A Fan Rescued Phil Tippett’s Effects Archive From a Studio Clearance — and Put It Online

October 4 (IT Home) — In August last year, the Hollywood special-effects master and animator Phil Tippett closed his studio in Berkeley, California. The film effects assets inside the studio were then put up for public sale.

Public records show that Tippett and his team worked on many classic films, including Jurassic Park, RoboCop and The Matrix — and one of their best-known credits is Star Wars. He used traditional effects techniques such as stop-motion animation to bring the films’ alien creatures to life. Because the studio ultimately entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in the United States, Tippett was forced to close it and began to liquidate the dusty but precious materials inside.

According to a report by the foreign outlet Kotaku, a film fan named Brandon Sheffield, who had attended the sale of the studio’s assets, bought a large CD folder and then discovered that it held a great deal of material covering Tippett’s film career. He digitised all of it and uploaded it to the Internet Archive.

Brandon Sheffield said that after winning the assets at auction, he quickly realised that some of the material had never been published online and might never again appear at such high resolution, so he decided to buy the discs and digitise them. The material uploaded so far is stored as ISO images and contains a great deal of precious material from the making of classic films. Examples include behind-the-scenes material from the famous cantina scene in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, and production photos of various stop-motion and puppet creatures, including the pieces on the holographic chessboard and the eye creature in the garbage compactor.

IT Home notes that the material is not limited to Star Wars. It also includes the making of the ED-209 robot in RoboCop, skin texture material for Abe Sapien in Hellboy, wireframe model files for Jurassic Park, and photographs from the 90th birthday celebration of the effects master Ray Harryhausen.

For the history of film special effects, this material is especially valuable. Phil Tippett has long been an important figure in the field of traditional film effects; his work spans several eras, from stop-motion animation, models and puppets to digital visual effects, and he has witnessed Hollywood’s gradual shift from traditional physical effects to computer-generated imagery. For ordinary film fans, much of this material is also the first chance to see behind-the-scenes records of classic films in relatively high quality.

Although the studio has closed, Tippett himself does not seem to be thinking entirely of retirement. He has previously said he is not ready to end his creative career completely. His personal project Mad God, which took decades to complete, stands as a representative work of his long commitment to traditional effects.

As Hollywood relies more and more on digital effects, traditional physical models, stop-motion animation and practically shot effects props are gradually withdrawing from mainstream production. Today, these models, photographs and production materials that once physically existed in the studio — even if they end up only in a museum, a digital archive, or even a single burned CD-R — still leave a precious record for the history of film effects.