Tippett Studio Closes Berkeley and Auctions Forty Years of VFX History

Tippett Studio’s historic California headquarters has closed after more than forty years, putting up for sale models, miniatures and equipment connected to films such as Star Wars, RoboCop and Starship Troopers. The brand, however, survives: production continues in Canada and Phil Tippett has no intention of retiring.

For three days, from August 28 to 30, the Berkeley workshop that for decades had built alien creatures destined to look alive on screen was transformed into something much more earthly: a liquidation sale.

Across roughly 6,200 square feet at the Grayson Street facility, collectors, enthusiasts and former employees were able to purchase models, prototypes, cameras, stop-motion systems, posters, production documents and equipment accumulated over decades of work.

From Star Wars to Jurassic Park, a movie workshop sold piece by piece

Among the objects were creatures from the holographic chess game in Star Wars, miniatures from Starship Troopers and an AT-AT model connected to the work on The Empire Strikes Back. Tippett had helped build that language while still at Industrial Light & Magic: together with Jon Berg, he convinced George Lucas to use stop-motion for the holochess game in the first Star Wars, creating ten creatures, eight of which appeared in the film. For The Empire Strikes Back, he later worked on tauntauns and AT-ATs, while with go-motion, a technique designed to give miniatures photographic motion blur, he reached one of his creative peaks in Dragonslayer.

After founding his own studio in Berkeley in the 1980s, Tippett won a Special Achievement Award for Return of the Jedi and ten years later a second Oscar for Jurassic Park, together with Dennis Muren, Stan Winston and Michael Lantieri.

When Steven Spielberg saw ILM’s digital Tyrannosaurus test and chose CGI instead of go-motion dinosaurs, Tippett said that he felt “already extinct.” Tippett then transferred into digital production the knowledge the first CGI animators did not yet have: an understanding of weight, locomotion, animal behavior and inertia. The Academy in fact regards Jurassic Park as one of the decisive transitions between stop-motion and computer animation, a transition to which Tippett directly contributed.

The same stubbornness would return in Tippett’s most personal project, Mad God, conceived at the end of the 1980s, shelved during the digital revolution and revived when several artists rediscovered boxes of puppets and materials from the studio. The project eventually involved more than sixty collaborators and became, in 2021, a feature film deliberately built with physical sets and creatures, at a time when it would by then have been far easier to generate them in other ways.

Berkeley closes, not Tippett Studio: the amount of space cinema needs is changing

Tippett Studio has clarified that it will continue working in visual effects and animation and that the Toronto facility is busy producing a major feature film. According to the company, permanently maintaining a large physical space is no longer necessary: stages, fabrication, motion-control photography and specialized infrastructure will be used externally when needed.

In May 2024, Tippett Studio filed voluntarily for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in California. During the same period, the Indian company PhantomFX began the acquisition of 80% of the company.

Phil Tippett, now seventy-four, told CBS that he has no intention of retiring: the man who in 1993 feared that he had become obsolete is still working, and this time what has become superfluous is above all the space needed to contain forty years of cinema.