{"id":2987,"date":"2012-05-24T19:23:23","date_gmt":"2012-05-25T01:23:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=2987"},"modified":"2012-05-24T19:23:23","modified_gmt":"2012-05-25T01:23:23","slug":"phil-tippett-starts-a-masterwork-35-years-after-star-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=2987","title":{"rendered":"Phil Tippett Starts A Masterwork 35 Years After Star Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In a warehouse space in a picturesque neighborhood here, Phil Tippett, the Oscar-winning visual effects genius who has worked on everything from Star Wars to the wolf pack in the Twilight films, is toiling away on a passion project that he may never see completed.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a short, experimental film called Mad God and, by his own estimation, Tippett\u2019s been working on it \u201cfor like 20 years.\u201d Set pieces for the stop-motion animation project \u2014 described on its Kickstarter page as a \u201chand-made, animated film set in a Miltonesque world of monsters, mad scientists and war pigs\u201d \u2014 fill huge areas of his namesake studio.<\/p>\n

The bearded giant at the helm says he\u2019s got a narrative in his head, but it\u2019s pretty hard for even Tippett to fully explain Mad God. And since he works on the constantly evolving story between other projects, he\u2019s put in place a backup plan for what to do if Mad God outlives him.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve collected a little group of people \u2014 guys around here that really missed the era when you actually made things,\u201d the VFX pioneer told Wired in a light, airy room at Tippett Studio. \u201cWe\u2019ve shot an end title for it. So the idea is that if I have a heart attack when we leave here, they put the end credit on and that\u2019s when it\u2019s done.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s Phil Tippett, a consummate creator who, after more than three decades in the business, doesn\u2019t feel the need to mince words because his resume speaks for itself. His first big Hollywood movie was Star Wars: Episode IV \u2014 A New Hope (he even put in an uncredited performance as a cantina alien), and he went on to win Oscars for his work on Return of the Jedi and Jurassic Park. And yet, in an era when CGI has cheapened cinema and foreign countries compete to lure Hollywood\u2019s business, his namesake studio still struggles.<\/p>\n

Tippett isn\u2019t the only one feeling the squeeze. In recent years, more and more film productions are outsourcing their VFX to places like London and Vancouver. Getting the effects work done in those cities costs the same amount that Tippett\u2019s work would command, but the producers get tax incentives better than those available in for U.S. productions. The resulting shakeout shows no signs of slowing.<\/p>\n

\u201cCompanies are going out of business left and right because they can\u2019t compete,\u201d said Jeffrey Okun, chair of the Visual Effects Society, in an interview with Wired. \u201cCaf\u00e9 FX went out of business for these reasons, Illusion Arts went out of business for these reasons \u2014 we\u2019re literally losing the smaller-to-midsize company on an average of about one a month.\u201d<\/p>\n

From Stop-Motion to CGI
\nBut Tippett is used to making something out of nothing. Born in Berkeley in 1951, he knew early on that he was into monsters. (\u201cI was in the dinosaur camp,\u201d he said.) He was entranced by films, particularly the work of legendary effects creator Ray Harryhausen.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 1955, I think it was, they started running [King Kong] on television; I was 5 years old and saw it\u2026. I couldn\u2019t believe my eyes,\u201d Tippett said. \u201cRay Harryhausen was the guy when I was a kid. I made my parents take me to see The 7th Voyage of Sinbad in 1958 over at the theater on Solano.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cRay Harryhausen was the guy when I was a kid. I made my parents take me to see The 7th Voyage of Sinbad in 1958.\u201d
\nAfter years of teaching himself drawing and sculpting, Tippett went to the University of California at Irvine to get a fine art degree. After school, he landed at Cascade Pictures in Los Angeles doing animation work. \u201cIt was like the 10 geeks that were interested in that kind of stuff were there,\u201d he said. Some of those geeks were up-and-coming special effects whizzes like Dennis Muren, Jon Berg and Ken Ralston.<\/p>\n

Those friends would eventually help Tippett work with a hot young director named George Lucas, who was working on a new space-adventure movie and wasn\u2019t happy with the creatures in his movie\u2019s cantina scene. Muren told Lucas about an effects guy named Rick Baker, who he thought could help.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo Rick threw together a shot with about five or six unemployed stop-motion animators at that time,\u201d said Tippett, who was one of the half-dozen tasked with creating the eccentric extraterrestrials in the Mos Eisley cantina. \u201cWe just worked over a lot of masks Rick had done\u2026. We had like six weeks and we just had to bang this stuff out.\u201d<\/p>\n

They ended up bringing to life one of sci-fi cinema\u2019s most enduring images: a dingy Tatooine dive bar filled with some of the galaxy\u2019s seediest characters, the perfect place to catch some deep-space jazz or blast a bounty hunter. When Lucas needed help with the holographic chess sequence elsewhere in A New Hope, he brought on Tippett and some others to bring the novel game to life on the screen. They put together the scene in about a week.<\/p>\n

Star Wars went on to become a massive hit and, as Lucas began growing his Industrial Light & Magic operations, two of his effects gurus \u2014 Dennis Muren and Joe Johnston \u2014 convinced the director to add a stop-motion department. Tippett moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area and eventually began working on The Empire Strikes Back, doing stop-motion animation on the famous AT-ATs, which \u2014 despite what urban legend may say \u2014 were not inspired by the dock machinery at the Port of Oakland.<\/p>\n

On the AT-AT not being based on dock machinery: \u201cI think it was a prehistoric animal called the Baluchitherium. It\u2019s like a giant horse-pig-elephant thing.\u201d
\n\u201cThat\u2019s not so,\u201d Tippett said. \u201cI think it was [based on] a prehistoric animal called the Baluchitherium. It\u2019s like a giant horse-pig-elephant thing. That\u2019s my memory of it, anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tippett formed his studio the same way Steve Jobs formed Apple: in a garage. In 1984, after completion of the original Star Wars trilogy (and after winning a special-achievement Oscar for Return of the Jedi), Tippett Studio was founded as a stop-motion animation company with just two people: Phil Tippett and his partner, Jules Roman. The studio made a name for itself doing effects for RoboCop and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. But it made visual effects history with Jurassic Park.<\/p>\n

Originally, Steven Spielberg\u2019s life finds a way dinosaur amusement park movie was going to be done with stop-motion miniatures from Tippett combined in post-production with larger robotic dinosaurs created by special effects master Stan Winston. But then Muren told Spielberg about the new CGI technologies that were being used by ILM for Terminator and said he might be able to make dinosaurs. Spielberg and Tippett watched a mock-up of CGI dinos and were blown away. In that moment Tippett told Spielberg, \u201cI think I\u2019m extinct.\u201d (Spielberg later worked the line into the Jurassic Park script.)<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was like this big emotional thing for me because I was like, \u2018Oh god, that\u2019s it. What I do is not relevant anymore,\u2019\u201d Tippett said, recalling the film\u2019s production.<\/p>\n

Chris Morley does digital effects for Tippett Studio.
\nSpielberg decided to use CGI for the film (along with Winston\u2019s larger animatronic dinos). But Tippett wasn\u2019t out. After cutting their teeth on stop-motion work, Tippett\u2019s animators were better equipped than computer nerds at making dino-motion look real. So they came up with a solution to combine the efforts \u2014 the Dinosaur Input Device, an animator\u2019s puppet covered in sensors that translated movements into computer code (one of the devices sits in Tippett\u2019s Berkeley office, not far from the visual effects Academy Award that Tippett subsequently won for Jurassic Park).<\/p>\n

Adding CGI to the mix might have been an overhaul of Tippett\u2019s work style, but it was by and large just a new way of doing the thing that had made the filmmaker unique in his field.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe secret to what Phil does is a cross-platform ability in that he has a way of adding character traits to inanimate objects,\u201d Okun said. \u201cWhat Phil\u2019s done that makes him unique and special is that \u2014 besides advancing the art of stop-frame animation \u2014 he manages to put character into motion into these little puppets that he manipulates, and he does so with a fanboy glee.\u201d<\/p>\n

Following the success of Jurassic Park, Tippett Studio was hired to work on Starship Troopers in 1995, and the studio grew from a crew of 25 to a staff of 200 digital animators, lighters, engineers, compositors and other production staff. The studio has been chugging along ever since.