History Of Computer Animation Essay Research Paper

History Of Computer Animation Essay, Research Paper

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 father’s old movie camera. Tippett had been a lifelong devotee of stop motion as practiced by masters like Willis O’Brien 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 wasn’t 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 Tippett’s ‘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 Tippett’s 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, “I’m 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 I’d 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 man’s 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 weren’t immediately qualified to visualize mammoth reptiles dynamically and persuasively. As Spielberg’s “Dinosaur Supervisor” (as his credit on the film read), Tippett schooled a corps of ILM and Tippett Studio animators