Tippett Studio closed its Berkeley doors this summer. Most of the props went to collectors. One buyer grabbed something easier to overlook: the studio’s pile of CD-ROMs and DVDs.
Now 90 of those discs are online. Anyone can download them from the Internet Archive. They hold four decades of photos, slides, design work, CG tests and interviews from one of the most important creature shops in film.
How the Discs Got Out
Phil Tippett and Jules Roman founded Tippett Studio in 1984. The shop worked out of a warehouse on Grayson Street in West Berkeley for about 35 years.
PhantomFX, a VFX company based in India, bought the studio in March 2024. On May 1, 2024, Tippett Studio filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. A reorganization plan was confirmed in April 2025.
The Berkeley space was emptied in a three-day estate sale run by Clarity Estate Liquidation, August 28 to 30, 2026. Holochess pieces, an AT-AT walker from The Empire Strikes Back, Mad God puppets and decades of tools all sold. Lines went down the block. Tippett kept his two Oscars.
What the Uploader Did
An anonymous buyer picked up the disc library at the sale. They weeded out duplicates, ripped 90 discs as ISO disc images and posted them on September 27, 2026.
The upload is titled “Tippett Studios visual archive (unofficial, plz read desc!)” and runs about 49.6 GB. A few videos are also posted as MP4 files, so you can watch them without opening an image.
The reasoning was simple. A lot of this material was not online anywhere. And it might never show up again at this resolution.
What Is on the Discs
The file names tell most of the story. Here are the highlights:
- Early stop motion: slides from Tippett’s Star Wars days, plus slides of early work labeled Crater Lake and Piranha.
- RoboCop and Jurassic Park: making-of stills, behind-the-scenes photos and Jurassic Park wireframes from a Spielberg “Movie Magic” segment.
- Starship Troopers: CG bug art, publicity stills and the in-world recruitment ads. Starship Troopers 2 gets its own discs, including a 2003 “day in the life” at the studio.
- Hellboy: hi-res Abe Sapien textures and shot progression stills.
- Evolution: a creature design bible, design drawings and two discs of behind-the-scenes and CG images.
- Constantine and Son of the Mask: a CG showcase with wireframes.
- The Matrix Revolutions: work-in-progress renders and five discs of publicity stills.
- The Spiderwick Chronicles: individual CG shots and a making-of video on the goblins.
- Tests and shorts: sea monster CG prototype videos and the short Mutantland.
- Phil Tippett on camera: interviews from 2008 and 2010, a Twilight: Eclipse interview and a 2014 video on his history and influences.
- Extras: hi-res images tied to Cinefex issue 121 and photos from Ray Harryhausen’s 90th birthday at the BFI.
There is also a long tail of publicity stills. Hollow Man, Cats & Dogs, Mission to Mars, The Haunting, Virus, Blade II, Catwoman, The One, My Favorite Martian, Dragonheart and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen all show up. So do Hollow Man baseball cards and a Blockbuster commercial.
Considering its significance
Tippett’s career covers the whole jump from stop motion to CG. He animated the holochess creatures in Star Wars and ED-209 in RoboCop. On Jurassic Park, his go-motion dinosaurs gave way to ILM’s computer animation. He stayed on as dinosaur supervisor and taught the animators how the animals should move. He has Oscars for Return of the Jedi and Jurassic Park.
When an effects house closes, its archive usually disappears. Drives get wiped. Discs get tossed. Some of this was headed the same way. Now it is public, and it shows the work in progress, not just the final shots.
One caveat. The upload is unofficial, and the uploader says so right in the title. The images belong to the studios and filmmakers behind them. Treat it as a reference library.
Tippett and the Studio Now
Tippett is 74. He says he is retired from the racket, but also that he will die with his sword in his hand. An exhibition of work from his film Mad God opens at CoproGallery in Los Angeles on October 10.
The Tippett Studio name lives on under PhantomFX. Its Toronto office is still in production.
How to Browse the Archive
- Go to archive.org/details/tippett-archive.
- Start with the MP4s. They play in the browser.
- Download the ISO files you want. Double-click to open them on Windows 10 or 11 and on macOS. No extra software needed.
- Files that start with “!!” sit at the top of the list and cover the big shows. They are a good first stop.
For more creature work, see our list of horror movies with heavy creature and environment VFX.
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