Jurassic Punk

It's a medium, God damn it.

It ain't gonna fit me.

Look at that.

Oh, it's exactly--

It's exactly what I have, but it's a medium,

I don't think it's gonna fit.

-You need a large? -Yeah, minimum.

I can't wear a shirt unless it has a stain on it.

If you wear a shirt that doesn't have a stain on it,

it's not a shirt.

One of the biggest problems I have is my memory.

I just wanna forget everything.

Unfortunately, I can't.

-You raised her-- -The past haunts me.

Do these animals deserve the same protections

given to other species?

Or should they just be left to die?

These creatures were here before us.

I guess Netflix is doing the thing on Jurassic.

They want to hear the real story.

Not a revisionist history version.

We're in "C" Theater

at 3210 Kerner Boulevard, San Rafael, California,

the old ILM facility.

In this theater is where we projected

every single one of the shots

that we knew was gonna change the entire film industry.

When the T-Rex took a step, you had a secondary jiggle.

So, I had separate channels of animation

of literally a digital bladder

hung off the hierarchy of the leg,

so it shook on the bone.

So, if the bladder shook,

the outside control vertices shook as well.

So, every time the Rex took a step,

you had to have a massive amount of shake

of this muscle.

A lot of people are always referring back to it

being the best of all the Jurassics.

And now, what is it?

World domination of everything--

I mean the "Giganotosaurus", that's the latest one.

It was like three times the size of the Rex.

"It is? Oh, I better go see the sequel."

Why don't they just merge Star Wars and Jurassic together

and come up with one big mega movie?

You know, it's like dinosaurs in space

and everyone's shooting each other, you know?

I'm naive, I guess,

when it comes to a lot of stuff.

And you get burned, y'know.

You get burned.

Things are so simple now, right?

Looking back at the ILM days,

it's almost like it was a weird dream.

Even though I was using machines as a tool back then,

I myself was stuck in a machine.

And this whole thing about blind curiosity,

trying to, A, prove it yourself,

and B, you know,

prove it to the world, you can do something.

Little did I know...

y'know, I created a monster.

And joining me now in the studio

is the chief animator at Lucasfilm, Steve Williams.

George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic Company,

the folks who provided special effects

for Star Wars, is going commercial.

These hummingbirds are not real.

Animator Steve Williams sketches out a line drawing

on a computer screen.

It was never Steve's intention to combine

his classical animation training with computers,

but now colleagues marvel,

they've never seen anyone create life so realistically.

It was not biotechnology

that brought the dinosaurs to life inJurassic Park.

Animator Steve Williams

used a computer to bring the T-Rex to life.

The Universal Studios picture

could generate as much as $50 million this weekend.

Other studios in town will not open

any of their pictures against it.

Williams is one of the hottest

computer animators in Hollywood.

Spreading his message

that computer animation is about art,

not technology.

I mean, is there anything that worries you about this?

Oh, yeah, I-- I think it's pretty--

I-- I don't think it's a good thing, but it's--

Well, so, you're sort of like Dr. Frankenstein.

Everybody thinks that chaos is completely random.

There is no such thing as random.

Every single variable is calculatable.

And math is nothing but a language

to try and describe what nature already knows.

We're so steeped in the rules...

so when you think differently, you're seen as a heretic.

I know I was different, you know, I-- I knew it.

I've always been different.

I had visions about how things are gonna be...

and not should be, but just are going to be.

Especially about, you know, synthetic imagery.

Here's a low-resolution data of the T-Rex,

and most of these points here

where each one of the bones were.

Jurassic Park storyboards.

"SS approved" means Steven Spielberg approved.

Chase scene four.

75 frames. Took me four months to animate this shot.

Here's somebody that was fundamental

at that time, in-- in, uh, the-- the,

um, progress of this disruptive technology.

But, the way that I know him now,

he mainly likes to blacksmith,

and we end up hanging out in the shop

because he likes to get his hands dirty,

just like I do.

We all called him Spaz.

Now, calling Steve Williams "Spaz,"

was, uh, a nickname,

like, that giant guy in high school

that everybody called Tiny.

Hey, Spaz, my, how you doing, buddy?

That character with the pocket protector

and the thick glasses, he was the opposite.

Here was a motorcycle-riding,

leather-jacket-wearing guy,

who's the first one that I ever met,

that was an artist,

who had computer

and high-mathematical skills.

Like Michelangelo took corpses and dissected them,

Spaz is a guy who kind of dissected life a little bit.

I was just amazed by how things worked.

My whole life I was driven by how things work.

Cartoons deviated from the rules

of the way nature operates.

It was sort of questioning convention.

You're questioning reality.

Good he's got that going for me.

Got that going at me.

Sheridan College in Toronto.

All of us are misfits.

We didn't think conventionally.

We're these, like, these strange artists.

I decided to take classical animation.

Then, I took computer engineering,

University of Toronto.

Then I joined a company in Toronto called Alias,

using computers to do animation.

No one really thought about it that way.

They thought it for data processing,

they didn't really think about it

for actually animating.

I was attempting to try and replicate the real world

in a synthetic environment.

There were very few people in the world that knew Alias,

three-dimensional computer graphics back in 1988.

I was working on a system called the "CIWS,"

it was a Gatling gun that, for the most part,

sat on Iowa-class battleships.

The simulation I was working,

had the fluorocarbon cooling system.

ILM, Industrial Light Magic,

got wind that there was somebody

that actually knew something about fluid dynamics.

They're working on a movie

where there's a water creature.

Now, you see water doing things

all the time, but back in the day,

you said, "Well, it's gonna be water that comes alive,

and then the face comes out of the water."

People would just blank out.

It was a big question mark for everybody.

What Jim had seen in computer graphics

up to that point,

was all the other prior films

that had used computer graphics,

like Last Starfighter, and Tron,

and even Young Sherlock Holmes.

CG had an artificiality to it.

We were looking for a photo-real thing.

His previous films, Terminatorand Aliens,

they were about thrills and action.

They were not about just a straight sense of wonder.

He really wanted to show that he could do that.

We clearly needed additional talent

and we found Steve Williams.

The quality was paramount.

If we were gonna be successful,

this stuff had to be not just good enough,

it had to be great, it had to be convincing,

it had to be something

that ultimately no one had ever seen before.

So I ended up at Industrial Light Magic,

and I got hired in October of 1988

to be Chief Animator on The Abyss.

We had two machines,