Quote from: DoomRulz on Jun 16, 2015, 12:42:15 PMEveryone needs a house to live in. And yes, I can fault the proprietor because he's the one who hired the engineer. He should've known what kind of service he was paying for.
...but the proprietor, being human, is not omniscient -- thus would not be realistically be able to know something's up with the engineer. It's a faulty logic going on here, both because of this and because you can give fault to an endless chain. I can fault the Costa Rican government for giving Hammond the island (should've known what kind of things he wanted to do with the island); I can blame whoever elected the Costa Rican government (should've known that they would've sold the island to yadda yadda yadda); and so on and so forth. It's utter, blatant nonsense.
Regarding the feather discussion,
Vertigo is entirely correct. Not only was the feather theory not widely accepted in those times, but digital effects were at the pioneering stage, especially for A. live-action integration (meaning that the CGI effects are integrated into a real environment and thus have to be photoreal -- i.e. not TRON) and B. living things. They had to invent to do it because no one had done it before. It was not puppetry or stop-motion, techniques with
generations of knowledge beforehand. CGI was new. You know what CGI had been really good at before
Jurassic Park? Liquids and fluids (
The Abyss and
Terminator 2), small touch-ups (
Alien3), and that's it.
Jurassic Park was the first film to portray fully digital living creatures in a live-action environment. Having them scaly and not feathered rendered the animation not only simpler but basically possible for the time. Had they wanted to make them feathered, they would have had to engineer specific programs to grow and animate feathers, to render and animate them convincingly, and to solve problems such as overlapping; but the truth is, they would have looked like poop no matter the effort.
Feathers are no different to fur, digital effects-wise: they are elements that react both individually and as a mass, and adhere to the body a certain way. Not only that, but light partially passes through their individual structures, creating specific appearences and making them very difficult to light without looking opaque (thus unreal). Levels of transparency and the manners in which light reacts with feathers and fur are still fields of research in digital effects!
90s attempts at fur were honest efforts, but quite awful.
Relic hid them effectively by having the creature move in the darkness whenever it was digital (except the finale, but the fur had burned by then); but films like
An American Werewolf in Paris aren't fondly remembered for their effects, and for good reason. Even in its time it was f**king derided for its effects. I can't even remember the first actually convincing renderings of fur and feathers (
The Two Towers?) but they certainly weren't in the 90s.
The
Jurassic Park digital dinosaurs still hold up (mostly) and part of the reason for that is because the only parts that need layers of transparency (eyes, teeth, certain soft tissue portions in the mouth) are never seen in big detail, or are lit a certain way to hide their flaws. Their bodies are overall bluntly opaque.
Species (2 years after
Jurassic Park) attempted to have a digital creature with layers of transparency, and failed miserably (to Giger himself's dismay -- there's an entire article on him dissing the digital effects of the film). So yes, it is entirely understandable that the makers of
Jurassic Park's digital effects did not want further problems with their creations -- problems far too massive for pioneers like them.
