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Phil Tippett reminisces over the beginnings of CGI
[Mon 07/07/2008 09:15:26]
By Rodney Appleyard
One of the founding fathers of visual effects talks exclusively to Smoke & Mirrors magazine about some of his career highlights, such as working on Jurassic Park with Steven Spielberg and Star Wars with George Lucas. As one of the biggest heavy weights in the history of visual effects, he has some interesting views on how the industry has evolved.
Although Phil Tippett worked on the pivotal movies that really showed the world how valuable CGI effects could be to cinema and television, he was not really that comfortable with the overall concept initially.
This is because he started off making special effects the old fashioned way, through the use of stop motion animation. This was the method used by his hero Ray Harryhausen and he enjoyed doing it that way. To his credit, many of the inventions he made on Star Wars, such as the holographic chess set, still stand up now as great historical effects.
He first had to use computer imagery to make visual effects when he worked on Jurassic Park with Steven Spielberg. Although he was reluctant to embrace the new technique at the time, his team at Tippett Studios has gone on to make a number of amazing CGI effects for Starship Troopers, My Favorite Martian, The Haunting,Evolution, Hollow Man, Hellboy and most recently The Spiderwick Chronicles. These days he thrives on making extremely realistic characters through the use of CGI technology.
He was also a part of ILM when it first started and he even headed the stop motion and creature departments when it grew into a much larger effects company following the success of Star Wars.
Tippett has won two Oscars (including one for his visual effects work on Jurassic Park) and seven Oscar nominations too. As a result, he is widely regarded as one of the foremost talents in the world when it comes to making sure visual effects really connect with the audience.
He recalls how he first became interested in the world of special effects:
“I remember in the early 50s that King Kong was the first film I ever saw that used special effects. I was fascinated by the effects made by Harryhausen and from that point on I tried to figure out the processes. It was hard back then to find out the information. But I was a short ride to Los Angeles so I used to visit Forest J. Ackerman, the editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. I went to his house with a few other guys, such as Rick Baker and Dennis Murren, who were interested in effects like me. Ackerman had turned his home into a museum with so much memorabilia from movies. I also met Harryhausen at his house. He used to visit Ackerman every two years, after making a movie, and talk about the effects he had just made. I eventually stayed in touch with him and also Jim Danforth, who helped me learn how to make stop motion effects over the years.”
Lucas and ILM
Tippett received his first big break in the movie world of effects with Murren and Baker on Star Wars, which really catapulted him into international fame straight away.
“At that time the studios weren’t making big effects movies like Star Wars. Their blockbusters were more along the lines of Airplane and The Towering Inferno. The studios were also built around unions, and if you weren’t in the unions then you couldn’t get to work on the movies. But George Lucas just broke the mould with his approach. He took on people outside of that world. I got initially involved because Dennis Murren was hired as a camera operator, so my contact with him helped me out. And then I was called in to help Rick Baker re-do the Cantina scene, with a number of other unemployed stop motion animators.”
Tippett loved working with Lucas because he found him to be such an empowering director.
“He is an extremely collaborative filmmaker. He hired people that were good at their job and he could leave them to get on with it by themselves. Of course he’d check in from time to time and steer them in the direction he wanted. He was the same all the way through The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi too.”
Following the success of Star Wars, Tippett was one of about 15 people who moved to Northern California to set up Industrial Light and Magic up there. It is amazing to think that ILM now employs about 1500 people. Tippett was responsible for heading the stop motion department in 1978 with John Berg for Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. During this movie Tippett used stop motion to animate the sinister Imperial Walkers and the hybrid alien Tauntaun.
“It all kind of snowballed from there. At the time we didn’t think about how amazing it was because we all felt fortunate to be working with such a terrific filmmaker. We were really focused and just thought of things on a project by project basis. The great thing about ILM is that it was the first effects house to prove to everybody that you could work on such a large scale artistically. It certainly set the standards. Everything else has floated on from there, such as my own studio. So a number of people in visual effects have experienced success after flowing from the great lake of George Lucas.”
Tippett used to work on other projects whilst sill being involved with ILM, such as Piranha, because special effects work in those days was not as available as now. In 1981 he co-developed an animation technique called Go-Motion at ILM for Dragonslayer and received his first Oscar nomination for creating an extremely realistic dragon animation.
Go motion was an advancement on traditional stop motion animation. It took away the disorienting staccato effect by creating a realistic motion blur during each frame. A computer was needed to help make this effect, which of course was a sign of bigger things to come, as Tippett recalls.
“It was kind of a transitional device from initial stop motion animation to CGI. We used quite a bit of computer work and things had to be programmed and manipulated. For Robocop’s ED209 sequences shot at Tippett Studio, I developed a sort of poor man’s blur-motion approach: the puppet was placed on a table and I used to make one leg on the table slightly smaller than the other ones. Then I would gently rock the table whilst shooting to make the blur.”
Tippet went on to form his own studio in 1983, a year before he won his first Oscar for his creature work on Return of the Jedi. He left ILM at this stage to work in his garage. Soon afterwards he won an Emmy for his effects work on dinosaurs for CBS’ 1985 animated documentary Dinosaur. During that same year he created the animated robot sequences for Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, as well as the ED-209 robot. But it was in 1991 when Tippett really had his eyes opened up to the emerging world of CGI when he worked on Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park.
Spielberg and Jurassic Park
“It was on this film that we really made a transition from stop motion to CGI. Initially go motion was going to be used for a big chunk of the dinosaurs. We were planning on using the Go-Motion technique together with computers. But then Dennis Murren worked with some people on perfecting computer graphic techniques and impressed Spielberg with them. He decided at that point that everything should be done ideally with computer graphics because it provided such a significantly different look. He thought CGI would create more spring in their steps and give us more editorial control too. At the time I felt like my stop motion techniques were becoming “extinct”.”
Because of Tippett’s background and understanding of animal movement Spielberg kept him on to supervise on 50 dinosaur shots. This included looking after his own Tippett Studio crew and ILM animators. He won another Oscar for the realistic effect in the end. Despite this success, Tippett felt that at the time there were not enough CG animators that really knew how to do this kind of character work.
“So we kind of bridged the gap by developing a system called the Digital Input Device, which allowed stop motion animators to physically pose an articulated puppet and then integrate that into the animation on the computer. This provided the animators with a hands-on method for animating living creatures. We then refined that during the editorial stage. At that time most people had been trained to do computer graphics in Canada. However, that was in the skills of classic animation, such as Disney.”
It was a very interesting time for Tippett because part of him felt like his techniques had become no longer useful.
“I felt set adrift because the traditional approaches and disciplines had immediately become displaced over night. I wasn’t sure how to participate. But Spielberg and Murren did not let the new guys with technology ignore the knowledge of the past. They were aware that a thorough understanding of how to make effects work was more important than being able to press a few buttons.”
Verhoeven and Starship Troopers
And so Tippett’s journey into the CGI world grew intensely from there. Starship Troopers, directed by Paul Verhoeven, was the film that made the full transition into the CGI world. During this film he supervised 100 animators at his CGI studio and won his seventh Oscar nomination for visual effects.
“Jurassic Park gave us a taste of things to come, but we went full on into CGI in this movie. At that point we put a great deal of effort into figuring out how to do that kind of work. When Paul committed to the project he said he wanted me to do the visual effects when it came to the bugs. But what he wanted seemed quite horrifying. We had no idea how to achieve the level of spectacle that he had in mind, but we got there in the end through invention. It was the first time we actually used programmes to create huge crowds, like how they use Massive now.
“Special programs were engineered to make them interact with each other. So we learnt how to use a lot of the technology on the job. Our guys worked out how to use collision and avoid techniques. We’d make the programmes work, then break things to discover variation. An enormous amount of detailed study went into those huge crowd scenes. We also liaised with every part of the crew to make the realistic bugs. This included the lighting people and puppeteers. It was right at the time when very good stop motion animators were becoming excellent CGI animators, so we used the Input Devices again to help them achieve some of the shots during this movie too.”
Tippett’s philosophy
Since then, Tippett has gone on to supervise visual effects for a huge number of movies. The reason why Tippett has been so successful across different effects disciplines is because of his philosophy about creating art.
“At my studio now, we try to work outside of the box as much as possible. I’m not that interested in the technology as much as I am in what you can do with freeing characters and making them believable, fun and interesting. These days, when it comes to CGI, the main thing people are interested in is speed. Everything is about getting faster and more intuitive. But I think there are only so many amazing things you can do with technology. Last year everybody was talking about pushing the water boundaries in Superman and Poseidon. Water was so big - but it all looked the same to me - like CGI water. A few years before then it was all about 10,000 charging men, which just looked like a bunch of CGI crowds. I think you have to stick to the artistry and not get lost in the tools.”
He says that the cinema sells itself to a certain extent, or attempts to by using visual effects to create the spectacle.
“I am more interested in when the characters are involved with the story instead of creating a spectacle like an exploding volcano. I think these kind of characters engage you in a much larger aspect of the filmmaking process. In my job, I would generally be involved very early on in the production process, working with the writers, producers and director to try to help shape the material and design the characters. I then work all the way through principal photography with the DOP and actors, making sure that everything is shot properly. I also work throughout the post production process to ensure that everything that was planned and designed works out as expected. During this process I am in constant contact with the editors and sound people so that we can really work out how to integrate the characters into the whole process, as opposed to just working on isolated shots. Every department crosses over at some stage. But at the end of the day I look at things very simplistically and try not to complicate stuff. For example, Charlie Chaplin could do an amusing pantomime with a couple of forks and two potatoes, so I try to keep it simple like that.”
Having worked with three of the finest directors in the world, he appreciates how important it is to be open when working on a big movie.
“There is a certain class of filmmaker from a generation just ahead of mine. Spielberg, Lucas and Verhoevan are all from that class of directors who really know how to work with a group of artists and they are also very inclusive. They give you a great deal of freedom to bring whatever you have to the table. At the same time they push and coach you to go further. Those class of filmmakers are really great to work with. For instance with Spielberg, he had seen every dinosaur movie ever made and knew what would work in the movie. He could think really quickly and encourage ideas. But he would also say no when you had a bad idea. He was fun to work with and I think that fun leaks out into the screen too.”
Tippett was very excited about working on Spiderwick Chronicles.
“We were responsible for bringing to life a number of different characters illustrated by Tony DiTerlizzi. It was a huge undertaking but a great opportunity to create lots of different characters that are really part of the story."
Tippett jokes that genetic engineers will find a place in the film industry soon: “They will be more like animal trainers.” But on a serious note, he is not convinced that movies on mobiles will really add to the spectacle of cinema, but he is looking forward to the prospects of bigger screened cinemas and 3D. The main thing he is interested in is making fantastic images that integrate seamlessly with the story. By all accounts, he has done a great job of that already.
Filmography:
The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008) Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation (2004) Evolution (2001) The Haunting (1999) My Favorite Martian (1999) Starship Troopers (1997) Jurassic Park (1993) RoboCop 3 (1993) RoboCop 2 (1990) The Golden Child (1986) Howard the Duck (1986) Prehistoric Beast (1985) The Ewok Adventure (1984) Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) Dragonslayer (1981) Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) Piranha (1978) Star Wars (1977)
Go motion was an advancement on traditional stop motion animation. It took away the disorienting staccato effect by creating a realistic motion blur during each frame. A computer was needed to help make this effect, which of course was a sign of bigger things to come, as Tippett recalls.
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