Phil Tippett.

The awards shelf at Phil Tippett's place is pretty full already: two Oscars -- for the visual effects in Jurassic Park and Star Wars: Episode VI -- Return of the Jedi; four other Oscar nominations -- for Dragonheart, Willow, Starship Troopers and Dragonslayer and an Emmy for the CBS Documentary Dinosaur!. But the award that Tippett received Saturday night from the Visual Effects Society is one that reflects the overarching influence of his stellar career: the George Méliès Award for Artistic Excellence. In choosing Tippett, the VES board of directors recognized Tippett's pioneering efforts in advancing the art of visual effects through his own work as a creature designer, animator, visual effects supervisor and director, and as head of his 25-year-old shop, Tippett Studio. Previous recipients of the Méliès Award have included the seminal vfx producer/director Robert Abel, and Pixar/Disney producer/director John Lasseter.

The occasion has provided the opportunity for Tippett to reflect on the state of the art, and the milestone productions he worked on along the way. First and foremost, he considers himself lucky to be doing something that he loves to do, and despite his latest award, he prefers to tone down the accolade 'pioneer' with respect to his own career. "That's a funny blurb to get stuck with," Tippett muses. "Visual effects people are either 'gurus' or 'magicians' or 'pioneers.' But Willis O'Brien was the pioneer. He was the guy who took technologies from the 1800s, and figured out how to turn them into King Kong. The rest of us are craftsmen and practitioners."

Work on the Rancor monster for Return of the Jedi helped Tippett win his first Oscar. Courtesy of Tippett Studio.

The Jedi Master
Tippett was a stop motion animator who'd been inspired by O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen when George Lucas tapped him to work on Star Wars in the mid-1970s. "I was really lucky because I was able to be part of the classical renaissance in visual effects that George exhumed. It was really what people had been working on in the '20s and '30s. Except for the motion control camera, everything else was pretty much the same."

During Tippett's tenure at ILM that followed, he became head of the studio's creature shop, and earned an enduring place in the Star Wars galaxy by animating the Imperial Walkers in The Empire Strikes Back. In fact, when Tippett's Méliès award was announced by the VES, it was touted proudly by many Star Wars fan-sites worldwide.

While at ILM, Tippett's technical ingenuity was evident in his contributions to the invention of the 'Go-Motion' animation technique in 1982. He earned his first Academy Award nomination for Dragonslayer, and by 1983 was working on Return of the Jedi, for which he received his first Oscar.

Animating the Imperial Walkers in The Empire Strikes Back earned Tippett an enduring place in the Star Wars galaxy, and solidified his place in the vfx community. Courtesy of ILM.