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Making The Dinosaurs | Jurassic Park Documentary (1993) | Screen Bites

Covers Stan Winston's animatronics alongside ILM's early CGI work, and how the production decided shot by shot which technique would sell a given dinosaur.

Screen Bites · 18 min · Intermediate · VFX · VFX · 2018

What you take away

Learn to plan a hybrid effects shot around which technique reads best from which camera distance.

Watch it

Filed under

The films in this lesson

Jurassic Park (1993)

Documentaries to study

Oscar winners for visual effects

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
The Matrix (1999)
Titanic (1997)

Books on visual effects

The workstation

Western Digital WD_BLACK SN850X 4TB — The other one, usually cheaper
SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE 8TB — Desktop archive drive built for footage
Corsair 128GB DDR5 kit — For Unreal, caches and twelve open applications
Intel Core Ultra 9 285K — Quick Sync, which some codecs still love
Apple Mac mini M4 — The cheapest Mac that cuts 4K without complaint
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X — 16 cores — the sweet spot for a cutting room

More VFX

Blender Donut Tutorial Part 1 (2026) — Blender Guru · 55m · Beginner
The Basics of Lighting and Rendering in Blender (Donut Finale) — Blender Guru · 40m · Beginner
Blender Basic Modelling Tutorial (Donut Part 2) — Blender Guru · 48m · Beginner
Animating Huge Crowds in Blender - Lazy Tutorials — IanHubert · 14m · Intermediate
CG Realism with Warbles in Blender - Lazy Tutorials — IanHubert · 15m · Advanced
VFX Artists React to Bad & Great CGi 13 — Corridor Crew · 21m · Intermediate
Animate Moths in Blender - Lazy Tutorials — IanHubert · 11m · Intermediate
ILM Visual Effects Artist Breaks Down Hidden VFX | Vanity Fair — Vanity Fair · 14m · Intermediate
VFX Artists React to Bad & Great CGi 232 — Corridor Crew · 23m · Intermediate
Add CGI Characters to Live Footage | Blender VFX Tutorial — CG Geek · 22m · Intermediate
Lazy Tutorial - Easy IK Rigging in Blender — IanHubert · 13m · Intermediate
How to use Eevee - Full Blender Course — Blender Guru · 77m · Intermediate

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