A new issue on 'Jurassic World Rebirth' and past 'Jurassic' films

In-depth on the river raft scene, gaussian splats and the history of practical and digital effects innovations in the Jurassic film era.

Issue #49 of befores & afters magazine covers the visual effects of Jurassic World Rebirth, and looks back at previous Jurassic films.

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The release of Gareth Edwards’ Jurassic World Rebirth in 2025 represents the seventh installment overall in the Jurassic Park franchise. Starting in 1993, these films changed the game in effects—both practical and digital. What the first Steven Spielberg film brought, and what continued in each movie, was an absolute devotion to showing living, breathing creatures on screen. Sometimes the dinosaurs were brought to life with full-scale animatronics, sometimes with digital visual effects, and sometimes a combination of both.

On Jurassic Park, Spielberg famously originally planned to combine full-scale animatronics from creature effects designer Stan Winston with ‘go-motion’ dinosaurs created by Phil Tippett’s Tippett Studio. The required motion blur and some wider crowd-type shots of dinosaurs were to be added by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), which would also composite the go-motion dinos into live-action plates. All that was turned around after a few of ILM’s artists worked on a clandestine CG dinosaur test, proving to the director that his dinosaurs were ready for digital.

While that altered Phil Tippett’s role on the film significantly, his experienced animation team still contributed majorly to the final results, initially via tests and stop-motion animatics, and then care of the Dinosaur Input Device (DID). This was a project worked on by both Tippett Studio and ILM (and a contributor from Pixar) that would bridge the stop-motion and CG worlds using a physical skeleton armature in the shape of a dinosaur (four were built for the film). Tippett retained the credit of ‘dinosaur supervisor’ on the film. For more on this aspect of Jurassic Park’s visual effects, issue #18 of befores & afters magazine went in-depth on how the DID came to be.

Incredibly, Jurassic Park featured only 63 visual effects shots by Industrial Light & Magic (overseen by visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren). The more recent Jurassic World films, of course, include a lot, lot more. Over the years, I have had the opportunity to write about a string of the Jurassic World films, as well as reflect on the legacy of the originals.

This special issue of befores & afters magazine goes in- depth of some of the newest work featured in Rebirth. Firstly, we explore the river rafting sequence that features the T-rex, with VFX by Industrial Light & Magic. Then, we look at the gaussian splat approach to visualization employed by Proof, Inc. on the film.

The issue then goes retro to feature a select range of pieces that previously ran online at befores & afters and vfxblog. These include stories highlighting ILM’s breakthroughs on Jurassic Park, The Lost World and Jurassic Park III, such as initial explorations into using morphing for motion blur, the development of a proprietary texture painting tool called Viewpaint, the approach to animation, and several technologies like ambient occlusion that aided in rendering the dinosaurs. There’s also an interview with Shane Mahan about Stan Winston’s Spitter in Jurassic Park. Finally, the digital and practical effects innovations made on the more recent Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom and Jurassic World Dominion are covered in detail.