CGI and the Digital Turn
Liquid metal in 1991. Dinosaurs in 1993. You could say computers simply started making what couldn't be filmed, and leave it there — but there's one moment in this thread I don't want to lose. While preparing Jurassic Park, the team screened a test reel of a computer-generated dinosaur. Up to that point, the dinosaurs were meant to move through stop-motion — puppets shifted frame by frame by hand. One of those artists, Phil Tippett, is said to have watched the footage and said: I think I'm extinct. Spielberg liked the line enough to put it in the film. 'We're out of a job.' 'Don't you mean extinct?'
The story doesn't end there. Tippett didn't leave the production. He built a device that carried the motion of a stop-motion puppet straight into the digital dinosaurs — move the puppet by hand, and the motion transferred to the computer-generated animal. Because of this, the dinosaurs in the film carry a physicality that computation alone doesn't produce. He directed roughly fifty shots and won his second Academy Award for visual effects. The man who said he was extinct became the bridge.
Something similar happened with film stock. In 2012, when Kodak went bankrupt and film production for movies nearly ended, a group of directors with very different styles — Tarantino, Nolan, J.J. Abrams, Apatow — pressed the major studios to sign a deal guaranteeing purchases to keep it alive. It was signed in 2015, with Scorsese joining later, and renewed in 2020. Moving to digital and keeping film alive turn out not to be opposites.