The Spiderwick Chronicles earned Tippett a VES nomination for animated character work, in keeping with the public's proclivity for talking animals in movies. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

At Tippett Studio, which has a tight-knit group of about 175 animators, sculptors, painters and technicians, the digital age is nonetheless in full swing. (And it has grown from his garage to five buildings in Berkeley, California.) Tippett notes, "We have a few stop-motion animators now who are digital artists, but we don't produce any work that way." So no longer do physical factors like gravity and mass get in the way of character animation, but now animators face the challenge of fashioning pixels into creatures that hopefully will convey a sense of mass and weight. "What resonates for me about the divide between the photographic age and the digital age is that back then, we worked with materials," Tippett observes. "When you work with things that you can touch and you can see, they're looking at you. They're not behind a blank screen. You can't avoid them. With digital, you're required to approach the work with complete intention. You have to know where you're going and why you're going there because everything is broken up into mosaic pieces that have to be managed. It's a big deal because you're dealing with scales that are so huge, and so many artists and technicians are working on it that it becomes a different kind of a thing."

Critter Central
At Tippett Studio these days, characters rule, of course. Tippett's work with director Paul Verhoeven on the RoboCop movies and Starship Troopers, and with Guillermo del Toro on Hellboy, put the shop at the forefront of character work. More recently, they created Templeton the talking rat for Charlotte's Web, Pip the talking chipmunk for Enchanted, and fantastical creatures for The Spiderwick Chronicles, which garnered a VES Award nomination for Outstanding Animated Character. "Talking animals seem to be the flavor of the day," cracks Tippett. "We're living in a gulag of talking animals and superheroes."

Work on RoboCop, Starship Troopers and Hellboy have kept Tippett Studios at the forefront of character work. Courtesy of Tippett Studio.

Meeting that challenge has propelled Tippett Studio to create a digital pipeline that enables them to handle multiple shows simultaneously -- including their popular series of Blockbuster commercials starring furry critters, and the movie Cats & Dogs 2. The studio employs a mix of commodity software, including Maya, Shake and RenderMan, with proprietary plug-ins like their Furrocious fur tool. "We're building a whole new fur tool now," notes Tippett. "Managing R&D and computer systems is like running a small city." He adds, resignedly, "And there's always something that somebody wants to try that will be a 'magic bullet' but which ends up becoming complicated and cumbersome. Things are always getting faster and you're always having to update and buy new stuff. The problem with buying this stuff is that you know in 20 minutes there will be something better and cheaper! It's pretty much never-ending. But every once in awhile we'll drag out a high-speed Mitchell camera from 1925 that still works great. Everything else that we have probably doesn't even have dust on it yet!"

But it was the digital savvy of Tippett Studio -- combined with an ability to employ judicious use of character animation to create a scary monster -- that led to one of Phil's favorite projects in recent years, J.J. Abrams' Cloverfield. "Cloverfield didn't have more than 50 or 60 shots of the creature, and it left the audience wanting more. It was a $25 million picture and it was really exciting. I hail from back in the Roger Corman days, when John Davidson from Piranha would come up to me and he wouldn't say: 'How much is it going to cost to do this?' He'd say: 'I have a show and this stuff has to happen in it and I've got $150,000 to do it." And you worked towards that. As an artist, that frees you up immediately. You just take and all your skills and you go for it. With today's multi-hundred-million-dollar projects everybody is so terrified that it has to be perfect." Not that Cloverfield suffered from its modest budget -- it earned a VES Award nomination this year for Outstanding Visual Effects.

Seat-of-the-Pants Moviemaking
Tippett confesses that what interests him these days is figuring out how to do great effects without spending tons of money. "That's where I have the most fun," he admits. "We've been having a good time working with Sam Raimi on Drag Me to Hell, which is a low-budget horror picture that he's doing between Spider-Man episodes. I've also been trying to develop a project that costs between $10 and 25 million. Like a good boy, I got a bunch of art work and treatments together and waited until Cloverfield came out, because that was going to prove to the world that a $25 million monster picture could be made. I did the pitch rounds at the studios and the basic consensus was 'So what?'"