B. From Stopmotion to early CGI

o 1. Leaving ILM

In 1983 Tippett left ILM to start his own studio, which of course was called Tippett Studios. He began his work in his garage on an experimental10-minute film called “Prehistoric Beast” which involved dinosaurs. The realism of the film’s dinosaurs, as well as the scientific theory led it to an animated documentary “Dinosaur!” on CBS in 1985. It won an Emmy for Special Visual Effects for the animated dinosaurs.



o 2. Expanding with Jon Davison

Tippett was hired in 1983 by producer Jon Davison to work on an animated robot sequence for “RoboCop”, along with Craig Hayes to design the ED-209 robot. Together Hayes and Tippett realized their ability to work together and produce highly successful projects.


Here is a video which covers the making of the ED-209 Robot with Hayes and Tippett. Hayes goes into detail about the design and reasoning behind the robot and emphasizes the way it is built to signify the fact that a person could not fit into the suit, and how the pieces of the robot would move. Tippett himself then explains about the composition of his shots, and talks about the issues behind stop motion and having to reset the characters and fixing them:





While working under Davison, Tippett was slowly involved in CGI, to supervise and give advice on how to animate the CG head of “Cain”. However due to the tight schedule, he could only give advice through written instruction.


o 3. Stopmotion to CGI


Steven Spielberg hired Tippett in 1991 to work on “Jurassic Park” for his acclaimed Go-Motion technique which can be seen within this test stop motion:



However Dennis Murren and his CGI team at ILM created test footage of a T-Rex for Spielberg—which caused him to revert from full stop motion to CGI. Once Tippett was informed he was shocked. Spielberg however kept Tippett on the job as a supervisor for his intensive knowledge in animal movement and behavior for both the Tippett and ILM studios. Tippett not only helped supervise but created animatics to further illustrate the plan of movements and shots from storyboards:





In all of Tippett and the crew he supervised, he won another Oscar for the digitally realistic dinosaurs and their animation. The breathing, the way the dinosaurs flexed and reacted all lead to the believability of the award-winning creatures.


Through out the process Tippett and Hayes developed the Digital Input Device (DID) which helped aid them through the transition from stop motion to CG animation. The DID is the use of physical character with inputs within themselves which, when animated in life, would send information to a computer which would help improve the accuracy of the animation and help save time.