rs, says Tippett, had to key into the manifold bizarreness of real-world movement -- “a twitch [for example] a dinosaur might make before it started to turn. Only then could they begin to understand the kind of reflexes and action they needed to emulate.” Tippett enlisted the computer in his cause and turned computer animators into fans of the spikes and hiccups that would show up on their dinosaur read-outs that showed up on their computer screens. In collaboration with ILM, Tippett’s close associate Craig Hayes developed the Direct Input Device (or DID, also known as the Dinosaur Input Device or the Digital Input Device). The DID, which Hayes had been thinking about for years, is basically a skeletal puppet rigged with electronic sensors. The sensors record information on a controller box that translates it for software and use in a computer. From Tippett Studio’s perspective, the DID allowed stop-motion artists to keep a tactile connection to their work and animate computer-graphic characters without learning a whole new technology. At the ILM end, it enabled computer animators not yet at full dino speed to study data that signaled the weirdness and anomalies of animal movement. Says Tippett: “If you look at the raw data you get from the DID, there are all these spikes and hiccups that pure computer-graphics guys would never have thought of; but eventually they saw that all this weirdness related to something a dinosaur might do.” For Tippett, “it was extremely painful, the entire process of coming to grips with the computer.” He still insists, “The computer doesn’t like to do anything that’s really good,” and regards the video display terminal as a “one-eyed monster with a keyboard. We’re people who live in a multitude of environments; to just sit in an efficient work station is pretty criminal. And it’s a false economy.” Tippett holds no...
