The Principle Character: CGSociety catches up with the 2007 ADAPT Keynote speaker

ome people can walk unnoticed through a crowd yet leave a mark that alters almost everything we know. Phil Tippett is one of those wandering wizards. With his work on the hologram chess pieces in Star Wars to his recent work in ‘Enchanted’, ‘The Golden Compass’, and ‘The Spiderwick Chronicles’, Tippett characters have been walking in our imaginations for years. Yet, if you saw Tippett in a crowd, you might barely notice the slightly rumpled man with intense eyes framed from years of smiling and concentration. He still seems to feel his impact has just been nothing more than luck and endurance. CGSociety sat him down for a yarn while at ADAPT in Montreal after a grueling year on 'Spiderwick'. “I don’t know, it has to be the way I do things, but I don’t know what that is. The way one thinks of themselves is not necessarily the way everyone else thinks about you, so when euphemisms are brought up like ‘pioneer’ and ‘legend’, it’s kinda cute in a way, and endearing. But it makes me a little bit nervous because it’s like foreshadowing. You know, ok, you see that box over there?” and he waves off to the side of the room. “That’s where you’re going. You’re going into ‘the legend box!’”
	Only the sea of animators parting before him gave rise to the news he was on his way to meet with us at ADAPT 2007, where the second of our two interviews took place. His eyes seemed to reflect the color of the sky, whether he could see it or not. On a sunny day in the enclosed Tippett Studio conference room located in Berkeley, California, they were startling blue, but on this overcast Montreal day at ADAPT, they leaned towards a cooler grey. You can watch the man work through his eyes. Though slightly blurred through a haze of fatigue, they never stopped absorbing every nuance around him. He had just come off ‘Spiderwick’ but his brain hadn’t yet stopped firing ideas from one cell to another. He sat down with a bit of a sigh that suggested he was perplexed by all the attention and just wanted some rest so he could get back to dirtying his hands with the work he loved. “I think these titles that are attributed to people are the result of people who have stayed alive for a long time, and have done a body of work, that has for one reason or another influenced other people. But the fact of the matter is, the way you arrive at that place- and you can talk to anybody about this, who is a “legend or pioneer” or whatever- is they just got lucky and they blundered into things. They turned around and people liked the stuff they did. You just got lucky, you got lucky a bunch of times. But in the course of a career or a lifetime, you see this time and time again, in anybody’s life, there are peaks and valleys and…” he shrugged, “I don’t know.” And he waved the whole thing off. He could almost convince you he had the makings of a curmudgeon if he could keep the laughter from his face for more than a few seconds. He talks in analogies and with his hands, plucking the words from the air in front of him. When he finds too many to select from, he emits a long inaudible stream of vowels as a place holder that somehow makes complete sense before driving forward again. But bringing Tippett back to a comfort zone turned out to be easy. All you had to do was ask him about his work. “You forget you are working and just get into the creative aspects. There is a method of approaching every problem that needs to be figured out and thought through and I’m pretty good at coming in early and doing that. I’m most effective charting the course and making sure the thing is on track, making sure when we are shooting that we’ve got the shot. In an idea world, you are hired for your expertise, so the fun aspect to me is being involved right from the beginning and getting called in when there’s a first draft of the script and working with the director and the writer and the producers.”
Hydrated and reasonably comfortable under the scrutiny of the camera, he returned to the importance of story and character and not relying on technology to create the craft. “We’re in a little bit of a fantasy stage with this digital stuff where we say, well you can do anything you want. And yeah, you could,” he shrugged, “maybe; but to a certain degree, it’s about doing an engineering reality check.” And he offered the analogy, “certain areas you don’t want to build a bridge across. You may want to go downstream about three miles because the geology is better over there, you can drill into the bedrock, and it’s not sandstone.” In other words, don’t just use technology because you can, because technology is a tool, not the accomplishment. “When you look at a script, you are divining a whole bunch of things at the same time. One is the character; what the character is required to be, one is what it’s required to do and how you are really going to do it. All three resonate equally. A lot of times you’ll figure it out by committee. Others, you are mitigated by the budget. No matter what the budget is, even if you are working on a $100 million dollar plus project, the envelope is being pushed farther and farther, so you have to figure out new and different ways of doing things all the time.” Tippett sees the merits of technology. He pulled no punches remembering the work he did as a stop motion animator. “It was a big pain in the ass dealing with weight and gravity doing stop motion work that you simply don’t have with digital work. If you wanted to have a certain buoyancy with a stop motion puppet, have it run and lift off the ground, it was a huge technological impediment.” But there was certainly a point where he hated to let stop motion go. He saw first hand the potential of digital effects early on through the transition of ‘Jurassic Park’, where his stop motion work was put aside in favor of close friend Dennis Muren’s computer generated dinosaurs.