Less Is More

Jurassic Park (1993) has about 60 visual effects shots containing computer-generated elements. In 1993, photorealistic, cinema-quality CGI video took much longer and cost much more to produce than it would today. The high-end Silicon Graphics computers used by Industrial Light & Magic took 10-12 hours to render each frame. A lower-end smartphone could do it in 2-3 seconds today. As the technology got faster – and the software got better and easier to use (think of what kids can do on laptops today) – the cost of CGI shots plummeted. This was great news, because now studios needed far fewer CGI artists and technicians to make their movies. And that’s totally what happened. All the visual effects for Avengers: End Game were done by one guy called Barry working Tuesdays part-time. Jurassic World has 1,000 computer-generated shots – 16x as many – and each frame contains about 1,000x as many polygons being animated and rendered. But, bafflingly, Jurassic World only has a 6.9 rating on…