rancor toward computer animators. But generally, he says, “I prefer people who have some experience working in the real world -- they have more of an overall idea of things. If you live exclusively in a virtual world, there’s a litany of details that you don’t think are important -- but they are.” Tippett contends that artists need to dig into their materials physically: “If you don’t cut your finger, if you don’t know you have to move around an object or keep your eyes peeled while you’re working on it, you may lose the notion of consequence -- that whatever you do has ramifications, so you have to be careful. If you have had that experience, doing stop motion or whatever, you think on your toes a little more.”Jurassic Park and it’s like brought forth a whole new way of dealing with special effects in films. In the golden age of Hollywood, effects sequences were often the lonely high points of epics, spectacles, and fantasy or adventure films. They were isolated in their position in the movies, and isolated in the way they were made. Typically, Tippett explains, “a production designer would call for a matte painting, a director would call for a dam bursting.” That began to change in the ’50s, when puppet masters George Pal (Destination Moon, The Time Machine) and Harryhausen developed enough clout to seize control of entire productions. In the ’60s and ’70s, a series of collaborative leaps -- made by Douglas Trumbull and Stanley Kubrick in 2001; by Trumbull and Spielberg in Close Encounters of the Third Kind; and by ILMers like Muren and Tippett and Lucas in the Star Wars trilogy and beyond -- brought effects teams and directors close together. And after Young Sherlock Holmes, filmmakers began to realize that the computer enabled them to weave the most whimsical or dangerous effects even more intimately into the fabric of a movie. That hasn’...
