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SYN STUDIO’S 24 DAYS OF MOVIES ADVENT CALENDAR PRESENTS: PHIL TIPPETT

Today, I want to talk about Phil Tippet, a director and special effect specialist. This man is a living legend and you are about to see why.

In 1975, Phil Tippet and Jon Berg were hired by George Lucas at Industrial Light & Magic to create stop motion miniatures and animate them for the first Star Wars film. Then, in 1978, Phil, along with Jon Berg, became head of the Industrial Light & Magic animation department for The Empire Strikes Back, released in 1980. For this movie, Phil co-developed what we call Go Motion, a variation of stop motion which incorporates motion blur in each frame. You see, early stop motion always had this unique aesthetic, which can be very interesting but doesn’t seem realistic. The reason is that in traditional stop motion, each frame is static. But in real life, if you stop a video at any given time, you’ll see that the image is blurry. And so, Phil had this little mechanism that would move the miniature a little, just as the camera would take a picture to create that blurry effect. This technique was used to animated the AT-AT Imperial Walkers and the Tauntauns. 

In 1981, Phil continued using go motion for Dragonslayer, movie that earned him his first Academy Award nomination for extraordinary realistic dragon animation. But it is only until 1984 that he got his first Oscar for his work on Return of the Jedi.

In 1991, Phil was hired to create the dinosaur effects for Jurassic Park, still using his go motion technique. However, at the same time, ILM had created animated test footage of a T-Rex and Spielberg loved that. When Phil learned there would be CGI in Jurassic Park, he was quite in shock, saying “I’ve just become extinct!” (a line that Spielberg borrows and uses in the movie). But, far from being extinct, Phil’s technique was actually used digitally, and because of his knowledge of animation and animal behavior, he was kept to supervise the animation for that movie. His efforts earned him a second Oscar. 

Long story short, Phil Tippett brought stop motion to a whole new level and made the transition from stop motion to computer generated creature animation possible. Plus, he worked on some of the most iconic movies of all time. And for this, we are thankful.

Now, the movie pick for today is The Empire Strikes Back. First because it is an incredible movie. Besides, there are quite a few scenes happening out there in the cold. And with all the excitation building up about the new Star Wars (if you haven’t seen the trailer yet, click here), it seems appropriate to have a good old Star Wars marathon!