There’s a moment early in Jurassic Park — you know the one — where Dr. Alan Grant’s jaw goes slack, he reaches over and physically turns Ellie Sattler’s head to look in the same direction as he is, and the two of them just stare. John Williams’ score swells. A Brachiosaurus crests a hill, impossibly alive, impossibly real, and for a few seconds you forget that you’re sitting in a theater watching a movie. You forget that what you’re seeing couldn’t possibly exist. You just believe.

That moment hit audiences in the summer of 1993 like a thunderclap, and I don’t think we’ve ever fully recovered from it.

I was thinking about Jurassic Park recently — as one does — and found myself going down a rabbit hole about just how seismic a shift that film represented, not just for blockbuster entertainment but for the entire craft of cinema. Because here’s the thing: Jurassic Park didn’t just show us something we’d never seen before. It fundamentally changed what filmmakers believed was possible to show us. And the story of how it got made is every bit as wild and improbable as the concept of cloning dinosaurs from amber-preserved mosquito blood.

Before Jurassic Park, There Were Puppets and Prayers

To understand why Jurassic Park was so revolutionary, you have to understand what came before it. Dinosaur movies had always been a feat of creative compromise. Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion creatures — brilliant and beloved as they were — had a certain jerky, other-worldly quality that nobody ever quite managed to shake. You could tell they were models being moved frame by frame. The magic was in the artistry, not in any convincing illusion of reality. By the late 1980s, go motion (a refinement of stop motion that added motion blur) was the most sophisticated tool available for putting large creatures convincingly on screen. It was the best anyone had, and for most productions, it was good enough.

Spielberg originally planned to use go motion for Jurassic Park’s wide shots, hiring Phil Tippett — a master of the craft who had done extraordinary work on films like The Empire Strikes Back and RoboCop — to create the dinosaur herd sequences. Meanwhile, Stan Winston’s practical effects studio was brought on to build the film’s on-set animatronics: life-sized, hydraulically operated dinosaurs that actors could actually interact with. It was a sensible, complementary plan. The animatronics would handle close-up, tactile moments. Tippett’s go motion would handle the wide, sweeping shots.

And then ILM showed Steven Spielberg a test reel, and everything changed.

The Day the Ground Shook

The shift began, as so many things in Hollywood do, with someone going slightly rogue. ILM animator Steve Williams had started secretly building a T. rex skeleton in the computer on his own time, convinced that CGI could do more for Jurassic Park than anyone was giving it credit for. He scanned a T. rex skeleton at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology to create a virtual skeleton, animated a walk cycle, and eventually convinced effects supervisor Dennis Muren to take a look. Muren was initially skeptical — ILM had just broken new ground with CGI in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but the timeline for Jurassic Park was daunting, and they had already committed to animatronics and go motion. He didn’t want to overpromise.

But when Williams unveiled his animation, Spielberg was so impressed that he scrapped the go motion plan entirely. Just like that. Tippett had assembled a thirty-person crew to prepare for the go motion sequences, and now the rug was being pulled out from under him in real time. His response, when he heard the news, has gone down in movie history: looking at the CGI T. rex, Tippett turned to Spielberg and said, simply, “I think I’m extinct.”

Spielberg, never one to waste a good line, had it written directly into the film. When Grant first sees the living dinosaurs, he says to Sattler, “We’re out of a job.” Malcolm replies, deadpan: “Don’t you mean extinct?”

Rather than losing Tippett entirely, Spielberg kept him on as a movement consultant, and it turned out to be an inspired decision. Tippett’s deep knowledge of creature anatomy and physics became essential for coaching ILM’s animators on how dinosaurs might actually move. The two camps — the old world of practical effects and the new frontier of CGI — ended up collaborating in a way that made both better.

Stan Winston and the Art of Making You Believe

None of which is to diminish what Stan Winston’s team brought to the film, because the animatronics they built were extraordinary by any measure. The full-sized T. rex animatronic stood twenty feet tall, weighed nine thousand pounds, and stretched forty feet from nose to tail. It was — and remains — the largest creature ever built by Stan Winston Studio. Paleontologist Jack Horner, who served as the film’s scientific advisor, called it “the closest I’ve ever been to a live dinosaur.”

Filming with it was, to put it gently, a logistical adventure. The T. rex breakout sequence was shot on Stage 16 at Warner Bros. Studios — Universal’s own stages weren’t big enough — and the whole set was soaking wet from rain machines, which turned out to be a significant problem. The T. rex’s foam rubber skin began absorbing the rainwater, adding so much extra weight that the animatronic would shake and quiver uncontrollably between takes. Crew members had to dry it down with chamois cloths between every shot. At one point, the animatronic hit a tour vehicle’s plexiglass roof with more force than intended and one of its teeth popped out. Reinserting it proved so difficult that Spielberg just kept filming with the gap in place. You can see it in the final film if you know to look for it.

And then there was the problem of actually moving the thing. The T. rex animatronic was so enormously heavy that repositioning it within a scene was essentially impossible. So rather than moving the dinosaur, the crew moved the set around it — rearranging elements to create the illusion that the T. rex had changed position. All of this for a creature that gets roughly nine minutes of total screen time in a 127-minute film.

The Guitar String and the Glass of Water

Some of the most iconic moments in Jurassic Park came not from million-dollar technology but from simple, almost accidental ingenuity. Take what is arguably the most famous single shot in the movie: the close-up of a glass of water on a car dashboard, rippling in concentric circles from the approaching T. rex’s footsteps. It’s a perfect piece of visual storytelling — Spielberg showing you the threat through its effect on the environment before you ever see the creature itself.

The inspiration for the shot, according to special effects supervisor Michael Lantieri, came from Spielberg listening to Earth, Wind & Fire in his car and noticing how the bass vibrations affected a nearby drink. He wanted the water to ripple in exactly that way. Lantieri had no immediate solution — until the night before filming, when he absentmindedly placed a glass of water on his guitar and plucked a string. The concentric circles appeared perfectly. The next morning, guitar strings were threaded through the floor of the prop car, and a crew member lying underneath the vehicle plucked them on cue to produce the effect. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the ones that last forever.

This was the animating spirit behind so much of Jurassic Park‘s practical problem-solving: find the organic solution, the one that feels real because it is real, on some level. Sound designer Gary Rydstrom took the same approach to the film’s audio. Rather than using stock sounds, he built a library of entirely original animal recordings. The T. rex’s roar combined a lion, a tiger’s snarl, a baby elephant’s scream, and the sounds of alligators and crocodiles. The Brachiosaurus’s vocals drew on whale songs, cow noises, and donkey calls. A dog attacking a rope toy became the sound of the T. rex tearing apart a Gallimimus. Even the film’s digital surround sound was a Spielberg innovation — he personally funded the creation of DTS (Digital Theater Systems) to ensure audiences would hear the film exactly as he intended.

Fifty-Two Shots That Changed Everything

When all was said and done, Jurassic Park contained exactly fifty-two CGI shots. That’s it. In a 127-minute blockbuster built around the premise of living dinosaurs, the digital creatures appear for a grand total of six minutes of screen time. The remaining nine minutes of dinosaur footage were achieved through Winston’s animatronics and practical effects.

But those fifty-two shots were enough to permanently alter the trajectory of cinema. The key insight Muren and his team brought to the work was treating the dinosaurs not as effects to be displayed but as animals to be observed. Rather than the quick, flashy cuts typical of effects-heavy sequences, they used longer takes with wider lenses, slightly delayed camera movements, and a general aesthetic borrowed from nature documentary filmmaking. The goal was for the audience to never once think about how the dinosaurs were made. And mostly, miraculously, it worked.

The CGI shots took nearly a year to complete. Rendering a single frame of the T. rex in the rain took up to six hours. The full 127-minute film required teams of animators, compositors, and technical artists working simultaneously across multiple disciplines — and Spielberg was supervising much of the post-production from Poland, where he was simultaneously filming Schindler’s List, receiving effects shots via encrypted fiber-optic cable and holding teleconferences with Kathleen Kennedy and ILM four times a week.

It is, by any measure, an almost incomprehensible creative undertaking.

The Ripple Effect

The impact of Jurassic Park on cinema is difficult to overstate, and it was felt almost immediately. George Lucas, watching ILM accomplish things with digital imagery that he hadn’t thought possible, began serious development on the Star Wars prequel trilogy. Stanley Kubrick had long shelved his passion project A.I. Artificial Intelligence as technically unfeasible; seeing what Spielberg had achieved, he reinvested in it (and eventually handed it off to Spielberg himself to direct). Peter Jackson, newly inspired, began revisiting his childhood love of fantasy filmmaking, a creative journey that would eventually lead him to The Lord of the Rings and his own King Kong.

Tippett Studio, which had briefly seemed headed for extinction along with its founder’s methods, pivoted to CGI and became one of the industry’s leading visual effects companies. Stan Winston, equally energized by the possibilities the film had revealed, teamed with James Cameron and IBM to form Digital Domain, a new digital effects company. The film had essentially forced an entire industry to reimagine itself.

Film historian Tom Shone has argued that Jurassic Park’s innovation was “as profound as the coming of sound in 1927.” That might sound like hyperbole until you consider the before-and-after. Before Jurassic Park, there were things you simply could not put believably on screen. After it, the constraint was no longer technology — it was imagination and money. Everything else was solvable.

The Library of Congress recognized this in 2018, selecting Jurassic Park for preservation in the National Film Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” It was the rare blockbuster honored not just for its entertainment value but for what it meant to the art form itself.

The Childlike Thing

Here’s what I keep coming back to, though. Spielberg has talked about how, as a child, he was fascinated by dinosaurs and spent a lot of time imagining what it would actually feel like to encounter one. That childlike sense of wonder was something he deliberately tried to channel when making Jurassic Park. He banned the words “monster” and “creature” on set, insisting the crew refer to the dinosaurs only as “animals.” He hired Jack Horner to ensure the creatures moved and behaved as real animals would, not as movie monsters. He wanted audiences to feel the awe before they felt the terror.

And that, ultimately, is what makes Jurassic Park more than a technical achievement. The technology is extraordinary — groundbreaking in ways that can’t be overstated — but technology in service of nothing is just a demo reel. What Spielberg understood was that the point of all those guitar strings and animatronic teeth and sleepless ILM rendering sessions was to get an audience to that moment on the hill, looking up at a Brachiosaurus for the first time, and feel something they’d never quite felt before.

Thirty-plus years later, the film still does it. Put it on today and you’ll still end up with your mouth hanging open just a little. That’s not a special effect. That’s a miracle. And it only happened because a bunch of impossibly dedicated people decided that the impossible was just another problem to solve.

Life, uh, finds a way. Apparently, so do filmmakers.