When moviegoers watched a Tyrannosaurus Rex move through rain and streetlights in the summer of 1993, they experienced true fear of a creature that had been extinct for 65 million years for the first time. A relatively small team at Industrial Light & Magic worked on tools that were new enough to have no set methodology to create the CGI that made that moment conceivable, a few minutes of film that altered what moviegoers thought computers could achieve. While the plane was landing, they were constructing the runway.
In public memory, Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg are associated with Jurassic Park. Though his work on the dinosaur locomotion—more especially, the shots that persuaded Spielberg to switch from the intended animatronic approach to full CGI—was the argument that made the film’s iconic sequences possible, Steve “Spaz” Williams’ name is much less well-known outside of visual effects circles. The Abyss and Terminator 2, where the morphing T-1000 had already shown that digital imaging could accomplish what practical effects could not, were two more films in which Williams contributed to ILM’s CGI work. He was pushing hardware that was truly insufficient for the job, operating at the limit of what the program could manage, and generating results that still hold up in ways that modern CGI frequently does not.
A different kind of pioneer is Rebecca Allen, whose contributions to the Hollywood CGI boom came from a different angle and whose work precedes it. Digital art was first recognized as a creative rather than a technical profession thanks to her early computer animation work at the New York Institute of Technology in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which included computer-generated graphics for Kraftwerk’s music and visuals. She was one of the first to approach the computer as an artistic medium rather than an engineering tool—a distinction that may seem straightforward, but at the time was seriously disputed. In the 1970s and 1980s, the makers of these tools frequently battled the notion that the final product wasn’t truly art.
Understanding the 1990s CGI software environment is important because it influenced every aspect of the work’s appearance and feel. Before Maya unified the industry into a more standardized pipeline, the main tools were Alias PowerAnimator, Softimage 3D, and Animation Master. Each had its own logic, its own constraints, and, when pushed to the extreme, its own distinct appearance. During this time, there were no YouTube lessons or problem-solving community forums for artists. In ways that practically created the industry from community up, they programmed custom solutions, manually fashioned virtual skeletons using techniques they were developing along the way, and exchanged expertise at SIGGRAPH conferences.
For decades, the visual effects business has struggled with the recognition issue that has dogged these artists. Unlike above-the-line professionals, VFX houses do not receive studio assistance. In order to partially close this gap, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences established the Scientific and Technical honors category. However, the honors are given to systems and tools rather than to the actual artists who used those tools to make artistic decisions. The rendering software’s creator is not the same as the individual who discovered how to realistically compress the ground with a dinosaur’s foot, and the industry has generally been better at identifying the latter.
