Tippett Studio adds a sense of performance to Troopers' swarms of killer insects
After ace stop-motion animator Phil Tippett netted an Ocscar for his landmark digital effects on Jurassic Park, he feared that his days of conceiving fantastic creatures might be numbered. But Tippett Studio, owned and operated by Tippett; his wife; visual effects producer Jules Roman; and designer Craig Hayes, is still holding fort against the industry's digital tsunami. Having recently completed effects for the family film Three Wishes, the studio used its deft sleight-of-hand to supply armies of marauding insects for Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers.
While Tippett designed aliens for the Star Wars trilogy and dragons for Dragonslayer, Willow and Dragonheart, he has rarely been asked to give birth to bugs. Until now, his most notable feats in this realm were the giant scorpion in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and the quasi-insectlike monster from the much-maligned Howard the Duck. But the effects veteran has never before animated creatures on the vast scale that Troopers required. "There are seven different kinds of bugs, and you basically meet a new bug or two in each of the four key battle sequences," Tippet reveals. "Craig Hayes, who co-supervised the bug visual effects with me, also designed all of the bugs. He's a brilliant graphic designer. We put a great deal of effort into making palpably real fighting bug armies that appeared to have some kind of offensive strategy."
Since Verhoeven stressed that Troopers was first and foremost a war film, Hayes' designs transformed the insects and their armaments into the equivalent of the faceless World War II Axis troops and exaggerated weaponry seen in old Hollywood propaganda films. "The Warriors are the ground-based troops, the Plasma bugs are the heavy artillery, the Hoppers are the air force, and the Tankers are like flame-throwing tanks," Tippett explains. "Craig tried to create some logical consistency within the bug community. For example, the Hoppers are genetically mutated Warrior bugs: they just have legs in different places and differently elongated limbs. In the same way, the Plasma bugs are genetically altered Tankers they're a lot bigger and look significantly different, but there are a lot of similar design attributes. We wanted to achieve a balance with these alien adversaries. We didn't want you to take it all in or understand what they were the first time you saw them. Instead, we wanted their appearance to manifest itself over the course of 50 shots."
Hayes, whose first assignment for Tippett Studio was designing the petulant ED-209 police robot for Verhoeven's RoboCop, found it relatively easy to design killer bugs that met with the Dutch director's approval. "Because of our established relationship with Paul, we worked out some of the overall issues in the first round," Hayes recalls. "We started by breaking the insects down into a bug hierarchy, then into individual groups. We did different drawings of bugs with weird stuff here and there, then fleshed out designs for each particular style. But there was a concerted effort to make them pretty familiar. Troopers is not about this fantastic lifeform: the bugs had to be real and grounded so you wouldn't have any trouble telling the good guys from the bad guys."
Hayes envisioned that the Plasma bugs would produce explosive goo through an internal catalytic reaction that would then blast tracerlike fire from their backsides. "The Plasma bugs are bulbous and greenish-blue colored with yellow stripes on their thoraxes," Hayes says. "They're 85' tall and based on a cross between stinkbugs and fireflies. Since their butts are transparent, you can see some kind of reaction happening inside. There are only three shots of the Plasma bugs, which are seen in the Klendathu battle sequence: they move into position, take aim like pieces of artillery, and then fire."
The Tanker bugs, however, are a great deal more mobile. "They're more like half-track tanks," Hayes explains. "They have multiple legs a big set up front, and then a row of six small ones. They're mobile plasma sprayers, like flame-throwers, who shoot plasma like napalm from a nozzle between their eyes; the plasma is ignited by little spark generators dangling in front."
Hayes designed the flying Hopper bugs to appear aerodynamic: "The Hoppers have translucent wings that fold up and fit inside their carapace. They're greenish-blue, with a metallic reflective surface that gives them a futuristic, aerospace feel."
The most ubiquitous of the deadly insects are the preying mantis-like Warrior bugs, which swarm in thousand-unit hordes, gleefully munching on troopers with their massive jaws. "The Warriors were modeled on those big rhinoceros or elephant beetles, which have huge chopping jaws," Hayes explains. "We gave them two attack claws up front to help them draw people into their jaws. To make them look really mean, we gave them graphic splash patterns reminiscent of other predatory animals or insects. The Warriors have yellow-orange stripes like wasps and tigers, and a red strip on top of their heads and jaws so you'll hopefully understand which end's up. We also avoided big round soft shapes; everything is pointed. If one stepped on your toe by accident, it would hurt."
"Their feet even terminate in little ice picks!" Tippett adds. "Ironically, the Warriors were also called the Arachnids, but they bear little resemblance to anything that looks like an arachnid, which by definition has eight legs. Craig made sure they only had four, because we had so many Warriors to deal with; keeping the number of their legs down would give us a bit of an advantage. Making them walk was the hard part. [For the battle sequences on the planet's surface], we were dealing with a heavily textured landscape, so the footfall patterns, the shifting of weight and all of the physical attributes had to constantly be worked on and adjusted. With every step, they had to either go up, around or over a rock."
Nevertheless, the Warriors are impressively fast-moving critters who manage to convey a genuine sense of mass. "There's a balance one is compelled to find," Tippett states. "We wanted a quick, lethal quality, while at the same time making it feel as if each Warrior bug weighed between 1,500 to 1,800 pounds."
Once Hayes designed the alien bugs on paper, Tippett Studio's modelers built scale maquettes of each beast, which were then digitized using a home-grown 3-D scanner. After the bugs' coordinates were input into Silicon Graphics computers, the models were refined in Softimage and then set up with kinematic chains for the animators. They also created high-res models to be used in the final rendering of the images in Renderman. While most of the animation and rendering was done on SGI platforms, much of the painting and compositing was executed on Macintosh machines.
While most of the space insects, including the Tanker, Plasma and Hopper bugs, were computer-animated using keyboards and mouseclicks, about 30 percent of the Warriors were animated using the Direct Input Device (DID) that Craig Hayes originally developed for Jurassic Park (see AC Dec. 1993). The DID enabled Tippett's stop-motion animators to translate their artistry into the computer realm by moving a conventional ball-and-socket animation armature, essentially a machined metal dinosaur skeleton, a frame at a time. But instead of photographing the puppet (as in the conventional stop-motion animation of say, King Kong) sensors on the armature's joints fed information directly into a computer, where the movements of a wireframe dinosaur on a monitor exactly duplicated those of the real-world DID armature. Earlier this year, Hayes received a technical Academy Award for the creation of the DID.
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