DM: The eye lights were used in both Jurassic Park and Lost World, but the mouth lights didn’t come along until Lost World. The lighting scheme that Janusz [Kaminski, cinematographer on The Lost World] set up on Lost World was more radical, and it offered more opportunities. The eye and mouth lights are a really good trick. Again, you don’t want the audience to think about it, and if you light it dimly enough, they will see it and not to be conscious of it. When you’ve got something that’s kind of sketchy, you can add in the lightning flashes. They can be used sparingly but appropriately to highlight the drama of the scene. They will also fill in the side of the character that is normally dark in the shot. The part of the subject facing the camera could be dark with a little edge light, but then when the lightning hits you see all the muscles and detail. You really get a good chance to see the face, claws, and everything like that. And then it’s gone in a third of second, and you can use that as a great dramatic tool. What I like to do is keep shots sketchy so that by the end of it, you want to see more. It’s what I call playing peek-a-boo with the cameras. As a shot goes on, you can actually direct the audience’s eye from one point of the frame to another point, to another point, and so on. You can do that with lighting, performance, camera moves, or anything. With lightning, you can do it in an even more obvious way and it can be really, really effective. By picking the place that you put the light for the lightning flashes and deciding how many there are, you can get the details of the creature’s flexing muscles to show up and look really frightening.

[Figure 2] Eye lights used in the 1993 film Jurassic Park.

DP: What kinds of details do you look for in the way light interacts with surfaces of CG creatures and objects that tells you if it’s working well or not?

DM: I try to have a reference. I always have a reference that’s made, an actual object, because otherwise your mind will trick you. The more you work on anything, the more your mind will tell you it’s looking better. This can be a big mistake, because the audience only sees it once. You have to remember what the thing really looks like that you’re trying to do. For The Abyss, we sculpted a pseudo pod character, cast it in clear resin, and had it there all the time. We knew what a clear object would look like and how it refracted light. We had a real object for studying the highlights along with every other detail. We did that for Jurassic, as well. We made the dinosaur models, and the TDs would have them on their desk. We also had film of them that we shot out on the set. We’re always referencing back to what is real, and not what you think two weeks into a shot is real. You’ll really be fooled if you do that, as you fall in love with your own work, even though it’s wrong. There are a million things to look at, but if you start with reality and can make a little set of it somehow, like with a maquette or reference photos, then your questions answer themselves. That way you know for sure if the glints are too bright or too wide, or if you can see too many shadows, or if the fill side is not lighting up correctly. One problem is if the skin of the animal makes it look like plastic or rubber. It may not look like CG, but it looks like a fake object instead of a creature. We had to figure out what real dinosaur skin looked like. We went to a local zoo and shot lots of footage of elephants and had all our guys go up and touch elephants so they could see just how much sheen was on it, how dusty they were, and how much detail was on it also (see Figure 3). This is what you need to do. Don’t trust your memory. It’s one of the most important things.