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_History of Computer Animation _
By: Ian San Miguel
To look at him, you would not think that Phil Tippett is the creator of some
of the most horrific and terrifying monsters ever witnessed by the human race.
A quite normal-looking man of average height, with thinning grey hair, he has
been at the forefront of movie animation for almost three decades. Phil
Tippett is one of the greatest animators of all time, starting off with the
age-old techniques of stop-motion and then moving on to the technical computer
generated wizardry of today. I chose to write about him because I greatly
admire the work he had done in the industry and he has witnessed first hand
the technological advances that have occurred during the course of his career.
I am also interested in him because as well as being involved in the field of
cgi special effects (a career which I also wish to pursue), he was also
closely involved in the ground-breaking (for the time) special effects and
animation in the Star Wars Trilogy, which happens to be another love of mine
J. Born in 1951 in Illinois, Tippett has had a lifelong fascination with the
art of animation. During his childhood he was fascinated by films such as King
Kong and Jason and the Argonauts. He was fascinated by the surreal images in
these movies and wanted to know how they were achieved. He went to his local
library to research the subject and discovered the principles of stop motion.
One of his favourite childhood hobbies was to make stop motion films with his
fathers old movie camera. Tippett had been a lifelong devotee of stop motion
as practiced by masters like Willis OBrien in King Kong (1933) and Ray
Harryhausen in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Jason and the Argonauts
(1963). Stop motion was, and still is an intricate, painstaking art in which
animators pose and photograph miniature figures frame by frame. He wasnt
alone. Just about every top animator or effects man today has favorite
Harryhausen figurines, such as the part-rhino, part-centaur Cyclops, the
serpent woman, and the two-headed Roc bird from Sinbad; or, from Jason, the
harpies that are a cross between gargoyles and pterodactyls, and the
seven-headed Hydra and its spawn (ILM). In traditional stop motion (still
practiced by Henry Selick in marvels like The Nightmare Before Christmas and
James and the Giant Peach), the camera records a series of subtly different
poses rather than actual shifting, so the resulting flow of images is
inherently surreal -- ultra-sharp and jerky. That is the reason that an
audience can instantly tell when a creature has been animated in this way. If
one was to look at a frame of film of a person running, they would see that
the legs of the person in the frame are blurred. This was the thing that gave
stop-motion away. If one were to pause a movie and look at a single frame, one
would see that the movement was perfectly focussed and not blurred at all.
Starting with the movie Dragonslayer in 1980, and later used on the Taumtaum
creatures in Return of the Jedi, Tippett helped develop a new method of
animating at ILM which became know as Go Motion.In go motion, motorized and
computer-governed rods were attached to the models that were being animated.
When each frame was shot, the rod moved to blur the movement on the film, thus
giving a more realistic look of motion. In 1992, Tippett was hired to do the
animation work for the film, Jurassic Park. He did not know it then, but he
was about to embark on a journey that would forever change the way he, and
many other artists like him worked. At the time, the director of Jurassic
Park, Steven Speilberg thought that Tippetts Go Motion would do the trick
for all the effects he wanted. Go motion was state-of-the-art in the early
90s. But there was trouble on the horizon. One of the computer artists at ILM
presented Spielberg and company with a rough computer animation of the T. Rex
circling the Land-Rover from one of the planned story board scenes in the
movie. Computer animators at ILM, hired to embellish Tippetts effects, were
instead conjuring ways for digital graphics to supplant them. Spielberg had
scheduled the computer artists to do only a couple of herd shots, but the
results of their experiments knocked him out. He cancelled the go motion. The
way Spielberg has told the story, he and Tippett watched tests of
computer-generated dinosaurs moving smoothly through bright sunlight. Then
Tippett turned to him and said, Im extinct. Cut to 1997 -- and Tippett
lives. And thrives: His most recent film Starship Troopers opened with a $22
million opening weekend gross. Tippett described himself as being physically
debilitated when Spielberg decided to work primarily with computers on
Jurassic Park. It was such a horrendous proposal, he said. Basically,
everything Id done practically since I was able to walk was not to be used
anymore. How Tippett got from there to here is the story both of one mans
reinvention of himself, and of his fight to keep movie art in the computer age
honest, messy, and true. In the early days of Jurassic Park, there was a
terrible crash at the intersection of art and technology. It soon became clear
that computer animators werent immediately qualified to visualize mammoth
reptiles dynamically and persuasively. As Spielbergs Dinosaur Supervisor
(as his credit on the film read), Tippett schooled a corps of ILM and Tippett
Studio animators in animal motion and behavior, encouraging them to prepare to
play dinosaurs as actors would, with everything from mime and dance classes
to field trips to animal sanctuaries and museums. Before this, one ILM
animator admitted, I tended to just move my little mouse around and not use
my body. The ILMers, says Tippett, had to key into the manifold bizarreness
of real-world movement -- a twitch [for example] a dinosaur might make before
it started to turn. Only then could they begin to understand the kind of
reflexes and action they needed to emulate. Tippett enlisted the computer in
his cause and turned computer animators into fans of the spikes and hiccups
that would show up on their dinosaur read-outs that showed up on their
computer screens. In collaboration with ILM, Tippetts close associate Craig
Hayes developed the Direct Input Device (or DID, also known as the Dinosaur
Input Device or the Digital Input Device). The DID, which Hayes had been
thinking about for years, is basically a skeletal puppet rigged with
electronic sensors. The sensors record information on a controller box that
translates it for software and use in a computer. From Tippett Studios
perspective, the DID allowed stop-motion artists to keep a tactile connection
to their work and animate computer-graphic characters without learning a whole
new technology. At the ILM end, it enabled computer animators not yet at full
dino speed to study data that signaled the weirdness and anomalies of animal
movement. Says Tippett: If you look at the raw data you get from the DID,
there are all these spikes and hiccups that pure computer-graphics guys would
never have thought of; but eventually they saw that all this weirdness related
to something a dinosaur might do. For Tippett, it was extremely painful, the
entire process of coming to grips with the computer. He still insists, The
computer doesnt like to do anything thats really good, and regards the
video display terminal as a one-eyed monster with a keyboard. Were people
who live in a multitude of environments; to just sit in an efficient work
station is pretty criminal. And its a false economy. Tippett holds no rancor
toward computer animators. But generally, he says, I prefer people who have
some experience working in the real world -- they have more of an overall idea
of things. If you live exclusively in a virtual world, theres a litany of
details that you dont think are important -- but they are. Tippett contends
that artists need to dig into their materials physically: If you dont cut
your finger, if you dont know you have to move around an object or keep your
eyes peeled while youre working on it, you may lose the notion of consequence
-- that whatever you do has ramifications, so you have to be careful. If you
have had that experience, doing stop motion or whatever, you think on your
toes a little more. Jurassic Park and its like brought forth a whole new way
of dealing with special effects in films. In the golden age of Hollywood,
effects sequences were often the lonely high points of epics, spectacles, and
fantasy or adventure films. They were isolated in their position in the
movies, and isolated in the way they were made. Typically, Tippett explains,
a production designer would call for a matte painting, a director would call
for a dam bursting. That began to change in the 50s, when puppet masters
George Pal (Destination Moon, The Time Machine) and Harryhausen developed
enough clout to seize control of entire productions. In the 60s and 70s, a
series of collaborative leaps -- made by Douglas Trumbull and Stanley Kubrick
in 2001; by Trumbull and Spielberg in Close Encounters of the Third Kind; and
by ILMers like Muren and Tippett and Lucas in the Star Wars trilogy and beyond
-- brought effects teams and directors close together. And after Young
Sherlock Holmes, filmmakers began to realize that the computer enabled them to
weave the most whimsical or dangerous effects even more intimately into the
fabric of a movie. That hasnt happened yet -- in 1999, effects are largely
still a carnival attraction. Tippett compares the digital boom to the
emergence of color television: When the sets for the TV shows all had to be
very colorful, game-show sets had panels with nine different colors.
Everything went haywire and became garish. Each new invention basically gets
abused in some fashion until good sense takes over. It seems that now things
have come full circle. Tippett thought that digital technology would be the
end of him, but he adapted and applied his wealth of knowledge and is now
again at the forefront his field. His company, Tippett Creature Studios, has
been involved in a number of projects, including 1998s hugely successful
Starship Troopers. It just goes to show that no matter how technology
progresses, and no matter how things change, there is no substitute for
experience. Just as he drew inspiration from the greats before him such as
Harryhausen and O Brien, I will look to Tippett for mine.
_Bibliography _
www.starwars.com
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