It’s the jungle. It’s dark. There are bug sounds all around you. You can smell damp soil and urine and faeces. It’s your urine and faeces. A moment ago you relieved yourself behind a tree and now you’re thinking, if you can smell it, maybe the things out there can too (the “things” are dinosaurs because this is a jurassic park story). You decide to move to another bit of jungle and start walking through the brush and hopping over fallen logs. It’s all very scary for you because you can’t really see where you’re going, and if you take a wrong turn you might fall down a ravine and break a limb. You might break many limbs, and that would make this whole thing even worse. 

You’ve been walking for about a mile now, and just as you stop to take a rest, you hear a faint rustle in the distance. You freeze in place, and your eyes begin to dart around trying to spot any movement, but it’s useless because it’s night of course. Suddenly there’s another, louder, rustle. Much closer. “I should have stayed with the piss and shit”, you think to yourself. More rustles, footsteps, and a growl RIGHT next to you. It’s in this instant you realise you didn’t think those words at all. You just said them aloud. You spoke those words like you were talking to your best friend Craig at that busy club that you like. You aren’t sure how that just happened but you think maybe it’s because you are dehydrated (you did piss a lot). You don’t know whether to laugh or scream or cry, but just as you start to do all three at once, you are knocked to the ground and feel painful pressure around your neck as the thing that was behind you now sits on top of you and sinks its teeth in. You have just been killed by a dinosaur at Jurassic Park. Craig will be devastated.

For the past couple of months I’ve been working on my ultimate Jurassic Park restoration edit, and though it’s still a long way off from being completed, I wanted to talk a bit about what I’ve done. This post will cover some of the changes I’ve made to the film, and why I’m even doing this in the first place.

Jurassic Park has been released in many different formats over the years, including LaserDisc, VHS, DVD, Blu-Rays  — but none of these have ever matched the colour and overall visual quality of the original 1993 theatrical film print. The LaserDisc and VHS releases each had their own colour grades, and when the film was finally transferred to 1080p Blu-Ray in 2011, it received yet another alteration to its colour palette, this time the film we got was overexposed, grainy, and massively high in magenta. It was certainly the clearest and crispest the film had ever looked, but it was lacking everywhere else. Then, in 2013, the film underwent 3D post-conversion and got probably the worst treatment yet, with brown skies and sickly-orange grading.

I made the following video comparison showing the differences between the 2011 and 2013 Blu-Ray transfers. A lot of the visual weirdness is due to the 3D, so bear that in mind.

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