In the wake of Tippett Studios’ closure, a digital archive appears online

240 points by rdmuser a day ago on hackernews | 28 comments

Tippett Studios or Phil’s name should probably be in the title here to give this the audience it deserves. He’s a legend and many many nerds will know his name.

jasonjayr | 18 hours ago

Ah yes, the infamous Dinosaur Supervisor!

https://www.cbr.com/jurassic-park-phil-tippett-dinosaur-supe...

: Barbing | 17 hours ago
Aww I love that joke! (He had one job!)
: b38tn1k | 3 hours ago
The Dinosaur Input Device used for key-framing poses or whatever for the first movie was sooo cool
https://beforesandafters.com/2020/03/15/the-oral-history-of-...

Xenoamorphous | 12 hours ago

Due to AI I've been thinking a lot lately about his "I've just become extinct" quote.

stavros | 21 hours ago

This has Textfiles vibes.

EDIT: Yep: https://discmaster.textfiles.com/cd-rom?search=tippet

: tniemi | 12 hours ago
Thank you for the link!
It is strange to see how low-poly the old models were: https://discmaster.textfiles.com/view/46859/!!-starship-troo...

vincengomes | 19 hours ago

Direct Link to the digital archive at Internet Archive -

https://archive.org/details/tippett-archive/

: dang | 16 hours ago
Thanks! Added to toptext above.

justnoice | 19 hours ago

Huge thanks to him. It’s a real shame that so much material in this world, for one reason or another, will never see the light of day.

Barbing | 17 hours ago

Anonymous hero rescues 90GB of content from CD binder spotted at auction. Beautiful.

soltanov | 14 hours ago

Hosting 90GB on Internet Archive is step one. Mirroring the torrents is step two, before copyright lawyers notice the auction bypass. Seed it while it exists.

philipkglass | 5 hours ago

Is it 90 GB? The total shown on the Internet Archive page here is 49.6 GB:

https://archive.org/details/tippett-archive/

I downloaded the whole thing immediately because I too fear the copyright vultures. But if it's really 90 GB, I'm missing where to get the other 40 GB.

: tom_ | 49 minutes ago
If it's 90 CD-R discs then it'll be ~63 GBytes at most, as the max CD-R capacity is ~700 MBytes. But you don't have to fill each one completely full (and the .iso file size will reflect that).

hizlikovboy27 | 14 hours ago

this is great to see. Losing all that material to private collections would have been a shame. thanks to everyone who helped preserve and share it.

Ylano | 13 hours ago

There's something both wonderful and slightly terrifying about decades of film history being preserved because one person at an auction happened to notice a folder full of old CD-ROMs

: DocTomoe | 12 hours ago
Also, physical media.
I'd expect these kinds of things to wane now that we do anything in a cloud and data's gone the moment the credit card says nyet.
: ghostly_s | 3 hours ago
If you look through the isos, it's actually a pretty slight sliver of (presumably) what exists. Most features just have a couple promo reels of the final shots and a handful of WIP stills, not much that shows their process. Also seems to only cover later projects that were mostly cg work. Hopefully someone at the studio grabbed the more substantial stuff?

xtiansimon | 10 hours ago

Strange linking at Archive. Clicking on Tippet, gets you to a bunch of other people named Tippet.

: ctippett | 6 hours ago
Two T's my good friend. Two T's.

pfdietz | 10 hours ago

I assume the stop-motion studio's troubles were because everyone has moved on to CGI.

virtualritz | 8 hours ago

I recall my first live action blockbuster I got a vfx job on, "Charlotte's Web".

Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) in Australia had pitched for Templeton, the rat. But Templeton had already been given to Tippet.

So RSP got the option to either take Charlotte, the spider, or get no work on the show at all. A scary proposition for a company of 20 people at the time that only done hard-surface work and no creatures until then. They hired a lot of people in a short period and I was lucky to be one of them.

The work coming out of Tippet we saw in the first dailies of Templeton intercut with our work was jaw-dropping. [1]

I also remember feeling weirdly proud to work on a show that had Tippet involed because of Star Wars ofc. But more so because of Starship Troopers which I love. I can't think of any other movie that manages to be an in-your-face critique of facism while at the same time scoring as a "quality" popcorn flic.

I recall Tippet's test footage for the Arachnids being on the Softimage showreel years before that movie was released. [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYFQ9vVqiMA

[2] https://youtu.be/IPcFGleYsgs?t=73

manyturtles | 7 hours ago

Such a shame. It was an amazing place to work. I remember stripping down a defunct Zambeel storage system to harvest drives which we then used to cobble together a ~terabyte desk side NAS. It was for one person to house assets for a particular shot on Matrix Revolutions without melting the network.

: ToucanLoucan | 6 hours ago
Wait wut, all the Matrix trivia in my head and I didn't know Tippett worked on those movies!?
Edit: went and looked and damn right he did. Of course he did. How could he not. Thanks for throwing me down this rabbit hole internet stranger!

ctippett | 6 hours ago

I wonder what will come of the domain tippett.com. Hopefully Phil gets to hold on to it despite the bankruptcy, he's had it since 1995!

I can't imagine anyone else being interested in it...

lelandfe | 3 hours ago

Or a Tippett HN username, who’d want that

: ctippett | 3 hours ago
Perhaps not an HN username, but several Tippett's seem to think they all share my gmail address based on the invitations, council minutes, school notices and bank statements that get sent my way.
The best was another famous Tippett of NFL fame sending me a $500 gift voucher for their son's birthday.

rietta | 6 hours ago

I did not previously know about this closure or the auction. However, I am super sad to learn this was a Chapter 11 bankruptcy and not just an intentional retirement.