History of Computer Animation :: Computers Animation Essays

fib of Computer AnimationTo look at him, you would not think that Phil Tippett is the noble of some of the most horrific and terrifying monsters ever witnessed by the military man 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 iodin of the greatest animators of all time, st tricking off with the age-old techniques of stop-motion and then miserable on to the technical computer generated wizardry of today. I chose to write active 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 itinerary of his career. I am also interested in him because as sound as being involved in the field of cgi special personal effects (a career which I also wish to pursue), he was also tight involved in the ground-breaking (for the time) special effects and animation in the spark advance 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 phantasmagorical images in these movies and wanted to know how they were achieved. He went to his local library to enquiry the subject and discovered the principles of stop motion. One of his favourite childhood hobbies was to sham stop motion films with his fathers old movie photographic 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 Har ryhausen figurines, such as the part-rhino, part-centaur Cyclops, the ophidian 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 beget (ILM). In traditional stop motion (still practiced by enthalpy 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.