The First Frame's The Hardest: What Phil Tippett Taught Me About Bringing Things To Life
The ghost of the craftsman
Two weeks ago I told you about a goofy coyote, a cow who thought she was a dog, and a baby owl falling out of frame. That post was Technically Correct, Emotionally Wrong, and it came from the first episode of LAIKA's new series, MADE BY HUMANS.
Well. They went and did it again.
This time LAIKA's Model Shop Creative Lead, Keith McQueen, sits down with a man he introduces as basically a father of stop motion. They are surrounded by steel armatures from LAIKA films, and about five minutes in Keith says the quiet part out loud... everything from his childhood has this man's fingerprints on it.
Mine too. And yours. Even if you have never once heard his name.
His name is PHIL TIPPETT. By the end of this post I want you to be that person at the party who will NOT stop talking about him.
Near the end of the video, Keith walks Phil through the model shop and talks about what he loves most in handmade work. A little chatter in the fur. The tiny evidence that a human being was there, moving things one frame at a time. He calls it "the ghost of the craftsman."
That is this whole post. That is Phil's whole career. And if you have been reading me for a while, you already know it's the whole reason I do what I do.
The resume you already love (you just didn't know whose it was)
Everybody knows George Lucas. Everybody knows Steven Spielberg. Almost nobody knows the guy who made their monsters MOVE.
Here is a partial list. Stop me when you hit your childhood.
The holochess set in Star Wars (1977). Those little stop motion monsters on the Millennium Falcon that Chewie is sulking over? Phil and his partner Jon Berg.
The tauntauns and the AT-AT walkers in The Empire Strikes Back. He co-developed a whole new animation technique to pull them off.
The dragon in Dragonslayer (1981). His first Academy Award nomination.
The Rancor in Return of the Jedi. He ran the creature shop on that film and won his first Oscar.
ED-209 in RoboCop. The stair-challenged murder robot of your nightmares.
The digital dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. His credit literally reads Dinosaur Supervisor. Second Oscar.
The bugs in Starship Troopers. He ran a team of about a hundred people, and Paul Verhoeven has credited him with co-directing the big battle sequences.
He came back for the holochess scene in The Force Awakens. He did stop motion for Skeleton Crew. He animated a stop motion rat in Alien: Romulus in 2024, which is the single most Phil Tippett sentence I have ever typed.
Two Oscars. An Emmy. A spot in the Ray Harryhausen Hall of Fame.
And TODAY September 27, 2026, he turns 75.
So let's give the man his flowers.
"I want to be Ray Harryhausen"
Every legend has an origin story, and Phil's starts behind a chair.
Around 1955, when he was five or six, King Kong came on TV. He watched it peeking out from behind the furniture. He's quick to say those puppets weren't believable at all... it was the suspension of disbelief that got him, and the sheer ATTACK Willis O'Brien's team brought to pushing them into position.
Then, at seven, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. Ray Harryhausen's cyclops and dragon and sword-fighting skeleton. In Phil's words, that was his thing.
He has a theory I love. Somewhere between about five and fourteen, every kid finds THEIR movie. Keith grew up on Clash of the Titans, and Phil teases him that those weren't Ray's best... then admits that's just his own seven-year-old self doing the remembering.
(Mine was Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I was also seven.)
When his dad asked what he planned to do for a career, young Phil had an answer ready. He wanted to be Ray Harryhausen. He laughs about it now... highly unlikely, he says.
But he had someone in his corner. Ray Bradbury (yes, THAT Ray Bradbury) wrote back and forth with him for years and became a real mentor. As Phil tells it, Bradbury's philosophy was simple: do what you love and go for it, because if you try and fail you're still in a better place than if you never tried at all. And he just kept saying it. Stick with it. Stick with it. Stick with it.
Here's where Phil and his hero part ways. Harryhausen never spilled the beans on how he did anything, right up to the end, even after everybody had figured it out. He believed it was magic, and magic should stay a mystery. Phil shares everything. There's no point being secretive anymore, he says... but he gets why Ray was that way. Ray was a showman who saw himself as a magician.
Then Phil says the line that sums up his entire life. He is ALWAYS chasing that 7th Voyage of Sinbad feeling.
Not the technique. The FEELING.
The puppet that got him into Star Wars
Before Star Wars, Phil made TV commercials at Cascade Pictures. He calls it a great school, because you churn through a lot of work very fast and you wear every hat... model making, animation, setting up cameras.
(Voice actors, underline that. Commercial work is the GYM. I came up doing it in New York and I would not trade a single one of those sessions.)
Then George Lucas wasn't happy with the cantina. He brought in Rick Baker to run a crew building more aliens, Phil among them, and George would drop by the shop once a week. One day he spotted a stop motion puppet Phil had built as a teenager and said, more or less, oh, you do stop motion? Could I use that in my movie?
The plan for the holochess scene had been people in masks shot against black. Instead, in the last two weeks of the show, George asked Phil and Jon Berg for a batch of stop motion space aliens. No specific direction. You're the monster guys, right? Just do it. They built ten puppets, and eight made it into the scene.
They shot it surrounded by black flats... while the rest of ILM was at the wrap party.
And here's my favorite detail, from Lucasfilm's own history. The armature inside the big one (Phil called him Mr. Big, canon be darned) was the thing Phil made in HIGH SCHOOL. Out of bicycle chain links and chunks of metal.
A kid builds a monster out of bike parts because he loves monsters. A few years later George Lucas walks past it. Nearly forty years after that, they bring Phil back to redo the scene for The Force Awakens, and he tells his crew to reverse the outcome of the old game. This time, the little guy wins.
MAKE THE THING. You never know who is going to walk past it.
"I've just become extinct"
Sculpting in time
The first thing Phil's crew did when they moved up to ILM for Empire was test the tauntaun. He and Ken Ralston grabbed a puppet left over from Piranha and spent one afternoon, maybe three or four hours, shooting tests.
The problem was motion blur. Stop motion is a string of perfectly sharp frozen poses, so anything running across a giant screen gets that jittery staccato look. They cracked it by moving the puppet DURING the exposure, and that became a whole new technique.
Nobody knew what to call it. It's not stop motion... but it goes. So, as a joke, go motion. The joke stuck, and it became the standard for everything after, all the way to the dragon in Dragonslayer, which Phil describes as essentially a computerized rod puppet.
Read that again, puppeteers. A computerized ROD PUPPET.
He also gives the best one-line definition of stop motion I've ever heard. You are literally sculpting movement in time. Pose to pose to pose. Go motion forced him to totally rethink how he managed a performance.
That's reinvention number one. Hold onto it, because number two nearly broke him.
Extinct
Jurassic Park was supposed to be go motion. Phil spent a long time working it out and getting rigs built.
Then ILM's computer graphics team showed Spielberg a test of a digital T. rex, and Spielberg went digital.
Phil calls what happened next a total meltdown. It felt like the end of the world, like the bomb bay doors opened underneath him. He came down with pneumonia, stayed in bed for days, and genuinely believed his career was over.
The story goes that when he got the news, he said he'd just become extinct. And Spielberg liked the line so much he put it IN THE MOVIE. Grant says he thinks they're out of a job, Malcolm asks if he means extinct... that's Phil's heartbreak, played for a laugh by Jeff Goldblum.
(If that isn't the most show business thing that has ever happened, I don't know what is.)
But here's the twist. Spielberg called him, sick in bed, and told him to hang in there. You're the guy. You're the DINOSAUR guy. He and Kathleen Kennedy wanted Phil on the whole thing.
Because the computer could make a dinosaur LOOK real. It had no idea how to make one BE real.
What does a tyrannosaurus think?
When Phil was six he got so obsessed with dinosaurs that he skipped playing with the other kids on weekends to read everything the library had. By Jurassic Park he could pair that with years of production know-how, and the combination helped shape the script itself.
In Crichton's book, the T. rex picks up a Jeep and shakes it like Godzilla. Phil's reaction: no, no, no. The physics don't work. Spielberg's edict from on high was that these had to be real dinosaurs. ANIMALS, not monsters.
So Phil asked the question every actor reading this should tattoo somewhere visible. What does a tyrannosaurus THINK?
He'd visualize a scene from inside the T. rex. You take in information through your eyes, just like us. You process it. Then you act on it. Getting that intention onto the screen, he says, was always the trick.
That is not a visual effects note. That is an ACTING note. It's the same note I give in the booth every single week, just with more teeth.
Then there's the Dinosaur Input Device. Picture a stop motion puppet of a raptor or a T. rex, about yea big, with a sensor on every joint. Move the puppet and the wireframe in the computer moves with it. The animators were PUPPETEERING the digital dinosaurs by hand.
Phil describes the headspace like this: you do the performance in your mind, then physically map it out, feeling your way toward how the character should move. He admits it sounds counterintuitive. But it was a way of connecting to the thing... a roundabout route around the obstacles to get to a performance.
If you have ever voiced a creature with nothing but a sketch and a one-line description, you know that route.
Fifty miles an hour is correct. Twenty-five FEELS right.
This is the part that made me want to write this post, because it's the SEQUEL to Technically Correct, Emotionally Wrong. Same lesson, different decade, bigger lizard.
Phil's team made stop motion versions of Stan Winston's small dinosaur sculptures and shot walk and run cycles. They called it the Dinosaur Bible. At the time there was real scientific debate over how fast a T. rex could run, and one paleontologist said up to fifty miles an hour.
So they tested it. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. All the way up to fifty.
Somewhere around twenty-five, it worked. It FELT right. Anything faster didn't.
Maybe fifty was technically possible. Didn't matter. Twenty-five is what you BELIEVE while a T. rex is chasing your Jeep, and believing is the whole job. Those coyotes at LAIKA were anatomically correct too.
The Dinosaur Bible also became the shared benchmark, so Stan Winston's practical dinosaurs on set and the digital ones in the computer felt like the same animals. Practical AND digital. A blend, built on a performance. (Sound familiar?)
Phil won his second Oscar for it. He also became an internet meme, because his credit reads Dinosaur Supervisor and, well... have you SEEN that movie? When Jurassic World gave him a consultant credit and the jokes started up again, he tweeted that to be fair, there were a lot of dinosaurs. It was a large job.
Legend.
The tool is not the talent
Keith says something in the middle of all this that I want every voice actor worried about AI to read twice. Every shiny new technology gets treated like a magic button that solves everything... until you start using it like a tool and fold it back into the old craft. Then it's just another wrench in the toolbox.
Phil was told he was extinct. Instead the new tool needed him MORE, because it could render skin and teeth but it had no idea what a tyrannosaurus thinks. He did.
I'm not going to pretend nothing in our business is changing. It is, and the fights over consent, credit and compensation are very real. But notice which part of Phil survived the meteor. Not his technique. His understanding of PERFORMANCE.
Your sound is not what makes you valuable. Your understanding of what the character WANTS is.
Mad God: thirty years, reaching in the dark
Phil started his own studio for one reason... so he could make his own stuff. And that changed how he thought about everything. It's the IDEA you're chasing, he says. He wanted to make something he had never seen or felt before.
So he drew. For years. The drawings meandered and eventually came together into something he describes as a thing he could feel in the dark. He's not afraid of that place. You can't really see it, he says, so how do you reach for it?
He started around 1990 and wrote a treatment about ten pages long. Then he realized the scale was far too big, and he stopped.
Except he couldn't get it out of his head. For the next twenty years, while doing his day job on other people's movies, he kept reading anything that felt connected. During the week he'd work out processes he could teach the volunteers who came in on WEEKENDS, sometimes fifteen of them at a time. His studio crew shot pieces at lunch and after work. A Kickstarter in 2012 asked for $40,000 and raised more than $124,000.
The film, Mad God, finally premiered in 2021. Thirty years. Phil says the content just emerged... it found its own way instead of being ruled by his intentions.
Lucasfilm tells the other half of that story. Tippett's computer graphics artists talked Phil into letting them help, and a lot of them sparked their own stop motion careers on Mad God. So when Lucasfilm came knocking about The Force Awakens, that crew could honestly say, we know how to do that.
A passion project nobody asked for trained the team that brought stop motion BACK to Star Wars. MAKE THE THING, part two.
(Fair warning: Mad God is NOT for kids. It's a gorgeous, grotesque, wordless nightmare. Watch it for the craft, and maybe not right before bed.)
The cost
Keith asks the question I would have asked. Would you do it again? Thirty years?
No. Phil doesn't think he has that length of time left in him.
Then he's honest in a way I wasn't expecting. Toward the end, he says, he unwittingly became something like a method director. He internalized all of it, worked every single day and every weekend, obsessed the way people have accused him of being since he was a kid. And he cracked. His words: he totally cracked at the end of it.
Keith wonders out loud whether that kind of obsession is part of what makes someone an artist. Phil points at art history. Same story, time and time again, people who drove themselves nuts doing their work. Keith calls it a razor's edge.
I want to sit on that for a second, because I know a LOT of you walk that edge.
We are obsessive people. It's part of why we're good. It's the thing that has you doing forty takes of a two-word line at midnight because the last one was ALMOST there.
But remember what Phil said at the very top of the video, standing next to a LAIKA armature. He's good at breaking things. They bring him an armature, and if he can't break it, it's good. Build yourself the same way. Steel where it counts. Rest, help, and people in your corner are part of the armature, not a luxury bolted on after.
It's why I say PROGRESS NOT PERFECTION to every actor I coach. The chase is the point... but you have to still be standing at the end of it.
Seven big juicy nuggets
Okay. Here's the stuff I underlined, highlighted, and yelled at my screen about. For actors, voice actors, puppeteers, and anybody who makes things with their hands, their voice, or their sheer stubbornness.
1. The first frame's the hardest
Keith makes a point early on that I think about constantly. When you're learning anything, the leap from zero to one is monumental compared to the steps from one to a hundred. Getting from knowing nothing to your first working armature is the MOUNTAIN... once you crest it, the long hill on the other side is the easy part.
Phil sums it up in five words. The first frame's the hardest.
Your first audition. Your first paid session. Your first demo. It's supposed to feel like a mountain. That is not a sign you're bad at this. That's a sign you're on frame one.
2. The character can do what you can't
This one comes from a StarWars.com interview, and I have not stopped grinning about it.
While building creatures for Jabba's palace, Phil tested a costume for the little blue keyboard player who became Max Rebo. George picked Rick James' "Super Freak" as the temp track, so Phil got in the suit and pantomimed to it. His wife showed up to drive him home, was told Phil was IN the suit, and flatly refused to believe it... because Phil has no sense of rhythm.
His explanation is beautiful. You channel yourself, you actually become the character, and suddenly a guy who has never danced in his life thinks he's got it. That's how the characters come alive.
THIS is why I teach inside out. The shy actor plays the swaggering villain. The guy with no rhythm plays the funky space organist. The character is allowed to be everything you aren't, and giving yourself permission to let it is half the job.
3. A monster is a monster is a monster (so find the weight)
The Rancor was never supposed to be a puppet. George wanted the best Godzilla suit ever made. They built one, Phil climbed in, and his review of the footage is unprintable on a family blog. So they went back to what Phil had designed it to be, and built a hand and rod puppet. Dennis Muren's thinking, as he put it: rod puppets like MUPPETS.
(Twenty years with a rod in my hand. Reading that made me want to stand up and salute.)
Phil ran the head and mouth. Tom St. Amand had the arms and Dave Sosalla had the feet, all crammed with the camera crew into a space three or four feet square. They shot at high speed so the thing would read as ENORMOUS, which meant performing lightning fast, shooting something like sixty takes and keeping six.
And Phil's approach to the performance is so simple it's almost rude. A monster is a monster is a monster. Figure out how tall it's supposed to be, work out what it would weigh, and the pantomime follows from there.
Voice actors, that's your homework on every giant, dragon, ogre and creature you will ever read for. Before you find the sound, find the WEIGHT. How big is it? How much air does it have to move? How long does it take to turn around? The voice is the last thing you build, not the first.
4. Leave something for their imagination
Keith saw Harryhausen's movies as a kid on a school field trip. He remembers you could hear a pin drop in the theater, and that he staggered out afterward feeling like he had just watched something ILLEGAL.
His theory is that with practical effects, some part of the audience knows it's watching a magic trick. They can't tell how it's being pulled off, and that scratches a part of the brain full digital doesn't reach. Maybe digital is too good at showing every nook and cranny, he says, while practical still hides enough to leave room for your imagination.
Phil's version, from that same StarWars.com interview: he likes monsters that are hard to look at until you've seen three or four shots and start putting it together yourself. Visceral first. Understood later.
On our side of the glass, the enemy of imagination is OVER-EXPLAINING. Punching every word. Telling the listener exactly how to feel. Leave them room to do some of the work, and they'll love it more, because part of it is theirs.
5. Nothing is precious except the shot
This one surprised me. Keith is standing next to a gorgeous LAIKA vehicle that looks like a museum piece, and he tells Phil that during production they chopped it apart, cut holes in it, and ripped pieces off to get the shots. Everything is just to satisfy the shot, he says. The stuff loses a little of its preciousness.
Phil has his own version. The Rancor was carved out of sheets of FOAM with electric turkey knives, because there was no time or money to do it the careful way. It was, he says, the product of its process.
Your favorite take is not precious. The read you practiced in the car is not precious. The voice you were SURE was right is not precious. The story is precious. Chop the prop.
6. Start with the character, then build the world
When Phil asks how long that vehicle took to build, Keith backs up to explain something about LAIKA. Every film there starts with the characters, and everything else gets built around them. Scale is an arbitrary, man-made number, he says... there is no scale there.
The reference for that vehicle started as a BLACK SILHOUETTE. A shape and some squiggles. Everything else came later.
If you've coached with me, you've heard me say it a thousand times. The voice comes LAST. Who is this person? What do they want? What are they afraid of? Build the world around that, and the sound shows up on its own.
7. Find your tribe (and your shorthand)
Keith tells young artists that one of the most important things they can do is find their tribe, the people who share their interests, their goals and their language. The ones who get a Ming the Merciless reference without a five-minute explanation.
Phil lights up at that. On Jurassic Park, Spielberg could say a shot would be like a Stanley Kubrick shot, and everyone instantly knew... wide lens, low angle. Phil and Dennis Muren first bonded at movie nights for monster guys back in their commercial days, and Phil has compared their partnership to Lennon and McCartney. (He's John. Obviously.)
When Keith asks for his favorite prop, Phil won't pick. That's like asking about your favorite child, he says. Instead he borrows a position from Verna Fields, the legendary editor of Jaws: it's not so much the movie you're working on, it's the people you're working with.
That's my entire argument against gatekeeping in our business, right there. Find your people. Build the shorthand. BE somebody's shorthand.
The name you NEED to know
When people list the giants of practical effects, Ray Harryhausen's name goes first, and it should. He's the reason Phil exists.
But Phil is the reason a whole generation of us exists. He carried Harryhausen's torch into Star Wars. He taught the computer how to PERFORM on Jurassic Park. And then he spent thirty years on a film nobody asked for, chasing a feeling he first had at seven years old.
Harryhausen made us believe in monsters. Phil made us believe they were ALIVE... that they had weight, and wants, and a brain behind the eyes deciding what to do next.
So say his name. Put it right next to Ray's. Tell somebody about the kid who built a monster out of bicycle chain.
Your ghost of the craftsman
Here's where I land, and it's the same place I always land, just in a new key.
Everything Phil ever touched has a ghost of the craftsman in it. You can FEEL the person. The bike chain inside Mr. Big. The foam carved with a turkey knife. The guy with no rhythm getting down to Super Freak in a rubber suit. A T. rex slowed to twenty-five miles an hour because that's what felt true.
You have one too. It lives in your breath, your little catches, the way only YOU would land that line. It's the part that makes the performance yours. Stop sanding it off.
The first frame's the hardest. Go shoot it anyway.
Watch it: "Why Stop Motion Animation Matters in the Digital Age" with Keith McQueen and Phil Tippett is part of MADE BY HUMANS: Creatives in Conversation on LAIKA's YouTube channel. And Wildwood hits theaters October 23. I'll be the one openly weeping in the fedora.
Watch more Phil: The Empire Strikes Back. Dragonslayer. RoboCop. Jurassic Park. And if you have a strong stomach and a free evening, Mad God.
Companion reading on this site: The 12 Principles of Animation was the MECHANICS. The Ollie Johnston piece was the EMOTION. Technically Correct, Emotionally Wrong was WHO it's all for. This one is the GHOST OF THE CRAFTSMAN.
Want help finding the weight, the want and the WHY in your own characters? That's exactly what we dig into in 1:1 coaching. Book a session here.
Happy 75th, Phil. Thank you for every single nightmare.
Nate Begle is a voice actor, audio producer, writer, director, puppeteer and VO coach.
