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"Phil Tippett - legendary special effects artist, stop-motion animator, and director of MAD GOD—has offered to design and build our flashback, in which the boy Strindler is abandoned by his father in a snowstorm. Tippett Studio will create the flashback, and the El Condor Mexican street and graveyard."
—Writer/Director Alex Cox

Phil Tippett (born September 27, 1951) is an American film director and visual effects supervisor and producer, who specializes in creature design, stop-motion and computerized character animation. He is the founder and namesake of Tippett Studio. His varied career in visual effects has spanned more than 30 years and includes two Academy Awards; and six nominations, one BAFTA award and four nominations, two Emmys and the advent of modern digital effects in motion pictures. 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 (and features Alex Cox as an actor). On Dead Souls, Tippett supervised visual effects by master animator Tom Gibbons, including the stop-motion flashback scene in which young Strindler is deserted by his father at the entrance of an orphanage:

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Tippett was born in Berkeley, California. As a child of seven, Phil was profoundly inspired by Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion classic, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Willis O'Brien's classic character 'King Kong'. As a kid, and then as a student always drawing, sculpting and making animations, he developed his skills in a broader context first with a Fine Arts degree from University of California at Irvine, then as an animator at the commercial house, Cascade Pictures in Los Angeles.

A huge turning point came in 1975 when George Lucas hired Phil and Jon Berg to create a stop motion miniature chess scene for Star Wars: A New Hope. Phil also had a hand in many other aspects of the Star Wars films, including modeling and casting alien heads and limbs for the busy Cantina scene in the first film. By 1978 Phil lead the animation team at Industrial Light and Magic that would launch his career bringing life to the sinister Imperial Walkers and the alien hybrid Tauntaun for The Empire Strikes Back. In 1982, building upon insights from 'Empire', the same ILM team developed a stop-motion process that they comically christened as 'Go Motion' that produced a startlingly realistic beast for Dragonslayer and won Phil an Academy Award nomination. And in 1983, as head of the ILM creature shop, he began work on Return of the Jedi, designing Jabba The Hut and the Rancor Pit Monster as well as animating the two legged Walker and later winning the Oscar® for Best Visual Effects.

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In 1984 Phil left ILM to create a 10-minute short film, Prehistoric Beast. The newly formed Tippett Studio, then operating out of Phil's garage, drew upon Phil's wealth of experience with stop motion and his expertise in anatomical modeling and rigging. He and Tippett Studio went on to create top-notch stop motion animations for various television and film projects including Dinosaur!, Willow, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and the 'Robocop' trilogy. In 1991, Steven Spielberg, learning of Phil's expertise in dinosaur movement and behavior, selected him to supervise the dinosaur animation for Jurassic Park. When Phil learned of the choice to go with the computer generated dinosaurs, instead of stop motion, his initial reaction was, "I think I'm extinct!" It was this project that was responsible for Tippett Studio's transition from stop-motion to computer generated animation and for which Phil was awarded his second Oscar®.

Phil's next major challenge came in 1995 when Paul Verhoeven, again with producer Jon Davison, asked Tippett Studio to create the swarms of deadly arachnids for the sci-fi extravaganza, Starship Troopers. Leading a team of 150 computer artists and technicians, earned Phil a sixth Academy Award; nomination in 1997. Starship Troopers firmly planted Tippett Studio (and Phil) into the digital age of filmmaking. In the following years Phil has been a guide and mentor for the Tippett Studio VFX supervisors and crew as they create monsters, aliens and appealing creatures for the numerous films that wind their way through the Tippett pipeline. Partnering with associate, writer Ed Neumeier (Starship Troopers and Robocop scribe), the two created the story for Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation, which Phil went on to direct in 2004 for Screengems.

Recently, Phil oversaw the design and creation of the wolf pack in Summit Entertainment's New Moon and Eclipse, the second and third film installments based on the Twilight series of novels by Stephanie Meyer. Phil's roots in stop motion, modeling and practical effects and his ability to use this foundation in conjunction with developing technologies has made him one of a handful of artists whose careers have spanned the transition of visual effects from largely practical to digital. In this way he is a great teacher and mentor to the crew passing on the tradition of mentorship given to him in the early part of his career.
In 2010, Tippett returned to work on an independent animated film, Mad God that he had set aside back in 1990 when he was busy establishing his own studio. He did not have the budget to complete the film, so he started a Kickstarter campaign with a goal of $40,000. On June 16, 2012, the project was successfully funded, exceeding the goal and obtaining $124,156. The film was first screened December 11, 2021, after 30 years of work—and it was worth it: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, Mad God holds an approval rating of 92%, based on 95 reviews, and an average rating of 7.8/10. Its consensus reads, "A rich visual treat for film fans, Mad God proves that even in the age of CGI, the cinematic allure of stop-motion animation remains strong."

By the way, Tippett also appears in Dead Souls. You won't see him in the bar rooms or gunfights, but if you look over the Widow's shoulder during the scene in her home, the framed photo of her late husband might look familiar...