If you don't know who Phil Tippett is, do your homework and start appreciating the man already. Especially if you're a certified "Star Wars" fan.
He's not an actor, he's definitely no celebrity, but he's one of the main men George Lucas heavily relied on to bring his epic cinematic series to the big screen (and into your imagination and huge collection of "Star Wars" creatures).
Aside from animating Lucas' tauntauns and AT-ATs, the Oscar-winning special-effects professional Tippett also worked with no less than Steven Spielberg in "Jurassic Park" to make the dinosaur animation so lifelike you forget the creatures are harmless fossils now. In fact, this is how he won his Academy Award, according to Screen Crush.
So when "JP4" director Colin Trevorrow announced that Tippett will be coming back to oversee the animation in the fourth installment of the "Jurassic Park" movie series, you should be clapping and jumping for joy. That's because the animation expert's involvement means that the upcoming sequel will be nothing less of a hit in the special effects department - which is pretty much a huge factor of this movie's success.
Director Trevorrow made his landmark announcement via Twitter, which received eclectic responses ranging from the mildly humorous to the optimistic. It can be recalled that the animator's name in "Jurassic Park 1" credits was put under the heading that read "dinosaur supervisor," The Mary Sue noted.
In an interview with Phys.org earlier this year, Tippett revealed that the first "Jurassic Park" was a steep learning curve for him because he "didn't know the tools."
"It was a time where computer graphic animation wasn't at a very high level, so we developed technology that allowed stop motion animators to be able to manipulate (dinosaurs)-it wasn't software, it was more mechanical device," the 62-year-old visual effects supervisor explained.
With today's technology, one wonders how Tippett will incorporate that into his own animation techniques. Will he deliver stellar results come June 12, 2015 when "Jurassic World" finally gets released? Only one way to find out!