Phil Tippett Is Closing His Berkeley Workshop and Selling Off 35 Years of Props — From an AT-AT to Mad God Models

The workshop where stop-motion expertise once crossed over into computer animation is going piece by piece. A three-day liquidation sale is under way in Berkeley at the 6,200-square-foot premises of Tippett Studio: models, props, sketches, production documents and working equipment accumulated over 35 years at this address are all up for sale.

The inventory includes stop-motion and mocap equipment, cameras, computers, 3D printers, lighting units, welding gear, drill presses, tools for building models and molds, and entire crates of tooling. What is being sold off is the material base of a working effects studio, and the organizers state the terms briefly: everything goes.

The Oscars Tippett Kept

The 74-year-old Tippett has excluded only two things from the sale — his Oscars for “Return of the Jedi” and “Jurassic Park”. “That’s the most valuable stuff, and those were the most meaningful moments of my journey,” he told CBS in San Francisco. He is more restrained about parting with the rest: “Sometimes a slight regret does come over me.”

Among the lots named in the sale listing are hundreds, and possibly thousands, of items from the studio’s projects:

• models and sketches from “Mad God”;
• an artist’s proof model of the AT-AT walker from “The Empire Strikes Back”;
• miniatures from “Starship Troopers”;
• three models connected to the dejarik chess scene from the first “Star Wars”;
• signed posters, storyboards, costumes and prototypes.

What Led the Studio to Liquidation

The closing of the workshop draws a line under a difficult period for the studio. In 2024, Tippett Studio agreed to sell a controlling stake to the Indian VFX company PhantomFX, and in May of that year it filed for creditor protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. The reorganization plan was approved in April 2025, and in July PhantomFX announced that the deal had closed.

The Tippett Studio name itself is not going anywhere: the new owners continue to operate under that brand. What is ending is the history of one particular shop in Berkeley, where film effects were made for decades. “We had almost a 40-year run. A good run,” Tippett summed up in the same interview.

Why This Shop Matters to People Working in CG Today

Tippett founded the studio in 1984 together with his wife, producer Jules Roman. After working on the first “Star Wars”, he took part in developing go-motion — an evolution of stop-motion in which frame-by-frame shooting was supplemented with motion blur.

The key episode of his career was “Jurassic Park”. Tippett was hired to make stop-motion dinosaur puppets, but the production switched to computer graphics and the team had to retool on the fly. Tippett’s studio became the transitional link: the knowledge of stop-motion animators and their physical instincts were carried over into the CG animation that was taking shape at the time. The techniques laid down at that moment defined character animation and visual effects for decades to come.

The studio went on to work on “Starship Troopers”, “The Matrix”, “Hellboy” and “Twilight”, while Tippett himself spent decades, on and off, finishing the feature-length stop-motion film “Mad God”, which came out at the Locarno festival in 2021.

What Disappears Along With the Workshop

The Berkeley sale looks like one instance of a broader process. In recent years, independent VFX studios have increasingly changed hands and come under the control of international groups, including ones from countries with cheaper production; after a change of ownership, what usually remains of the former company is the brand and the portfolio, while the production facility survives less often. The modern pipeline is distributed across cities and countries, a significant part of it lives in the cloud, and a large shop with drill presses, molding equipment and shelves of models stops being a necessary asset.

Hence a loss for the industry that is not measured by the price of the lots. Almost no one in the industry systematically preserves archives of practical effects: when a workshop closes, its contents scatter into private hands, and along with the props goes the part of the craft that used to be passed on in person, at the bench and the animation table. If the trend continues, there will probably be repeated cases where a historic name stays in the credits and on the new owner’s website, while the physical workshop behind that name ceases to exist.

Tippett himself, meanwhile, is not planning to retire. “I’ll die with my sword in my hand,” he said.

What lies behind the closing of the Berkeley workshop: an overheated VFX market, falling demand for practical effects, management missteps?