“The Founder, a highly charismatic person, begins enlisting disciples. These followers become an informally but closely knit association, bound together by the new experience, whose nature the founder has revealed and interpreted. A growing sense of solidarity both binds the members together and differentiates them from any other form of social organization.”
Phil Tippett was my savior after I quit ILM. He still had an openness to old school folks that had a bit of stop motion knowledge. When I joined Tippett’s in 2002, they where going to start production on Matrix Revolutions. The Matrix was my first CG gig since the last time I touched a computer on the film, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. In the Star Wars section of this site I go into the story of how The Phantom Menace broke me. I wanted to quit the industry after I worked on that show. Time heals I guess. Not heals, I think it just scabs over and you live with the itch.
Phil took me in and I had no idea what I was in for.
The amount of booze was phenomenal and the amount of work kept pace with our intake.
I was invited into this world and somehow scratched out a place in the corner and was accepted by the inhabitants.
Tippett Studio was the perfect fit for me. It was defiantly not a corporate production house with suits in charge. Phil and Jules ran the studio and they kept the house. To me it was a family. We all have very different definitions of “Family” and Tippett Studio was one to me.