Phil Tippett

Phil Tippett was a core member of the effects team at Industrial Light & Magic who created the stop-motion creatures for The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. He famously animated the Imperial AT-AT walkers on the ice planet Hoth and the Rancor pit monster. His work on the alien chess game in the original Star Wars also earned him immense industry respect.

Yes, Tippett developed the go-motion technique to solve the inherent blurriness problem of traditional stop-motion animation. By attaching computer-controlled motors to the puppet armatures, the model could be moved slightly during the actual exposure of the film frame. This resulted in realistic motion blur, which was heavily utilized on the Tauntauns in The Empire Strikes Back and the dragon in Dragonslayer.

Tippett was originally hired to do stop-motion animation for the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, but he adapted his role when the production shifted to CGI. He was credited as the Dinosaur Supervisor and helped input his deep knowledge of animal movement into the new computer-generated models. He famously won an Oscar for his visual effects supervision on the film.

Tippett founded his own visual effects studio, Tippett Studio, in 1984. The studio has worked on the visual effects for hundreds of major Hollywood blockbusters, including Starship Troopers and the Twilight series. More recently, Tippett used his studio to fund and produce his own dark, wildly ambitious stop-motion feature film, Mad God, released in 2021.