Using the original character models, Tippett was able to make a Starship Troopers sequel for just $6 million. © 2003 Startroop Pictures Inc.

Which is not to say that Tippett is giving up -- far from it. After all, back in 2004 he directed the video project Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation on a $6 million budget. (Of course, it helped that he could build upon the creature models he'd created for the original feature film.) Now, even as Tippett Studio works on such big name features as Bedtime Stories and Wolverine, Tippett is devoting time to what he calls 'an extracurricular project.' "It's with Alex Cox, who did Repo Man. Alex has become this ex-patriot who makes low budget pictures all over the world. Now we're making Repo Chick -- basically on weekends, because it's a no-budget project. It's less like a movie production and more like an Our Gang comedy where you say, 'Hey guys, let's get together and do a show.'" Tippett believes that such projects can be instructive for some of his younger employees who didn't rise through the ranks by working on low budget pictures the way he did. "I want them to see that you can approach shooting like sketching. It's like a lab, and it shows you that there are lots of ways to be creative."

The Role of the Mentor
Getting the Méliès Award from the VES has prompted Tippett to consider his responsibility as a mentor the next generation of artists. "That's something that I have been mulling over lately," he says. "I was really lucky in my education to have a lot of mentors, people who actually gave of themselves and allowed me to be their friend." Tippett cites the influence of Dave Allen (a stop-motion artist on Willow and Honey, I Shrunk The Kids) as well as Harryhausen and Ray Bradbury. But he notes that it was a lot easier to meet people when he was getting started in the film industry. "We'd go to the bakeoffs at the Academy, and sitting in a virtually empty theater would be a bunch of codgers as old as I am now [he was born in 1951]. You could approach folks who'd been in the business for years and talk to them. It used to be like a pokey, Midwestern town where you could do your thing and get good at it. Now you go to the bakeoff and it's so crowded that you can't see people you know, even though they're there. There aren't many opportunities now to be intimate, and I don't know if the sense of mentorship is there."

Tippett on location. He worries that the industry is getting too crowded and too fast-paced for young artists to receive mentorship like they used to. Courtesy of Tippett Studio.

Tippett also notes that there may not be the time available, either. "It's the pace that we're going at. The screening room at ILM when we were doing The Empire Strikes Back is so different from screening rooms at studios today -- including mine. We have to burn through so much material. You get these young kids coming in, and sometimes it's their first jobs and you sit down and look at their shots and say: 'Fix that, fix that, fix that…OK, Next!' I don't think I could take that. You try to give some encouragement, but in the throes of production you're burning really fast." And he does worry that a sense of film history might be getting lost along the way. "I'll be sitting in the back of the theater during dailies and I'll say, 'We have to approach this scene with the feeling of the third act from The Wild Bunch.' And I can see heads turning in front of me, and people saying, 'What's The Wild Bunch?' There are a lot of folks whose film history begins with Star Wars."

So Tippett wonders how one can foster a sense of tradition under these circumstances. "I don't know that you can. You try to encourage people to become aware of film history and we do run film festivals. But everything is so production-driven. And we operate so close to our margins that we don't have a lot of leftover time." He explains that the business side of Tippett Studio is run by his wife, Jules Roman, and that his main involvement is with 'crisis management' and making higher-level hiring decisions. "In the meantime, I'm developing projects and having fun working with writers and trying to see if I can talk people out of money to make things."

A Backward Glance
As Tippett prepared to accept the Méliès Award, he reflected on the interesting path he's taken to get to this point. In thinking about an early job at Cascade Studios, he talks about the impact that meeting Tex Avery had upon him. "Tex was a mentor. In fact, when I was working there in my early twenties, I remember pulling out a dummy sheet and plopping down into a chair next to where Tex was sitting. I asked him, 'Can you show me how this works?' As an example, he drew a little sketch of Bugs Bunny and then drew all the little vowel sounds and showed me how to check off the frames on the dummy sheet. At the end of it, I said, 'Would you sign this for me?' He wrote, 'To my good friend Phil.' I have that framed on my wall at work."

Ellen Wolff is a southern California-based writer whose articles have appeared in other publications, including Daily Variety, Millimeter, Animation Magazine, Video Systems and the website CreativePlanet.com. Her areas of special interest are computer animation and digital visual effects.