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, we had made a dinosaur bible where we picked the T-rex and raptor and did a walk cycle or a running cycle or behavioural things. Steven wanted them not to perform like monsters but have a palpable sense of being animals. So we had to cross-over between what was going to be computer graphics and practical dinosaurs by Stan Winston. I actually knew probably more about dinosaur motion than anyone else – I knew a bunch of paleos and would hang with them. Randal M. Dutra works on an animatic for the T-Rex paddock sequence. Craig Hayes: The other thing was, yes, they’d chosen to go all-CG for these full-motion shots, but, really, the talent that was available to the production from Tippett in terms of stop-motion animators was huge and it couldn’t be ignored. Tom Williams (supervisor of software and digital technology, ILM): Phil Tippett had these people who just understood animal motion.They would go into the wilderness and draw animals. One of them showed me this beautiful thing, I think it was a mountain lion. I was like, ‘Wow, did you take a picture?’ He was like, ‘No, I sketched it right there.’ You look at it and you could see all the sinew and everything. Phil Tippett: At the same time there weren’t a lot of CG animators who were trained to do living characters – people had done TV commercials with flying logos and cartoony things, but it’s a whole different world when you’re trying to match your artificial characters in a photographic background plate that’s shot on earth with a certain kind of lighting and specific gravity. You have to really nail and know what you’re doing to have all that stuff fit in. An early armature made for one of Tippett Studio’s Jurassic Park stop-motion puppets.

Craig Hayes: Now, when I was working on RoboCop I designed and built the big robot, so I took the money I got paid and I actually bought my first contemporary computer, which was an Amiga, I think it was an Amiga 1000. This was a chance to play with something that was a little bit more than just a toe into the world of graphics. This is years before they had inverse kinematics and other techniques that really made computer animation more achievable. So I was playing around with potentiometers and making wooden mock-ups and hooking potentiometers up the joints. I really couldn’t take it much further than that because, first of all, the analogue electronics component of this thing were really kind of not trivial and these devices I was using were just pretty cheap and horrible and there were just a lot of roadblocks. So it was something that I wanted to do and kind of was hoping to do at some point, but I always I guess back then assumed it would be on a hobby level. But Jurassic was where I knew it could work. Brian Knep: Initially, this project to try to get the stop-motion animation to work for the Dinosaur Input Device was quite controversial. There were some people that felt like ILM should be able to do everything. Some people felt we shouldn’t. We couldn’t because we didn’t have enough animators but we still wanted to be involved. It was a tense thing between the two companies and it was a bit tricky for me because I loved both of them and I was a little bit in the middle. Above: Stop-motion animation for Jurassic Park’s animatics by Randal M. Dutra, Tom St. Amand and Kim Blanchette. Phil Tippett: And then, I actually got sick and got pneumonia and had to stay in bed for two weeks. I thought it was all over. But Dennis and Craig, they developed the feasibility for doing what was essentially a stop-motion armature but making it motion capture – it had little sensors on it that you could plug into the computer and physically manipulate in real space and have that duplicated inside the computer as a wire frame; the Dinosaur Input Device. Birth of the DID Randal M. Dutra (senior animator, Tippett Studio): Quite simply: The “Dinosaur Input Device” was created to keep Tippett Shop in the Jurassic Park game.

It was announced to the shop in April of 1992 that JP was going CG. As Senior Animator for Tippett on JP, I was already five months into pre-production having completed the “Dinosaur Movement Bible” (Raptor and T.rex) and was immersed in the Animatic phase of the “Raptor Kitchen” sequence. Tippett Studio’s Bart Trickel machines the armature for a DID puppet. Craig Hayes: There was no time to train these stop motion animators how to become computer animators. I mean, I say this sort of jokingly, but at the same time, really these guys were not necessarily computer savvy, and sometimes even the idea of moving a mouse around was a little bit foreign. I remember with a couple of the guys when they were first holding a mouse it’s like they were spending more time watching what their hand was doing to the mouse than watching the cursor on the screen. Randal M. Dutra: I, Phil, and Tom St. Amand had no prior, or practical, computer background to speak of. Our talents and experience lay within the realms of traditional stop-motion animation and related disciplines, which we had practiced together for years at his shop prior to JP and for various ILM projects. So the advent of CGI was a huge upheaval for all of us. Everything had suddenly been upended. Craig Hayes: So, clearly, we were not going to be able to educate our stop-motion animators about the computer graphics in the short order, but we could give them the tools to do their job, which they were very skilled at. So we put this presentation together, Dennis Muren, and Phil Tippett, and our production, VFX production guys, we said, ‘Let’s try this DID’. And everybody went for it and ILM said, ‘Well, we need to put together some people.’ So from ILM we had Tom Williams and Brian Knep, and Tom knew this guy Rick Sayre, from Pixar, who was a genius at hardware and software. Rick Sayre (Sci-Tech winner): The question was, well how do we keep them involved and contributing at a high level?