The Dinosaur Decade
In 1984, Tippett left ILM and opened Tippett Studio in his garage to create a 10-minute experimental film featuring dinosaurs called Prehistoric Beast. That effort led to his Emmy Award-winning work on 1985 CBS animated documentary Dinosaur!. Now known for his ability to make these long-extinct creatures appear real, Tippett was asked by director Steven Spielberg in 1991 to supervise the dinosaur animation for Jurassic Park.

Jurassic Park not only earned Tippett his second Oscar, it ushered in the digital age quicker than anyone was expecting. © Universal Pictures. 

Working with his longtime ILM friend Dennis Muren, Tippett realized that the stop-motion dinosaurs he'd created in the past would give way to computer-generated creatures in Jurassic Park. (His initial reaction -- 'I think I'm extinct' -- reportedly inspired a line in the film itself.) Tippett realized that a different kind of thinking would be required, and set about adapting his expertise as a creature animator to the new realities of 3D-CG. The result was the development of a Digital Input Device (DID) to animate Spielberg's dinosaurs. The technology, which earned Tippett a Scientific & Technical Achievement Award from the Motion Picture Academy, involved placing computer-linked sensors into the moving joints of three-dimensional, articulated character models so that animators could create CG dinosaurs for the first time. The results earned Tippett his second Oscar, and he reflects on this watershed project by saying, "Jurassic Park was the big linch-pin. Although ILM had been slowly been developing its digital character thing, it came a lot faster than people thought it would."

It's a measure of Tippett's identification with animated dinosaurs that an actual dinosaur species is named after him: Elaphrosaurus philtippettorum, which, fittingly for a moviemaker, means 'light lizard.' But Tippett thinks the lessons of Jurassic Park have something even broader to tell us about the process of making what he calls 'spectacle' visual effects films. "Jurassic Park came on the heels of Hook, where Steven had gone over budget. So the amount of preparation that went into Jurassic Park -- whittling down those dinosaur shots down so they had some meaning and impact -- took a lot of figuring out."

Tippett observes that Stan Winston's animatronic dinosaurs carried a lot of the load, and that the film contains no more than 55 animated dinosaur shots. That people think there were many more is a testament to how well-planned the animation truly was. Still, laughs Tippett, "Nobody really knew how to get all that stuff going, so there were a lot of things that people were trying for the first time and were jury-rigged. There was a lot wobbling dinosaur flesh that curls my toes now!"

Characters rule, to this day, at Tippett Studio, even if they are evil alien bugs (Starship Troopers). Courtesy of Tippett Studio.

Then and Now
Tippett can't help notice the contrast between Jurassic Park and many of today's tentpole vfx extravaganzas. "Many movies are being sold by their spectacle quotient. The way that people turn up the heat is to add more stuff. So all of these shows have so much material that has to get done. The productions are so stressed that the actual shooting is done sometimes in a very inefficient way -- which requires a tremendous amount of invisible work later on. Hundreds of man-hours to go into fixing things that nobody wanted to deal with on set. Sometimes I get very frustrated that more planning and intention -- and attention -- is not going into mounting shows. People say, 'We'll add the flames later on…' The processes are becoming more like what you would use making commercials, with a lot of decisions being made after the film's production. Multiple people give you their opinions, and then you go out and do re-shoots. It's hard to find stuff that feels like it was crafted by intention by a small group of people."