The oral history of the Dinosaur Input Device or: how to survive the near death of stop-motion – vfxblog

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Visual effects and animation journalist Ian Failes

The oral history of the Dinosaur Input Device or: how to survive the near death of stop-motion

The oral history of the Dinosaur Input Device or: how to survive the near death of stop-motion

By Ian Failes

In visual effects lore, it is well-known that the full-motion dinosaurs of Jurassic Park were originally intended as stop-motion puppets animated by Phil Tippett’s Tippett Studio. That is, until a secret ILM test with computer-generated dinosaurs convinced director Steven Spielberg to go with that digital approach, perhaps changing the course of VFX history in the process.

But, determined to stay ‘in the game’ and continue to contribute a rich knowledge of dinosaur movement, Tippett Studio combined with ILM to build the Dinosaur Input Device. This ‘DID’, which would later also be known as the Digital Input Device, was a dino-shaped sensor-covered armature that could translate stop-motion-like input to a CG model, allowing Tippett’s traditionally trained animators to lend their skills to this new wave of digital animation. It also would also ultimately be awarded a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy (presented to Craig Hayes, Brian Knep, Rick Sayre and Tom Williams).

In this new oral history as part of Jurassic Park’s 25th anniversary, vfxblog speaks with some of the original developers and users of the DID to find out how it worked, how it sometimes didn’t work, and where it made a major impact on the film. Plus, there’s a bonus section on the DID’s surprising influence in Tippett Studio’s major headway into CGI on Starship Troopers.

‘I feel extinct’

Phil Tippett (dinosaur supervisor) : When I was first sent the script to Jurassic Park, they were talking about doing full-scale animatronics and I thought, that’s never going to happen. It cooked for about a year, and then eventually it was decided to do high speed puppets with go-motion.

Brian Knep (computer graphics software developer, ILM) : Go-motion was something Phil had pioneered on Dragonslayer where you would pose a creature in a motion-control rig, and then move to the next pose and it would basically hold both poses and move between them as you open and close the shutter, giving you this nice motion blur that you didn’t get in normal stop-motion.

Above: Senior Animator Randal M. Dutra’s stop-motion animation for Jurassic Park’s “Dinosaur Movement Bible.”

Craig Hayes (computer interface engineer, Tippett Studio) : Basically all the full-motion dinosaurs were going to be foam, latex, aluminium and steel armature stop-motion puppets, that would then be shot on bluescreen. And they would be composited and also further motion blurred with computer graphics.

Brian Knep : That was actually the first thing I did on Jurassic Park at ILM, these tests to make the go-motion look less ‘jumpy’ by adding motion blur. It was a bit of experimental project where we took some of the software that was used to do 2D morphing on Willow – MORF – and we created a way where we could take two frames of stop-motion animation and basically create a morph between them. Then we would render that morph at, let’s say, 60 different states midway between the frames and then composite all those to create a fake motion blur.

Craig Hayes : When I saw the first motion blur tests applied to stop-motion animation, I was kind of flabbergasted. It was just really exciting because it just filled in so many of the blanks in ways that even to a certain extent the go-motion stuff didn’t do.

Brian Knep : We got some good results but it was very slow and a pain in the ass. At the same time I was working on that, [CG animator] Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams and [co-visual effects supervisor] Mark Dippe and some of the other folks were working on some secret 3D tests.

[So much great documentation already exists about the CGI beginnings of Jurassic Park that this oral history won’t be dealing with that side of things.]

Phil Tippett : I went down with [visual effects supervisor] Dennis Muren when he presented the T-Rex test to Steven and Steven went, ‘Wow, that’s what we’re going to do,’ and he asked me how I would feel and I said, ‘I feel extinct’. And he said, ‘Oh that’s quirky, I’m going to put that in the movie!’ He had Dr Grant say that line.

Craig Hayes : All of a sudden all the work that we had been putting into gearing up for the stop-motion kind of production just evaporated literally overnight. But somewhere in this mix I think that everybody realised that there was a big difference between an animated dinosaur skeleton – the CGI test – and getting from that to fully fleshed out characters.

Phil Tippett : We had already spent a long time on storyboards and once they were locked, production wanted animatics of the T-rex paddock and the raptor kitchen scene to be laid out. At the same time,...