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Phil Tippett
Hands-On Effects
The Early Years
If the 1958 film The Seven Voyages of Sinbad had a toyline, Phil Tippett would not have followed his particular career path. Or so he theorizes upon reflection of the film that influenced him the most. “I would have probably been completely satiated and saturated, and completely happy.”
Instead, the movie stuck with young seven-year old Tippett, specifically the amazing stop-motion animation by the legendary Ray Harryhausen. “I saw it at the Oak Theater on Solano Avenue in Berkley, and it just completely changed everything. It zapped me like a bolt of electricity. I wasn’t the same after that. I just could not figure out how these amazing creatures were brought to life, but I really liked it.”
It was a time before movie websites, before online and television documentaries that went behind-the-scenes, before entertainment programming dedicated to peeking past the curtain of movie magic. “That thing percolated in the back of my brain for many years,” says Tippett, “It was probably in the early ’60s that I ran across a Forrest Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland publication. In that was a very small article and a few pictures on Ray Harryhausen, and how he achieved the stop-motion effects.”
From such slim sources, Tippett was able to piece together the magic behind the craft. Stop-motion animation takes advantage of the persistence of vision and the frame-by-frame nature of motion picture film. Moving images are actually a succession of 24 still frames shot in a second. By shooting an inanimate puppet or subject one frame at a time, and moving it slightly between shots, a skilled animator could create the illusion of life. Harryhausen had been awed by the original King Kong, featuring the animation of Willis O’Brien. Tippett would follow a similar path, where the movie magic glimpsed as a young boy would lead him to become a pioneer and effects veteran in his own right.
“When I was 11 or 12, I mowed a lot of lawns and bought a little Keystone 8 mm camera. I would set it up in the garage or in my room, on a little table, and just started animating clay or pipe cleaners or whatever I could find. When G.I.Joes came out on the market, it was like, ‘Wow!’ They were so articulated that you could do a lot of stuff with them.”
These little experimental films didn’t see much play beyond Tippett’s parents or his friends, but they were a helpful introduction to the time-consuming and tedious craft. These miniatures required subtle manipulations 24 times just to capture a single second’s worth of motion. “It was very expensive and it took forever to shoot. You’d send the stuff off to Eastman Kodak, someplace in Rochester, and you’d have to wait three weeks to get it back, and you never knew what you were going to get.”
Tippett continued to experiment, finding escape in his little films. “One afternoon, on some terrible science fiction show on TV, there was a guy being interviewed on the show that made a stop-motion movie. His name was Bill Stromberg, and I was able to get in touch with him. He was about 25 years old, and a hobbyist at the time. He made movies on the side, so I became his helper. I would go over to his house every weekend and help him make his 16 mm short films. That provided me with more of a structure and some kind of mentorism.”
This led to contacts in the film industry, but at the time visual effects pictures were few and far between. Studios had closed their effects shops as films became increasingly reality-based. Much of the real experience in visual effects could be found in outfits like Cascade Pictures, which focused on commercial work — accounts like the Pillsbury Doughboy and the Jolly Green Giant. Here, Tippett began his professional work, and would meet a camera operator by the name of Dennis Muren who would also go onto big things. Though none could predict just what lay beyond the horizon.
“I was finishing my B.A. in Art at UC Irvine, doing some work in the gallery when one of the guys I was working with had been in the Navy with Richard Edlund,” Tippett recalls. “He said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this friend that’s doing this movie, and he needs some help, and I’ll have him give you a call.’”
That call was recruiting camera operators for an upcoming space fantasy film helmed by George Lucas. “One thing led to the next. Richard hired Dennis Muren, and Dennis hired Ken Ralston and then it all just kind of began, like a snowball rolling down a hill.”
And Then Came Star Wars
Thus Industrial Light & Magic was first started, though Tippett initially wasn’t part of the team since he wasn’t a camera operator like those initial hires. But when word came that Makeup Supervisor Stuart Freeborn could not complete the Mos Eisley Cantina sequence in England, ILM grabbed the baton and Tippett was hired as part of the second unit creature crew.
“George wanted to set up a little unit and shoot a bunch of insert work, and that’s how we met. We threw together a shop under the guidance of Rick Baker, and it was a bunch of stop-motion animator guys like Doug Beswick, Laine Liska, Jon Berg and myself. We had about eight weeks, and we banged out a bunch of masks,” recalls Tippett.
When you watch the cantina sequence, pay special attention to the close-up shots of creatures in booths. Those were shot months after principal photography of the rest of the bar, when time could be devoted to create more outlandish aliens. “It was very informal and a lot of fun. We got a bunch of the people that built the suits and performed in them,” says Tippett. “I was the lead band guy, and I was the cyclops thing. And then there were two blue bubble-headed guys that were arguing; I was one of those. There was a thing that had kind of a yam-nose. And then there was a…. I don’t know what. It looked like a big tapeworm or something. That’s all I remember at the moment.”
It was during one of Lucas’ inspection tours of the cantina inserts that he happened across a little stop-motion puppet of Tippett’s, a long-necked hulking lizard humanoid with a natty vest. “He saw it and said, ‘hmm… you guys do this too?’”
Lucas was stuck with how to do the holographic chess sequence. His initial plan was to shoot actors and composite them as holograms, but a recent science fiction movie had done a similar effect. “George didn’t want to duplicate something that had just come out, so he thought doing stop-motion for the hologram would be different and a more fun way of achieving the effect. So, he hired us to do that.”
Tippett’s model, dubbed the Mantellian savrip years later by the Expanded Universe, was the first piece. It was a pre-existing model that he had crafted years ago. He and Jon Berg worked diligently to craft the rest of the players over little more than a week. “They were very simple sculpy and aluminum wire, or we just wrapped foam rubber around aluminum wire and brought them in to shoot.” The holographic chess scene was one of the last ones completed for the film. “They were having their final crew party at ILM. Everybody was partying it up and screaming and Jon and I were in the back still animating these toys,” says Tippett.
With Star Wars wrapped, few involved in the production could have known what to expect. But having worked on the last great unknown component of the visionary film — the groundbreaking visual effects — many of the ILMers had more than an inkling of what was to come. “I remember watching the dailies of the bar scene and the chess scene, and even though there was no temp track and it was just production sound, and it was the Van Nuys facility’s projection room, which was really ’60s-ish — just a bunch of overstuffed chairs that kind of smelled like wet dog — we just immediately knew. I mean, you could just say, ‘Wow. This is the picture we’ve always wanted to work on since we were kids.’ It was just so clear that it was going to be cool.”
After the immense success of the first Star Wars, many of the charter ILMers were brought back, this time to a new facility north of San Francisco, to blaze new ground in the much-awaited sequel, The Empire Strikes Back. Whereas Star Wars revolutionized the art and science of motion control and traveling matte compositing, Empire was set to push the envelope of Tippett’s first love, stop-motion animation.
“It was Dennis Muren who really pushed for using stop-motion for the AT-AT walkers, because there were a number of designs that Joe Johnston had drawn up for wheeled vehicles and various other things that could have been remote-controlled. Dennis and Joe really tried to steer George in the stop-motion direction. It took a little bit of time to assess whether there were enough skilled people out there who could do it,” says Tippett.
Tippett worked on the development of the tauntaun — the very first living creature seen in Empire. The need to get fluid, life-life movement in a creature that wasn’t a machine, wasn’t a hologram, but instead a living animal meant that new technologies had to be explored. Also, the creature was to be composited into a moving helicopter shot, which required the animation to sync up to a background plate with shifting perspective.
“I think Doug Beswick built a preliminary tauntaun armature, and we did a rough mockup of the creature,” recalls Tippett. “We developed a track with a pylon attached to the puppet, in order to graph the motion control of the shot. It was very limiting, because you had this support rod so you couldn’t work the object in free space like you could a stop-motion object. You had to move everything around this rod that it was on.”
Though the AT-ATs were afforded some abstraction by virtue of representing non-living machines, they proved troublesome not only for their size, but their intricate design. “They were very complicated engineering problems that Jon Berg needed to solve, because all of the joints were actually exposed. Most stop-motion puppets have articulated skeletons that are embedded deep within the rubber, so they merely have to be functional, but not visible. Jon had to design this series of joints that would work and that had very complicated compound moves, angles, and invent a number of different stop-motion joints that would work with Joe’s design. He had a great deal of internal mechanisms so that if you move the leg, it would automatically move pistons so you wouldn’t have to hand-animate them — the pistons would drive themselves.”
After Empire, Tippett and Muren would work together to further advance stop-motion with go-motion, a technique developed for Dragonslayer. One inherent drawback with stop-motion is that the camera is taking still images of a static object. When this plays back at 24 frames per second, there is a perceivable jerkiness to the image, since the crisp quality of 24 unblurred images creates a staccato-like flicker. Go-motion endeavored to introduce motion blur on the subject, by adding computer-controlled motors to the armature, to move the creature slightly while the camera shutter was open.
This technique was incorporated into Return of the Jedi, but by the time that film started pre-production, Tippett was surprised to find himself named Creature Supervisor. Instead of animating creatures, he would be designing aliens, much like his initial role in developing Cantina creatures. For Jedi, Tippett’s Creature Shop at ILM produced all the aliens except for Jabba the Hutt and the Ewoks, which were built in England.
“It was by executive decree,” he recalls with a laugh. “I am stop-motion animator, not a rubber guy, but they figured I could do it, so I did. We initially started off doing quite a few design maquettes. We didn’t see a script at all at that point. George just had us make stuff, and he would come in every two weeks or so and look at what we had done. He’d would integrate particular characters into the script, so it gave them a particular function — the next week, he’d come back and say, ‘Okay, this guy’s playing the organ and this guy’s singing, and this one’s going to be an admiral,’ and so on.”
Though the Creature Shop didn’t fabricate Jabba, Tippett’s team was instrumental in designing the loathsome slug. “At the time Nilo Rodis-Jamero, Joe Johnston and Ralph McQuarrie and I were all working on different ideas. All the work they did was in 2-D drawings, and I did a bunch of 3-D maquettes.” Initial designs varied from humanoid to a bloated queen termite, but the defining direction came from Lucas invoking a cinematic classic.
“He said to make him look like Sydney Greenstreet in Casablanca,” says Tippett. “I think at one point, we even gave him a fez.”
Such light-hearted gags helped the team manage the stress inherent in developing over 80 creatures for the film. The flippant humor turned up in a lot of the creature names. “Well, the thing just looked like the calamari appetizers we were having, so we started calling them Calamari Men, and that became Mon Calamari.” Other creature names — like Klaatu, Nikto, and Barada, Hermi Odle, and Ephant Mon have similar irreverent origins visible to those who look closely.
The Digital Revolution
After finishing his stint at ILM, Tippett was one of many alumni who went out on his own to follow his own projects. He formed Tippett Studio in 1983, based in Berkley, California. There, he continued to bring his animation talents to a number of fantastic creations, notably the ED-209 robotic sentry in Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi classic RoboCop.
Tippett had inherited the mantle of stop-motion animation wizard from Harryhausen. So much so, that when Steven Spielberg began work on his tyrannosaurus rex of dinosaur-movies, Jurassic Park, Tippett was recruited to handle the bulk of dinosaur effects, with some experimental digital dino-work by ILM planned for other, specific needs.
“All the dinosaurs in Jurassic were going to be pretty conventional, using stop-motion and rod puppets, and then relying a little bit on computer graphics for some of the stampeding herd scenes,” says Tippett. “As we were developing it, [ILM Visual Effects Supervisor] Dennis Muren was able to get some R&D money at ILM, and worked up a few tests.”
Those “few tests” led to a watershed moment in the development of digital visual effects. There, in a darkened screening room, the creators of Jurassic Park saw the future unfold in a test shot of a lumbering tyrannosaurus rex, completely digital, stalking across a Marin County background. In a much-repeated anecdote, Spielberg turned to Tippett and declared his beloved craft of stop-motion animation … “extinct.”
“Steven said to me, ‘how do you feel, Phil?’ I said, ‘I feel like Georges Méliès!’” Tippett recalls, mentioning the father of visual effects of the early 1900s. “Everything that I had ever worked towards and loved as a kid was just in the trash can. There was a little bit of the new gunslinger vs. old gunslinger mentality with the CG guys. ‘We’re the new kids on the block,’ and I fell for it! I thought to myself, ‘I don’t have a clue about sitting down at a computer monitor and clicking at a mouse all day long and typing stuff out — it just didn’t look like a job for me.”
Many visual effects companies did not survive the digital revolution, having failed to prepare for the coming tidal wave of computer-generated solutions that would wash away old mechanical and photochemical processes. “I got really sick. My world came crashing down. I got pneumonia. My doctor made me go to bed,” Tippett says. But he sprung back, and instead embraced the opportunity to set some firm footprints in this new territory. “In that time, it became clear that George Lucas, Steven and various people involved wanted me to stay involved with Jurassic Park.”
Computer generated imagery was nothing new in the early 1990s. For almost 15 years, there had been some experimental innovation. Computer animation wasn’t about characters and stories yet, but instead existed to solve problems like reflections, ripples, and procedural rendering. Those most schooled in making a computer simulate reality weren’t schooled in imbuing inanimate subjects with vitality and motion, and vice-versa.
“Most of the work that the computer graphics guys were doing at the time was, on some level, theoretical,” explains Tippett. “It wasn’t bound to conventions or the physical realities of gravity, because it never needed to be. That education didn’t exist. Up until that point it had been a lot of flying logos or things like that. Dennis had been working more on hallucinogenic kinds of things — the stained glass man (in Young Sherlock Holmes) or the water-snake in The Abyss, or even the metal man in Terminator 2.
“Now these things had to be really concrete and perform with a kind of instinctual projection. Weight and mass and acceleration and deceleration and intentional issues of eyelines and things like that became extremely important.”
To bridge both disciplines, Tippett’s team assembled a hands-on solution for the computer world. Further hindering the paradigm shift from physical to digital was that computer animation applications at the time weren’t very user-friendly. The newly crafted “digital input device” made the computer work far more closer to the “just for fun” stop-motion films of childhood.
“I think as a consequence of CG still being in its infancy, Dennis felt uncomfortable about putting all his eggs in one basket and wanted to co-evolve and cross-blend stop-motion animation with the CG stuff,” says Tippett. “So Tom St. Amand and Blair Clark built these big stop-motion puppets that each had optical encoders on them that ran into the computer, and that was the initial way of inputting both the raptor-attacking-the-kids scene, and the T-rex entrance.”
With this as a starting point, there was still a lot of learning and unlearning in CG animation. “The computer had this function at the time, describing the animation as an analytical curve that ends up looking like a map of the British underground railway,” says Tippett. “And if you looked at this analytical function curve and saw what a conventional computer graphics guy was doing, you’d see something that was very, very pretty and very precise and very mathematically worked out. As a result, all the animation looked very smooth, and very boring. What the stop-motion guys were doing was adding these odd spikes and jags to that curve whenever a creature’s elbow connected to the ground. Initially, some of the technical people were saying, ‘that function curve doesn’t look right!’ True, but the movement looked right.”
This reintroduction of natural chaos, which Tippett called “breaking it,” led to amazingly realistic animation, and garnered ILM and Tippett an Academy Award for their work on Jurassic Park. Rather than throw in the effects towel, Tippett Studio began ramping up their digital expertise, first with small projects like Tremors 2, and eventually graduating to full CG spectacles. Starship Troopers was Tippett Studio’s landmark foray into massive swarms of computer-generated performances.
Hero of the Federation
Though manipulating puppets and pixels is an entirely different discipline than directing a live action movie, Tippett’s VFX-background was of great help as he cut his directorial teeth with the straight-to-video thriller Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation. A sequel to the big-budget big-screen Paul Verhoeven film of 1997, Troopers 2 scales down the galaxy-spanning war epic to a single outpost, and a small group of soldiers holding their fort against innumerable warrior bugs.
But there’s little safety within that concrete bunker, as a new type of bug makes distinguishing friend from foe a very deadly game.
Collaborating with longtime associates, Producer Jon Davison and Screenwriter Ed Neumeier, Tippett knew this Starship Troopers adventure would be a departure from its theatrical predecessor.
“We had been trying to develop various projects unsuccessfully in Hollywood, because they were all too weird and nobody wanted to do them,” says Tippett. “Jon got the idea of seeing if there was any likelihood or interest in Columbia/TriStar Direct-to-Video’s part in doing a sequel to Starship Troopers.”
The original film had a budget of about million dollars, but only grossed about half of that once it ended its theatrical run. A big movie follow-up wasn’t feasible, but there was still life to the continuing stories of fascist Earth forces battling against terrifying insect infantry.
“Sony was definitely interested in keeping the franchise alive, if we did it for a rock-bottom amount,” says Tippett. Davison, Neumeier and Tippett came up with a single-setting story that exchanged epic battle scenes for psychological terror and claustrophobia. Tippett likens the differences between original and sequel as the inverse of Alien and Aliens. It’s smaller, but scarier.
Production-wise, though, a smaller production with a tiny budget is much less frightening to the executives tasked to bankroll it. “The administration is always worried if they’re spending million, and everything gets so micromanaged that nobody’s has any fun,” says Tippett. “What we wanted to do was get back to our ancient Roger Corman-style filmmaking roots and just make the picture. The bad news is that you don’t have any money. The good news is that you don’t have any money. So all you can do is the best you can with the resources that you’ve got — and that really frees you up. So our deal was, let us make our movie and don’t micromanage us.”
The final budget was well under million dollars — a fragment of what a typical non-VFX theatrical drama costs. Pricey film stock and development costs were curtailed through the use of 24p HD-cameras, the same style of digital cameras used to capture Episodes II and III. The biggest budget-stretching boon was the production’s abilities to use hand-me-down wardrobe from the first film — quality armor and uniforms that were ready to use. Though, as Tippett recounts, the mixture of costumes and camera almost proved to be a derailing setback on Troopers 2.
“We had done all our camera tests with a different camera, and a week before the start of shooting, it came down that we had to use a Sony camera, so we had to re-do all of our tests,” says Tippett. “We’re relighting and retesting the costume, and Christian Sebaldt, the Director of Photography, starts freaking out. All these horrible moiré patterns were emanating all around the costumes. It turned out the lines of resolution in the cameras and the weave of the fabric in these costumes created these ridiculous patterns.”
Down to the wire, the production had to remake all the costumes in time for the first week of shooting. Though on-camera, the costumes passed muster, they failed a few key quality tests as action garments. “The first things we were doing were all these action scenes. All the troopers start to run, and all the crotches rip out of their pants. So everyone was putting gaffer’s tape on people’s crotches the first day of shooting,” Tippett laughs. “That’s a pretty typical stupid story.”
Such character-building war stories aside, Tippett was able to navigate the first-time director waters by applying what he had learned from working with a number of award-winning directorial heavyweights. “I would meet with Paul Verhoeven every month or so and go over production strategies. He was my mentor on the show. My memory of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard and all these guys was that they were extremely inclusive. What they’ll do is invite you into a project to do your best work,” he says.
“I found that the more experienced the director was, the easier it was to work with him. The less experienced the directors were, the more horrible it was to work with him. Primarily because they were freaked out and worried,” he continues. “But I had seen that in action. Coming from a visual effects, you really get to cradle-to-grave these projects, and you’re working right from the beginning with the writer all the way through to when they’re striking the release print. So, you get to see the whole process and it’s not a mystery.”
Low budget-necessity proved to be the mother of production-invention in solving a number of challenges. It wouldn’t be Starship Troopers if the soldiers couldn’t use guns, but working weaponry proved to be a budget-buster. “In the first Starship Troopers, the budget for guns and ammo alone was like .5 million! That would cancel the picture right there, but I remembered this thing that Craig Hayes had devised when we were doing Robocop. I needed to have the ED-209 blast his guns with interactive lighting. Craig designed this rig with these little flash tubes that I was able to put into the barrels of the stop-motion character. It worked out great, so we used a similar idea. We manufactured these guns designed by Blair Clark, and one of our cameramen Frank Petzold put this quartz flash in the barrel. Because we were shooting HD, we were able to shoot with a shutter speed that would blow everything out.”
Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation boasts a modest 125 visual effects shots designed for maximum impact. Whereas the first film was a spectacle, this one is more of a gruesome horror picture, with the creature design and execution handled accordingly.
“On the horror side of things, the less you know and the more that is left to the mind and the unconscious, the better,” says Tippett of his creature-design philopshy. “It’s better if things are kept in the dark. But when it comes to spectacle, you have to try to give the things a lived-in sense of history. You have to have the thing explain itself without any explostion to make it feel like it’s actually been a real lived-in thing with an evolutionary history of its own. So that they don’t just feel like they’re designed by some cool designer who gave it a modeler and just said, ‘hey, make this and put it in a movie.’ A lot of times things fail because people are just making decisions based on things that look cool, but they’re not total concept planning.”
As far as the directorial debut experience goes, Tippett doesn’t seek to mystify the process. It seems clear-cut to him. “I figured if we have fun making this picture, then some of that will leak out into the finished product, and people will have fun watching it,” he says.
Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation is now available on DVD from Columbia/Tri-Star. It is rated R for violence, sexual content and brief language. Phil Tippett is also one of the dozens of behind-the-scenes talents interviewed on the supplementary material found on the Star Wars Trilogy DVD, due out September 21.