REEL WORLD

Local effects

BY MICHAEL FOX

What Dreams May Come

While a tidal wave of applause is building for Pacific Data Images (PDI), DreamWorks' Palo Alto-based subsidiary, and its animated feature Shrek, the venerable Tippett Studio goes about its business out of the spotlight. The 15-year-old Berkeley visual effects house (Starship Troopers, Hollow Man) created the computer-generated animation crucial to Evolution, the Ivan Reitman comedy opening June 8. Armed with books on biology and physiology, company founder Phil Tippett led a team that designed 18 creatures that evolve out of a meteor crashed in the Southwest. (There's no truth to the rumor that Jesse Helms is developing an effects-driven comedy called Creation, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bible.)

"From cave paintings until now, there's a thread of storytelling through images that forms the foundation of how we create our work," says Tippett's biz dev/marketing honcho Jim Bloom. "We're not just engineers." Maybe, but they did tape and study a live cat prior to creating a computer-generated feline (a Russian Blue, if you must know) for the July 4 release Cats and Dogs. As Jar Jar Binks would tell you, natural-looking movement is crucial to believable CG characters. Of course, the computing power and software programs exist to create such believability. As Bloom explains, "There are no limits now other than schedule and budget."

For a company with 185 employees, Tippett Studio keeps a low profile outside the industry. Nonetheless, the comic-book crowd is already wise to the news that the effects company will do CG action sequences for Blade 2 with Wesley Snipes, now shooting in Prague and pegged for a 2002 release. And science-fiction fanatics are twittering in chat rooms about Phil Tippett's plans to direct Ringworld, the best-selling Larry Niven novel. It's in the early stages of development, as they say.