BERKELEY, California — In a warehouse space in a picturesque neighborhood here, Phil Tippett, the Oscar-winning visual effects genius who has worked on everything from Star Wars to the wolf pack in the Twilight films, is toiling away on a passion project that he may never see completed.

It’s a short, experimental film called Mad God and, by his own estimation, Tippett’s been working on it “for like 20 years.” Set pieces for the stop-motion animation project — described on its Kickstarter page as a “hand-made, animated film set in a Miltonesque world of monsters, mad scientists and war pigs” — fill huge areas of his namesake studio.

The bearded giant at the helm says he’s got a narrative in his head, but it’s pretty hard for even Tippett to fully explain Mad God. And since he works on the constantly evolving story between other projects, he’s put in place a backup plan for what to do if Mad God outlives him.

“I’ve collected a little group of people — guys around here that really missed the era when you actually made things,” the VFX pioneer told Wired in a light, airy room at Tippett Studio. “We’ve shot an end title for it. So the idea is that if I have a heart attack when we leave here, they put the end credit on and that’s when it’s done.”

That’s Phil Tippett, a consummate creator who, after more than three decades in the business, doesn’t feel the need to mince words because his resume speaks for itself. His first big Hollywood movie was Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope (he even put in an uncredited performance as a cantina alien), and he went on to win Oscars for his work on Return of the Jedi and Jurassic Park. And yet, in an era when CGI has cheapened cinema and foreign countries compete to lure Hollywood’s business, his namesake studio still struggles.

Tippett isn’t the only one feeling the squeeze. In recent years, more and more film productions are outsourcing their VFX to places like London and Vancouver. Getting the effects work done in those cities costs the same amount that Tippett’s work would command, but the producers get tax incentives better than those available in for U.S. productions. The resulting shakeout shows no signs of slowing.

“Companies are going out of business left and right because they can’t compete,” said Jeffrey Okun, chair of the Visual Effects Society, in an interview with Wired. “Café FX went out of business for these reasons, Illusion Arts went out of business for these reasons — we’re literally losing the smaller-to-midsize company on an average of about one a month.”

From Stop-Motion to CGI

But Tippett is used to making something out of nothing. Born in Berkeley in 1951, he knew early on that he was into monsters. (“I was in the dinosaur camp,” he said.) He was entranced by films, particularly the work of legendary effects creator Ray Harryhausen.

“In 1955, I think it was, they started running [King Kong] on television; I was 5 years old and saw it…. I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Tippett said. “Ray Harryhausen was the guy when I was a kid. I made my parents take me to see The 7th Voyage of Sinbad in 1958 over at the theater on Solano.”

“Ray Harryhausen was the guy when I was a kid. I made my parents take me to see The 7th Voyage of Sinbad in 1958.”

After years of teaching himself drawing and sculpting, Tippett went to the University of California at Irvine to get a fine art degree. After school, he landed at Cascade Pictures in Los Angeles doing animation work. “It was like the 10 geeks that were interested in that kind of stuff were there,” he said. Some of those geeks were up-and-coming special effects whizzes like Dennis Muren, Jon Berg and Ken Ralston.

Those friends would eventually help Tippett work with a hot young director named George Lucas, who was working on a new space-adventure movie and wasn’t happy with the creatures in his movie’s cantina scene. Muren told Lucas about an effects guy named Rick Baker, who he thought could help.

“So Rick threw together a shot with about five or six unemployed stop-motion animators at that time,” said Tippett, who was one of the half-dozen tasked with creating the eccentric extraterrestrials in the Mos Eisley cantina. “We just worked over a lot of masks Rick had done…. We had like six weeks and we just had to bang this stuff out.”

They ended up bringing to life one of sci-fi cinema’s most enduring images: a dingy Tatooine dive bar filled with some of the galaxy’s seediest characters, the perfect place to catch some deep-space jazz or blast a bounty hunter. When Lucas needed help with the holographic chess sequence elsewhere in A New Hope, he brought on Tippett and some others to bring the novel game to life on the screen. They put together the scene in about a week.

Star Wars went on to become a massive hit and, as Lucas began growing his Industrial Light & Magic operations, two of his effects gurus — Dennis Muren and Joe Johnston — convinced the director to add a stop-motion department. Tippett moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area and eventually began working on The Empire Strikes Back, doing stop-motion animation on the famous AT-ATs, which — despite what urban legend may say — were not inspired by the dock machinery at the Port of Oakland.

On the AT-AT not being based on dock machinery: “I think it was a prehistoric animal called the Baluchitherium. It’s like a giant horse-pig-elephant thing.”

“That’s not so,” Tippett said. “I think it was [based on] a prehistoric animal called the Baluchitherium. It’s like a giant horse-pig-elephant thing. That’s my memory of it, anyway.”

Tippett formed his studio the same way Steve Jobs formed Apple: in a garage. In 1984, after completion of the original Star Wars trilogy (and after winning a special-achievement Oscar for Return of the Jedi), Tippett Studio was founded as a stop-motion animation company with just two people: Phil Tippett and his partner, Jules Roman. The studio made a name for itself doing effects for RoboCop and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. But it made visual effects history with Jurassic Park.

Originally, Steven Spielberg’s life finds a way dinosaur amusement park movie was going to be done with stop-motion miniatures from Tippett combined in post-production with larger robotic dinosaurs created by special effects master Stan Winston. But then Muren told Spielberg about the new CGI technologies that were being used by ILM for Terminator and said he might be able to make dinosaurs. Spielberg and Tippett watched a mock-up of CGI dinos and were blown away. In that moment Tippett told Spielberg, “I think I’m extinct.” (Spielberg later worked the line into the Jurassic Park script.)

“It was like this big emotional thing for me because I was like, ‘Oh god, that’s it. What I do is not relevant anymore,'” Tippett said, recalling the film’s production.

Spielberg decided to use CGI for the film (along with Winston’s larger animatronic dinos). But Tippett wasn’t out. After cutting their teeth on stop-motion work, Tippett’s animators were better equipped than computer nerds at making dino-motion look real. So they came up with a solution to combine the efforts — the Dinosaur Input Device, an animator’s puppet covered in sensors that translated movements into computer code (one of the devices sits in Tippett’s Berkeley office, not far from the visual effects Academy Award that Tippett subsequently won for Jurassic Park).

Adding CGI to the mix might have been an overhaul of Tippett’s work style, but it was by and large just a new way of doing the thing that had made the filmmaker unique in his field.

“The secret to what Phil does is a cross-platform ability in that he has a way of adding character traits to inanimate objects,” Okun said. “What Phil’s done that makes him unique and special is that — besides advancing the art of stop-frame animation — he manages to put character into motion into these little puppets that he manipulates, and he does so with a fanboy glee.”

Following the success of Jurassic Park, Tippett Studio was hired to work on Starship Troopers in 1995, and the studio grew from a crew of 25 to a staff of 200 digital animators, lighters, engineers, compositors and other production staff. The studio has been chugging along ever since.

Along the way, Tippett has attracted like-minded individuals to his operation.

“This is the first studio I worked at and I haven’t left,” said Chris Morley, a digital-effects whiz for Tippett, in an interview with Wired. “I was hired when I was 22 and fell in love with the way this studio did things. From the way the founder carried himself and his ideals — it felt right to me.”

Morley (“C. Mo” to his colleagues) does a kind of digital work that hadn’t even been dreamed up when Tippett started in the business. His latest feat was the “nesting” system that incorporated archival footage into Hemingway & Gellhorn — an upcoming HBO movie about the love affair between Ernest Hemingway (played by Clive Owen) and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (Nicole Kidman). Also a Bay Area native, Morley came up with a way to meld green-screen shots with vintage film in a way that allows a fade from old to new — using VFX to replicate the graininess and scratches and a create seamless transition. (See a video about Hemingway & Gellhorn’s visual effects below.)

“I like to work with brilliant, creative people, and I knew we needed special effects to do this,” Hemingway & Gellhorn director Philip Kaufman told Wired during an interview at Tippett’s Berkeley studio, housed in a building with a deceptively unassuming façade. “We came over here and this place, the atmosphere, the presence of Phil Tippett — we go back to a certain place and a certain time and era of life in San Francisco — and we went into the screening room and showed him what we wanted to do and he said, ‘I get it exactly.'”

That aura of Tippett — the man as well as the studio — gets referenced a lot when you talk about the creative atmosphere at this moviemaking mecca. To hear Kaufman tell it, the place comes with a certain realness — it doesn’t feel like a VFX sausage factory. “They have some of the biggest clients in the world, but it’s not a place of client-oriented special effects,” Kaufman said.

“When you’re hiring Tippett Studios, you’re hiring Phil Tippett. Even if he’s not on your show, you know he’s going to walk by and look at the animation and tell people what to do.”

Even if Tippett isn’t working directly on any given project, people still come to his studio because they know he’ll supervise, according to Okun. “When you’re hiring Tippett Studios, you’re hiring Phil Tippett,” he said. “Even if he’s not on your show, you know he’s going to walk by and look at the animation and tell people what to do.”

Tippett’s reputation goes beyond his work. According to Okun, everybody in VFX knows the “outrageously outspoken and hilarious” Tippett. Want an example? In 2011, the Visual Effects Society was giving a lifetime achievement award to Ray Harryhausen. Tippett sent in an unsolicited video he made on the set of the latest Twilight film, Okun said. The clip started with Tippett thanking Harryhausen for helping him find his life’s work and ended with Tippett humorously ranting that he wouldn’t have thought it was such a dream if he knew he would spend the rest of his life trapped on soundstages.

“He has a way to put the painfully obvious out in a really humanist way, bringing to all of us a means to cope with it,” Okun said.

From Tax Incentives to Kickstarter

Having one of the most well-known names in the business doesn’t guarantee success, though. Sitting in the room that houses his Oscars, Tippett said he worries about the state of his company and the U.S. visual effects industry in general. Yet even as he contemplates the tough spot that foreign competition has put him in, Tippett remains stoic.

“The tax incentives in other countries are just killing us; they’ll probably put us all out of business in a couple years,” he said. “They charge more than we do but they still get the work because the government supports them, and we’re not supported. It’s the same thing that happened to the garment and automobile industries.”

As in those industries, U.S. visual effects companies are shuttering at an alarming rate. Phil Feiner, a veteran of the effects and post-production industry, has been following the trend and estimates more than 100 firms have gone out of business in recent years. Although some of the companies have closed their doors because of mismanagement or other factors, Feiner said, many closed due to business lost abroad, where tax incentives for film productions are far sweeter than they are in California.

“When I started in the business in 1976, all post-production and visual effects were completed mostly here in the U.S.,” Feiner said in an e-mail to Wired. “All the big VFX companies were located in California. Prior to these companies, most VFX work was done by the studio VFX departments. They’re all out of business now.”

As long as Tippett still has a studio to work in, he plans to keep plucking away at Mad God. The plot of the in-development sci-fi film might be a little murky (or, probably more likely, Tippett isn’t going to share details with a reporter at this point). But there’s an area of Tippett Studio that bears the distinct look of Dr. Frankenstein’s lab (if Dr. Frankenstein were a stop-motion auteur). The spot is dedicated to Mad God‘s production, and staffers have been spending their spare time working on the film in between jobs and whenever inspiration strikes.

Tippett has been funding the film himself with some of the money he’s raised selling his “junk.” He doesn’t want to be beholden to anyone else and is pretty certain no studio would ever want the film. (Or, in his words, “Oh, hell no.”) Ultimately, he’d like to spend 18 months with his rag-tag group of Tippett filmmakers completing a 12-minute chapter of Mad God to distribute to his Kickstarter benefactors.

When the prospect of using Kickstarter to fund Mad God comes up in conversation — it reached its $40,000 goal Tuesday, with weeks left to raise even more — the look of a smart-ass creature creator comes back over Tippett’s face. It’s easy to see the guy who built monsters in his garage and found a way to make a career out of his creative tinkering.

“It’s the perfect scam for a crook,” he said, a slight smile filling his bearded face. “All filmmakers are pirates anyway — it’s in the blood.”