Fifteen Minutes of Dinosaurs

Jurassic Park is the standard answer to when computer graphics arrived. It is a reasonable answer and the detail is better than the summary.

The film runs a little over two hours. It contains roughly fifteen minutes of dinosaurs. Of those, about nine minutes are Stan Winston's animatronics and about six are ILM's computer animation. Accounts differ a little in the exact split and they agree on the proportion: the majority of the dinosaur footage in the film that convinced the industry computer graphics worked is not computer graphics.

Spielberg had originally planned go-motion, an advanced form of stop motion with motion blur built in. Dennis Muren suggested computer animation could do better and ILM was sent to find out whether it could.

Why does the mixture work better than either technique alone would?

Because they fail in different places. A physical animatronic exists in the room. It is lit by the same lights as the actors, it has weight and inertia, it casts real shadows, and the performers have something to look at and react to, which shows in their faces. What it cannot do is run, or move in ways that exceed what hydraulics and a puppeteer can produce.

Computer animation can do the movement. In 1993 what it could not reliably do was sit convincingly in photographed light.

So the film cuts between them, and each technique covers the other's weakness. The close-up of the sick triceratops breathing is a physical thing. The herd running across a field is not. By the time you have accepted the former you do not interrogate the latter, which is a point about editing as much as about effects.

The lesson that the industry took from this was not the mixture. It was that computer graphics worked, and the following thirty years went accordingly.

Which brings us to the business, and this is the harsher half.

Visual effects work is won on bids. A studio puts a sequence out to several vendors, who quote a fixed price. The lowest credible bid wins. Then the shots change, because shots always change: a director's note, a recut, a new idea in the edit. Under a fixed-price bid those revisions are largely absorbed by the vendor.

So the vendor carries the risk of a process it does not control, on a fixed price, with no share of the film's success. Meanwhile the work has become essential to the biggest films in the world.

On 11 February 2013, Rhythm and Hues filed for bankruptcy protection and laid off around 254 people. Eleven days later its artists won the Academy Award for visual effects for Life of Pi, a film whose tiger was their work.

Accepting the award, the supervisor Bill Westenhofer began to describe the company's situation. About three quarters of a minute in, the orchestra started playing the theme from Jaws and he was cut off. Outside the theatre, effects workers were protesting.

The point they were making was specific. A structure in which the party that defines the terms transfers the downside to the party that cannot refuse them, and keeps the upside, is the same structure as the net profit definition in the previous book. Different industry, different contract, identical geometry.