Phil Tippett (born September 27, 1951) is an American movie director and Oscar and Emmy Award-winning visual effects supervisor and producer, who specializes in creature design, stop-motion and computerized character animation. Over his career, he has assisted ILM and DreamWorks, and in 1984 formed his own company, Tippett Studio. His work has appeared in movies such as the original Star Wars trilogy, Jurassic Park, and RoboCop. In 2021, he released his long-gestating stop-motion film Mad God, which was funded through Kickstarter and distributed by Shudder. Early life Tippett was born in Berkeley, California. When he was seven, Tippett saw Ray Harryhausen's special effects classic, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and his life's direction was set. Tippett completed a bachelor's degree in art at the University of California, Irvine, and went to work at the animation studio Cascade Pictures in Los Angeles. Career Stop motion In 1975, while still working at Cascade Pictures, Phil Tippett and Jon Berg were hired by George Lucas at Industrial Light & Magic to create a stop-motion miniature chess scene for the original Star Wars film. When Star Wars was being released on theatres, in 1977, Tippett was approached by Joe Dante and Jon Davison to create the fish for Roger Corman's Piranha. It was released in 1978, although Tippett was not credited in the film. In 1978, Tippett headed the ILM animation department with Jon Berg for The Empire Strikes Back, released in 1980. For this film, Tippett co-developed the animation technique called go motion to animate the sinister AT-AT Imperial Walkers and the hybrid alien tauntauns. In 1981, Tippett continued using go motion for Dragonslayer, and received his first Academy Award nomination for the extraordinarily realistic dragon animation. By 1983, Tippett led the famed Lucasfilm creature shop for Return of the Jedi for which he was awarded his first Oscar in 1984. In 1984, Tippett Studio was born when Tippett left ILM and set up a studio in his garage to create a 10-minute experimental film called Prehistoric Beast. The realism of the dinosaurs it depicted and the film's reflection of contemporary scientific theory led to the 1985 CBS animated documentary Dinosaur!. The next year, in 1986, Dinosaur! earned Tippett Studio its first award, a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Visual Effects, for the animated dinosaur sequences. In 1986, producer Jon Davison hired Tippett to create the animated robot sequences for RoboCop. The