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j u ly . a u g u s t 2 0 1 5 c g w 7 n the film Jurassic World, the fictional owners of the imaginary Jurassic World theme park faced a problem: Attendance at the island locale had declined. The park's dinosaurs, it seemed, had become too familiar. And indeed, in the film Jurassic World, we see children ride baby dinosaurs in a petting zoo. Park attendees travel inside glass gyroscopes through meadows populat- ed with grazing dinosaurs. And one man (actor Chris Pratt) trains Velociraptors using positive reinforcement methods similar to dolphin trainers. Jurassic World's owners needed something new. The filmmakers had the same challenge. Jurassic World marks the fourth time audiences would see dino- saurs chase humans and fight one another. It was a challenge especially felt by the visual effects team at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), and resound- ingly met. Directed by Colin Trevorrow, the Universal Pictures release broke box-office records from the start. Jurassic World scored the top opening weekend of all time, the top second weekend of all time, and became the fastest film to achieve $1 billion dollars in box-office revenue – in 13 days. It's another film for the history books. The first Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg's 1993 ac- tion-adventure, turned filmmakers on their heels. The artists at ILM, led by VFX Supervisor Dennis Muren, cre- ated CG dinosaurs sufficiently believable to cause Phil Tippett's Go-Motion creations to stand down. It was a milestone in computer graphics and filmmaking history, and both Muren and Tippett received visual effects Oscars. Spielberg followed that film with a second, The Lost World: Jurassic Park in 1997, and Muren received an Oscar nomination for the film. Joe Johnson directed the third, Jurassic Park III, released in 2001. ILM provided visual effects for all three features and was the main vendor again for Jurassic World. "The major challenge was coming up with some- thing new and fresh," says Visual Effects Supervisor Tim Alexander. "Everyone has seen dinosaur movies over and over again, and the original Jurassic Park is iconic. We needed to figure out how to do something different and better than the original. So, one of the first things we did was to consult with Dennis Muren and Phil Tippett." Muren and Tippett have become visual effects legends, and both men took an active advisory role for Jurassic World, along with Paleontologist Jack Horner, who also advised the artists back in 1993. "We all talked with Dennis and Phil about the original and what we could do with this film," Alexander says. "Part of the gag of this movie is that the dinosaurs are commonplace and people are bored with them. We wanted dinosaurs there, but not obvious. We wanted them to be like animals out in a field, walking around." Thus, ironically, the response to the visual effects challenge was to create the fictional theme park owners' ©2015 Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment