Sorry.

Jody Duncan: Yeah. It is a huge question and actually, the answer isn’t that sexy either because again, really the advances are the fact that they can do so much real-time stuff so they can actually look at it and see what they’re doing. That’s interesting to maybe a small group of people. I don’t know how broad your audience is here. It’s really stuff like it’s the amount of time, it’s the real time, it’s the fact that they can throw on.

Re-targeting, that’s a big new thing. That’s where they’re able to actually take … it’s usually animators who go down to the motion capture stage real quick and they perform something for the raptors. Because of re-targeting they’re able to take human motion and re-target so it works on the muscle and skeletal rigs of a raptor.

I don’t remember what show it was, but many years ago I was a Sony Pictures Imageworks and they needed a tiger for something. This is like 20, 25 years ago so I’m not talking Life of Pi or something. They had actually considered, “Could we motion capture human beings and somehow make that motion?” Because you can control a human being, right? Who wants to be the guy putting motion capture suit on a tiger? Nobody wants that job, right? There was just no way to do it.

I think this is a very big thing now because if you can take human motion and so you get them walking from point A to point B, running from point A to point B, standing up on hind legs, doing all this stuff that you can go down, that it’s a lot faster to go mature real quick than it is to have the key framed in in the computer so that the animator can go down and do that. Then because of re-targeting they can make that work instead of a six-foot male human being, it works an eight-foot long very differently put together raptor, that’s huge.

That’s a huge new thing and I think that’s interesting. That is certainly a big thing that they would just not have I don’t think dreamed of on the original Jurassic Park. Hey Steve Williams, go down and be the T-Rex on a motion capture stage. “What’s a motion capture stage,” is what they would have said back then.

Mark Boszko: I assume that the way they’re doing that is more complex than just doing it a skeleton capture. There’s more capturing of more points for the musculature and everything.

Jody Duncan: I guess. To tell you the truth, I didn’t get into enough detail to understand the nitty-gritty of the technology for this, but to me the interesting part is just that you can take what a human being does and the animator knows better than anybody. This is what I need here. They actually go down throwing the suit and literally 30 minutes later they’ve captured it, they’ve re-targeted, they’ve applied it to the raptor and now they’ve got that. How long would that have taken them to do key framing? It’s a huge time saver and a really good shortcut.

Mark Boszko: I think it’s interesting thing too reading the original Jurassic Park, making a book, talking about Phil Tippett taking the animators and trying to train them to move more instead of just sitting in front of the computer and trying to talk about it or explain it on screen what they’re trying to do. They’re actually acting out motions and getting that physicality in their bodies, helping them understand how they need to actually animate the dinosaur in the computer.

Jody Duncan: Right. One of the things that was really interesting about Jurassic Park that makes it such a landmark thing is it was really the first time meeting of two very different worlds and in some cases even a clashing of two different worlds. You have this whole stop motion animation people, team, and then you have these computer animators and this was the first time that those two worlds collided, basically. How do you make that work?

Just as the DID was a way to get the talents of the stop motion animators to work in the computer, Phil Tippett’s mime classes that I think they had for at least a month or maybe even more teaching the computer animators how to do something that the stop motion animators used to always do.

mean, they were used to acting things out themselves and then applying that to their little puppets. In a way, those mime classes were the equivalent for the computer animators that the DID was for the stop motion animators. I don’t know if I’m being clear, but there were these things they had to do to make those two worlds meet and to get what each had to offer and make it work.

In fact, I remember them telling me some of the CG guys were not thrilled about having to do this. It’s like, “You’ve got to be kidding me, I have to get up and … ” it’s like beginning acting classes. If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you go up and be the kind of tree you would be? That was my major in college so I know about those classes. You roll your eyes and go, “Okay, great. Yeah, so now I’ve got to channel this dinosaur.”

I think they all came to appreciate what they got out of it at the end and I think much more so now. I don’t know what the computer animation schools teach them but I between you, that’s a pretty normal part of their training now is that they have to be actors. I found out that, especially from the old techniques but even now with the new techniques, animators are actors. That’s what they are. They just use something other than their own bodies for the final result, but they are much more likely to be actor types in a way.

Mark Boszko: Then that comes full circle with this re-targeting where the animator can actually go down and act it out with their body and bring that back into the animation that they’re building.

Jody Duncan: Absolutely and they have to be able to do that. Yeah, absolutely. That’s a really good point, actually, that it does bring it full circle because now they’re still finding that when it comes down to it it’s still good to be able to go down there and be able to act it out.

I’ve had a very long career doing this, but there are certain things that stand out as real highlights and one of them was they shot much of the Lost World up in the National Redwood Forest in Northern California, which, number one, had always been one of my favorite places anyway. We’d gone there as I was a kid and I just remembered thinking it was magical.

Then also, I will admit, there is an old Disney movie called The Gnome-Mobile that takes place in the Redwood Forest that I loved as a kid. I actually bought a copy of it but I’ve been afraid to watch it and create a space that’s incredibly stupid. I don’t want one of my fun childhood memories ruined.

This was great for me. There’s a few interesting things about it. For one thing, the paleontologist had told Spielberg that actually the Redwood Forest was probably more representative of the world that dinosaurs actually lived in than our concept of tropical areas.

Mark Boszko: Oh really?

Jody Duncan: Yeah. That that was actually more in keeping, it would have been more like a forest like that than a real tropical island type thing like the first movie took place in. That validated for Spielberg shooting there. He also thought that the size of the trees would be interesting because it’s kind of you’re in the land of the giants now, not just these giant dinosaurs but also these giant trees.

Really he’d wanted to shoot there because he happened to do that … what do they call that drive up there? There’s a highway, the highway of the giants or something like that. That’s not quite it. Anyway, there’s a length of highway that you drive through where you’re just surrounded by redwoods the whole way. He had made that drive I think just on vacation with his family and said, “Oh man, I would love to shoot here.” That’s what made thing. Start talking to the paleontologist go, “Could we justify shooting there?” That’s when they told them, “Yeah, that’s actually what it would have looked like more than Hawaii.”

Anyway, I got to go up there and spend quite a few days up there when they were shooting there and it was just a wonderful, magical place to be. They’d set up the big tent for dinner and lunch and I remember Spielberg standing there in line. He usually didn’t cut in line even, which is astonishing. Just the smells of it and it took quite a while to get to the locations too.

Of course they didn’t want to advertise that they were there so rather than saying, “Lost World location here,” there were just these little dinosaur signs that you might not even notice and they would have arrows and just a little drawing of a dinosaur. I remember that’s how we always found our way to the location everyday. That’s always been a real highlight of the whole experience for me and my career was being up there with all those people for that. Julianne Moore running from invisible dinosaurs in a stream and that sort of thing.

Mark Boszko: I’m curious, was there anything special they were doing on set as far as reference for the dinosaurs?

Jody Duncan: You know, that’s always pretty funny actually. You know the scene at the end where the T-Rex has escaped from the ship and is running down what’s supposed to be San Diego and they actually shot that in some closed off streets in Burbank and it was a night shoot. I remember being there and there’s always one guy with this stick and a T-Rex profile sketch drawing on the top of it running down the street, chasing all the extras. It’s not very imposing, let’s just put it that way. It’s pretty funny, actually.

Reference, yeah. It’s pretty much poles and sticks. That’s the thing with Jurassic World, they went to a lot more trouble to have pretty good and that’s what they had legacy effects do is these raptor heads, some of them were completely painted to look like how the final raptors would look so the lighting would be right. It was definitely a step above the tennis ball at the end of the pole thing that they usually have.

Mark Boszko: That’s pretty great. Jurassic World, your article is in Cinefex 142 and that should be out now.

Jody Duncan: Yes, it’s coming out right now.

Mark Boszko: This episode will be coming out about a week after we’re recording here so it should be on newsstands so run [crosstalk 00:54:10] and get that.

Jody Duncan: Good. Yes, I hope so. Yes. It was fun because for me this is like coming full circle for me too. Doing Jurassic Park wasn’t at the very beginning of my career but it was certainly in the earlier years and to come back and be doing this. Then also I just now finished a Terminator article for the next issue following this one and it’s like, well, I’m coming full circle there now. I think maybe it’s time to retire when you start doing articles that are almost re-dos of what you did 25, 30 years ago. Of course they aren’t really. It’s all very new, but it was fun for me.

Joe and I always decide who’s going to do what and I’m afraid I very selfishly pulled rank on him on this one and said, “I’ve got to do the Jurassic World article. I’m sorry. I just have to do it.” Those movies were so much a part of my life for several years. I wrote the article for Cinefex for Jurassic Park and making a book with Don for Jurassic Park.

Then I wrote the Lost World book by myself and then did the article for Cinefex for Lost World. I mean, I’ve devoted thousands and thousands and thousands of words to these subjects and it was a big part of a certain part of my life. Then I also wrote articles for following Jurassic Park movies.

It’s interesting though, this is one thing I thought was interesting, and again not to disrespect any of the movies or anything, but very much the people working on Jurassic World used Jurassic Park as their touchstone. Not even the Lost World as much and certainly not the other Jurassic Park [inaudible 00:56:03], yeah. Anyway, it was Jurassic Park that was there touchstone. That was their bible in a way of this is the kind of movie we want to make and these are the kinds of beats we want to hit and this is the thrill we want to recreate for people. I thought that was interesting. It’s not like they went back to all the three movies for their reference. It was that was the movie.

Mark Boszko: Yeah. Interesting. Speaking of the making of book, when I re-watched Jurassic Park yesterday, I finally noticed for the first time in the scene with the ice cream there’s a pan across like this shelf full of Jurassic Park merchandise at the park and there’s a book that says The Making of Jurassic Park by Don Shay and Jody Duncan.

Jody Duncan: Right.

Mark Boszko: That’s very great.

Jody Duncan: I’ll tell you about that. The camera even pauses for just a split second there, which is kind of neat. It focuses on it for just a second. This is one of my two claims to fame after 35 years of doing this and it’s amazing how many people have written to me about that. You wouldn’t think most people would notice it.

One day Don was at Amblin Entertainment, you know Spielberg’s company that produced the movie, and Don was coming to Amblin just as Spielberg was leaving and they met in the parking lot, a bit of distance, and Spielberg yells out to Don, “Hey, I got you in the movie,” and then he just laughed and Don was like, “Got me in the movie? What is he talking about?” I think we knew before we saw the movie, but finally someone told him, “Yeah, we decided to do … ” and it was a mock-up of the book because of course the book was a long way from being published and didn’t know what the cover was going to look like or anything like that so the props department did a mock-up of it and that was really nice.

I got to say what was very different about the Jurassic Park making of book experience, and we’ve never had it since, I had it a little bit on the Lost World, was that they brought us on in pre-production. In fact, I think we might have been brought on before official pre-production because I remember we spent a lot of time in the art department when all they were doing were just art department stuff while Spielberg was off making hoop.

We were on that for over a year. We were on it for a long time, which means we really got to follow the movie as it was being made. Now what happens is six weeks before a movie is coming out you suddenly get a call from a publishing house saying, “Hey, we want a making of book and you’ve got six weeks to do it.” It’s like, are you crazy? It’s always funny. I always laugh because they always say the same thing. “We want a book like the Jurassic Park book. Can you do a book?” I say, “Well, if you want a book like the Jurassic Park book, you should have called us a year and a half ago.”

The Jurassic Park book is that way because we had all that time and because we had complete access to everything. Now they don’t want to do that because they’re so afraid of secrets getting out. Of course, there was no more secret of project in the world than Jurassic Park at the time. It’s just there was this little item we like to call trust. They actually trusted that if they hired us we weren’t going to be going around blabbing about at all to everything.

I think that’s why Spielberg did that anyway because we’d been hanging around, we’d been part of the thing in a very peripheral, standing there taking our notes sort of way. Yeah, that was a very nice little nod and I figure when I’m long gone it’s something my grandchildren will enjoy, you know.

Mark Boszko: Yeah. That’s pretty great.

Jody Duncan: Seeing my name there.

Mark Boszko: Thank you so much, Jody, for coming on. I assume people can find your work at Cinefex.com?

Jody Duncan: Absolutely. Really, if you want to do something cool is go back and get all the back issues pertaining to Jurassic Park and Lost World and you can see the progression of where everything’s gone. That’s what I would do.

Mark Boszko: Yeah. I’m sure some of them are still in print, but if not, you can get them in the Cinefex iPad app.

Jody Duncan: Yes, you can. Yes, that was a shameless plug. Sorry.

Mark Boszko: No problem at all.

Jody Duncan: Okay.

Mark Boszko: Cool. Well, thank you so much for being on. I really appreciate your time.

Jody Duncan: Thank you for having me.

Mark Boszko: You can find our website and the show notes for this episode at opticalpodcast.com. We’re also available on Twitter, Facebook and SoundCloud at username Optical Podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the podcast. It’s free and easy to do. Just search for Optical Podcast on iTunes or follow the link from our website. If you like the show, please leave us a review on iTunes. It really helps us reach new listeners.

Big thanks to Cinefex for helping sponsor us and remember, you can go to Cinefex.com to order issue 142 covering Jurassic World, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Madmax: Fury Road and San Andreas. You can also get the new issues in the Cinefex iPad app along with every back issue of the magazine, including issues 55, 70 and 87 where you can read all about the making of three previous Jurassic Park films. Just follow the link from our website.

Thanks again to Cinefex editor, Jody Duncan, for chatting with us. Thanks to our dialog editor Joseph Ravenson. Thanks to Digital Droo for all the music in this episode and you can find more of his music at digitaldroo.com. Thanks to Mike Gower for designing our aperture logo. I’m your host, Mark Boszko. See you next time.

Lex Murphy: It’s a Unix system. I know this.