[GameBreaker64]

Ever wondered which SGI machines were used to animate the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park? The answer is interesting.

Several months ago I met, or rather, became fast friends with Steve "Spaz" Williams, the pioneer computer animator who rebelled against the suits at Industrial Light and Magic to model and animate the Rex and Raptors in Spielberg's blockbuster. Don't let the film's end credits fool you. Phil Tippet as "Dinosaur Supervisor" is a misnomer. Steve, who is just about the most honest person I've ever known, directed Jurassic's animation and personally handled 15 of the 50 (not 80) CG shots in the film. Oh yeah, the DID that the stop motion animators used? Steve called it the "DIDn't", because the data it provided to Softimage was useless for practical purposes. It provided great key poses (by Randy Dutra) for only 4 shots.

Alright, now on to the main topic of this post. the 420 Indigo. Yes, it existed. As Steve told me, ILM had special hybrid machines for animation. The 420 Indigo was a combination of a 420 VGX and an IRIS Indigo. Steve had one in his office (the famous "Pit") and it served as ILM's primary animation workstation until the O2 era.

Hope some of you found this post interesting.

Eli Santin