Phil Tippett, Dinosaur Supervisor, is On Board for Jurassic World

According to a tweet from Colin Trevorrow, Phil Tippett will have one job in Jurassic World. One job.

Tippett has had a long, award-winning career, beginning with the very first Star Wars movie and hardly slowing down since, as a stop motion animator and expert in animal movement who successfully made the transition to CGI-animation while working on the first, pioneering film to use the brand new technology to create its memorable antagonists: Jurassic Park. He’s been nominated for six Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects, and won two.

But you might know him better as the guy with the ironic job description in the end credits of Jurassic Park. The internet kind of likes to make jokes about it. Tippett was initially hired on to Jurassic Park to create the majority of the movie’s wide special effects shots using a stop motion miniatures technique he’d perfected in Dragonslayer. During early production, however, Industrial Light & Magic debuted computer animated test footage of the movie’s Tyrannosaur that blew director Steven Spielberg away.

Tippett is said to have responded to the footage by saying “I’ve just become extinct,” a line Spielberg gleefully borrowed and gave to paleontologist Alan Grant in the final film. But Tippett was wrong: his expertise in creating lifelike movement was invaluable, and he was kept on to supervise the dozens of new computer animated shots that had to be created and integrated into what was shot on set, making the transition from the physical puppets used on location and the computer versions of the animals as seamless as possible. He supervised animators both at his own Tippett Studios and Industrial Light and Magic as they worked only on clips of dinosaurs.

He was the dinosaur supervisor.

Tippett himself has responded to his new infamy in the best way possible:

@jamesmowat @KatieCou Hey Hey. Those dinos hit all their marks just right. Can't say the same re: most human actors ….

— Phil Tippett (@PhilTippett) September 11, 2013

He’s got one job on Jurassic World, and I feel safe in assuming that he’s going to do it very well.

(via Bleeding Cool.)