The dinosaurs weren't made on an Amiga (but nearly)

Among Amiga fans you sometimes hear that the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993) were made on an Amiga. They were not. The film's digital dinosaurs were created by Industrial Light & Magic on Silicon Graphics workstations: modelled in Alias and animated in Softimage, as Cinefex magazine explained in August 1993 ^[1].

ILM made about fifty "full-motion" dinosaur shots ^[1], some six minutes of digital creatures in all, cut together with nine minutes of Stan Winston's animatronics ^[2]. The original plan was stop-motion animation, in the hands of Phil Tippett; after a test shown to Spielberg, it switched to digital, less than a year before release ^[2]. Tippett's team ended up animating with jointed armatures full of sensors, whose movements were passed on to Softimage ^[1][2].

I was cheap and willing to learn.

So where does the Amiga come in? In pre-production. In the art department at Amblin, Spielberg's production company, Stephan Dechant made animatics, moving storyboards, on an Amiga 2000 with a Video Toaster ^[1][3]. "When I came on the project in January 1991, Amblin had a Video Toaster, but they didn't have anybody who was trained on it and they didn't have a lot of money to spend. I was cheap and willing to learn", he told Cinefex. NewTek, which made the Toaster, lent two machines to the production ^[1].

The models were wireframe, with no textures: all that was needed was to get a T. rex from point A to point B. Dechant built it by eye, from drawings by the illustrator Gregory Paul: first cross-sections, then "ribs", as in a model aeroplane, and the computer filled in the polygons between them. He animated with keyframes and let the machine work out the movement in between ^[1]. "The main purpose was to see how feasible the dinosaur shots were going to be. We had drawn storyboards, but it is very easy to fake things in a drawing", he explained ^[1].

At the same time, Tippett's team made its own animatics the old-fashioned way, with foam puppets and stop-motion, for about four months ^[1]. And the computers that appear on screen, in the park's control room, were lent by Silicon Graphics, Apple and Thinking Machines ^[1][3].

The Amiga did get its Jurassic Park in the end, but from the other side: Ocean's game came out in the UK in October 1993 for the Amiga 1200, and the versions for the A500 and A600 arrived in 1994 ^[4].