History Of Computer Animation Essay Example For Students

History Of Computer Animation Essay 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 ?. 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 fathers old movie camera. Tippett had been a lifelong devotee of stop motion as practiced by masters like Willis OBrien 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 wasnt 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 Tippetts 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. How To Start A History EssayIn the golden age of Hollywood, effects sequences were often the lonely high points of epics, spectacles, and fantasy or adventure films. They were isolated in their position in the movies, and isolated in the way they were made. Typically, Tippett explains, a production designer would call for a matte painting, a director would call for a dam bursting. That began to change in the 50s, when puppet masters George Pal Destination Moon, The Time Machine and Harryhausen developed enough clout to seize control of entire productions. In the 60s and 70s, a series of collaborative leaps made by Douglas Trumbull and Stanley Kubrick in 2001; by Trumbull and Spielberg in Close Encounters of the Third Kind; and by ILMers like Muren and Tippett and Lucas in the Star Wars trilogy and beyond brought effects teams and directors close together. And after Young Sherlock Holmes, filmmakers began to realize that the computer enabled them to weave the most whimsical or dangerous effects even more intimately into the fabric of a movie. That hasnt happened yet in 1999, effects are largely still a carnival attraction. Tippett compares the digital boom to the emergence of color television: When the sets for the TV shows all had to be very colorful, game-show sets had panels with nine different colors. Everything went haywire and became garish. Each new invention basically gets abused in some fashion until good sense takes over. It seems that now things have come full circle. Tippett thought that digital technology would be the end of him, but he adapted and applied his wealth of knowledge and is now again at the forefront his field. His company, Tippett Creature Studios, has been involved in a number of projects, including 1998s hugely successful Starship Troopers. It just goes to show that no matter how technology progresses, and no matter how things change, there is no substitute for experience. Just as he drew inspiration from the greats before him such as Harryhausen and O Brien, I will look to Tippett for mine.