In 1993, one man’s technological breakthrough made an entire craft obsolete overnight. The people who survived it had one thing in common. As AI threatens everything we know about our careers, it’s worth knowing what that was.

If you have a young child (or a nostalgic love of children’s films), you might already know that the fifth installment of the Toy Story franchise has hit cinemas, just in time for those long July school holidays. With an eye-watering budget of $250 million, this is officially the most expensive film that Pixar has ever made. For project partner Disney, it’s a tie for second place with their live-action Lion King, which also cost $250 million. 

The studios aren’t sad about the budgets though, as all signs point towards a box office smash in the making. The film has been out for just under a week and has already grossed $352 million globally. 

When you’re blinded by the box office success, merchandise and spin-offs, it’s easy to forget that Toy Story represents a very particular milestone in film history: the first fully computer-animated feature film. When the first one came out way back in 1995, it signalled the (mainstream) end of the hand-drawn animation era.

But Toy Story was the fallout, not the bomb itself. That came two years earlier, in 1993, in the form of a running T-Rex.

Welcome to Jurassic Park

The story begins in 1983 with a screenplay by Michael Crichton, a man who had already spent some time thinking about what happens when an expensive, technologically advanced theme park goes wrong.

His 1973 film Westworld, which he wrote and directed, was set in exactly such a park, where lifelike androids malfunctioned and started killing the guests. Crichton clearly liked the premise enough to dust it off a decade later, swap the malfunctioning robots for less-than-extinct dinosaurs, and turn it into a novel. Jurassic Park was published in 1990 and promptly became a bestseller.

That’s when it came to the attention of Steven Spielberg, who by the early 1990s knew a thing or two about the genre. Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) established Spielberg as a director who could make enormously successful films that were heavy on effects, but anchored in story.

A novel about a theme park full of dinosaurs was squarely in his wheelhouse.

Life before the Rex

To grasp why what happened next was such a big deal, you have to understand what passed for impressive before it.

Jurassic Park was hardly the first film to put dinosaurs on a screen. 1933’s King Kong had a giant gorilla wrestling them, achieved by combining stop-motion animation with rear projection, which is where previously shot footage is projected onto a backdrop while actors perform in front of it. 

Later dinosaur films reached for puppetry, and in some cases simply fitted live reptiles with prosthetics while hoping that the audience wouldn’t ask too many questions.

The gold standard remained stop-motion: a physical model, moved a millimetre or two, photographed, moved again, photographed again, twenty-four times for every second of film. A few seconds of a creature crossing the screen could take a week to animate. The undisputed master of this technique was Phil Tippett, who had animated the AT-AT walkers in The Empire Strikes Back and won an Oscar for the creatures in Return of the Jedi. He had spent his career making things that didn’t exist appear to breathe, and very few people on Earth could do what he did. 

So when Spielberg started building his film, the plan was both sensible and entirely analogue.

For the close-ups, he turned to Stan Winston, a special-effects and makeup legend who had built the Terminator endoskeleton for James Cameron and the Alien Queen for Aliens, and whose particular genius was full-size animatronic creatures – physical, on-set machines covered in skin and muscle that actors could actually stand next to and react to. 

Winston’s team would construct life-size dinosaurs for the close work (like the scene with the sick Triceratops that the characters get to touch). Tippett, meanwhile, would handle the wide shots using a refined version of stop-motion called go-motion, which added a little blur to suggest live-action movement. Two craftsmen at the peak of their careers, doing the things they’d always done.

What could go wrong?

The animator who was told no

Spielberg did bring in one more team, but only as hired help. Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the effects house, was contracted to add realistic motion blur to Tippett’s go-motion footage. That was the entire brief: clean up the edges, make the puppets look a little less like puppets.

Nobody asked ILM to make a dinosaur, and at least one person was told in plain language not to.

That person was a 29-year-old hotshot animator named Steve Williams, known to everyone as “Spaz,” who had already done boundary-pushing CGI work on The Abyss and Terminator 2 and held the unfashionable belief that a computer could build a convincing dinosaur. His supervisor, Dennis Muren, had heard a rumour that Williams was tinkering and told him in no uncertain terms to knock it off. Williams, by his own cheerful account, did not listen. 

On his own time, between assignments, he started building the bones of a T-Rex inside a computer. He scanned the schematics of a T-Rex skeleton at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology to create his virtual skeleton, then animated a walk cycle for it. The result was a fully digital dinosaur skeleton striding across the screen with a fluidity nobody had seen before.

Williams knew he was on to something, but getting it seen by the right people would require an act of mutiny. Knowing producer Kathleen Kennedy would be touring ILM that day, Williams left the walking Rex looping on his monitor, angled so it sat right in her eyeline as she passed.

The act of rebellion paid off: Kennedy made a beeline for the screen and demanded to see more.

Instant extinction

On the day of the screening, Spielberg watched a computer-generated dinosaur do what no model on a tabletop could convincingly do, and changed the entire approach to his film on the spot. The animatronics would stay, but the go-motion plan was scrapped. 

This brings us back to Phil Tippett, who had by this point assembled a 30-person crew to prepare the go-motion sequences. He was now watching a machine do (in one test reel) the thing he had spent 30 years learning to do by hand.

Spielberg asked him what he thought. Tippett’s answer was short: “I think I’m extinct”.

It was such a perfect line that Spielberg actually wrote it into the movie. There’s a scene where Sam Neill’s paleontologist character, faced with the existence of living, breathing dinosaurs, mutters that he’s out of a job, and Jeff Goldblum replies, “Don’t you mean extinct?”

It looks like a bit of clever screenwriting, but that is a man’s actual professional obituary, lifted verbatim from the worst afternoon of his working life and handed back to him as a punchline.

Pure cinema.

Phil pivots

But Spielberg didn’t send him home. It turned out that understanding how creatures move was not a skill that lived in the puppets or computers. It lived in Tippett.

So he stayed on as a movement supervisor, coaching ILM’s young animators on how a multi-tonne animal should carry itself. His team even built the Dinosaur Input Device, a stop-motion armature wired with sensors so an animator could pose a model the old-fashioned way and feed those movements straight into the computer. The craftsman’s hands stayed, but the output changed. The man who’d declared himself extinct won his second Oscar for the film that killed his profession.

Crucially, Stan Winston didn’t go anywhere either. The finished film wasn’t a victory of CGI over practical effects so much as a marriage of the two, and the seams were hidden with exquisite care. Jurassic Park contains about 15 minutes of on-screen dinosaurs, made up of roughly 9 minutes of Winston’s animatronics and only 6 of ILM’s CGI. The technique everyone remembers as revolutionary actually carries the smaller share of screen time.

The famous T-Rex paddock attack is a breathtaking illustration of how analogue and digital worked together. The wide shots of the animal stepping over a fence or chasing a Jeep, where its full bulk and movement had to read against a real landscape, went to ILM’s digital model. But the moment the T-Rex pushes its enormous head up against the car window, snorts, and turns one eye on the children inside, that’s Winston’s animatronic – a physical, hydraulic creation the actors could genuinely flinch away from. The digital dinosaur supplied the scale and the impossible motion while the animatronic supplied the weight, the texture, and the unbearable closeness.

Spielberg cuts between them so fluidly that audiences never register the handoff, which is precisely the point. Neither technique could have carried the scene alone.

Indulge your nostalgia and challenge yourself to spotting the difference between animatronic Rex and digital Rex below:

Then/now

Jurassic Park may not have invented CGI, but it made the industry understand what it could really do. Two year later came Toy Story, a feature with no puppets and no cameras pointed at anything physical at all.

An entire craft economy – model makers, matte painters, people who knew exactly how to light a 20 centimetre miniature so it read as 50 metres tall – found itself standing where Tippett had stood, doing the same grim arithmetic.

This is a long way of arriving at a thought that you can probably already see coming. 

So many people currently find themselves in careers on the brink of massive change. The AI industry has just left the test reel playing on a monitor, angled in such a way that we can’t help but see it.

The fear response is to conclude that we’ve just become extinct – and there’s a version of the next few years where that’s exactly what happens to a great many people who were very good at doing a particular thing.

But the lesson of the running dinosaur isn’t that the craftsmen lost out entirely. It’s that the ones who survived could tell the difference between the work they did and the way they happened to do it.

Tippett’s hands turned out to matter more than his puppets.

The question worth sitting with isn’t whether the new tool can move the dinosaur; it obviously and inevitably can. It’s whether we’ve spent our careers becoming the puppet, or becoming the person who knows how things are supposed to move.

One of those goes extinct like the dinosaurs. The other gets a second Oscar.

About the author: Dominique Olivier