A Brief History of Movie Special Effects
Jurassic Park — Movie Monsters
In 1912 director George Melies built a 23-foot tall Ice Giant puppet
for his film Conquest of the Pole. Made of plaster, wood and
papier-mache and controlled by a crew of puppeteers directing pulleys,
winches and capstans, Melies' mechanical beast was the first in a long
line of engineered Hollywood monsters. By 1925, a life-sized
Brontosaurus tail was built for the set of dinosaur flick The Lost
World, a triumph of visual effects that sent filmmakers into a frenzy
to create even scarier movie monsters. The beasts of 1993's Jurassic
Park were part animatronic and part CGI. Out of the
14 minutes of the film's dinosaur footage, only four were rendered with computer graphics. The rest were shot using animatronic models — including a 20-foot
T-Rex that weighed more than 13,000 pounds — and men in rubber
Velociraptors costumes.