They visited zoos to watch movements, and took mime classes to perform moves they themselves had not previously done. Spielberg had adamantly requested that the dinosaurs "be animals, and not monsters - certainly not Hollywood monsters," said Phil Tippett, one of the ILM animators. Meantime, Dennis Muren, senior special effects supervisor for ILM was interviewed in Omni magazine in 1993, and said that model-makers won't be going out of business any time soon, just because computer graphics has come so far. "It's still 70% models, 30% Co-Motion," he remarked. One of the problems Muren and the ILM team had going into JP was that they don't know if they could move the skin over the dinosaurs' bones "without tearing it apart when they moved, like computer skin has in the past." This is a process that embraces geometry, Muren reminds, and the geometry "can't quite figure out where it's supposed to be."

Muren never doubted what he was supposed to be, though. He had a still camera at the age of six, and was shooting movies with an eight-millimeter at the age of ten and at 14, his parents got him a 16-millimeter Bolex. "My parents didn't...

He says he didn't think of a career in special effects at that time, and he still doesn't. "It's more like a hobby," says Muren and while others see him as "a visionary," he says, "I see myself as a worker. I push the technology, but I also push the vision within the context of the director's vision." For someone who says he's not a visionary, Muren certainly looks, acts, and produces results that look visionary to anyone paying attention.
Works Cited

Delahoyde, Michael. "Jurassic Park." Washington State University. Retrieved 12 March, 2007, at http://www.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/jurassic.html.

Omni. "Dennis Muren (movie visual effects expert)." Vol. 16 Number n2 (1993): 91-98.

Think Quest. "Computer Effects: Creatures, Jurassic Park." Retrieved 13 March 2007 at http://library.thinkquest.org/3496/zjurassic.html.

Wide Angle Closeup. "A R-EVOLUTION in VISUAL EFFECTS: The SFX of Jurassic Park:

Jurassic Park's Special Effects." Retrieved 13 March 2007 at http://members.aol.com.morgands1/closeup/text/jurassic.htm.