The man who supervised Jurassic Park's dinosaurs is auctioning off his whole studio
Legendary VFX pioneer Phil Tippett has to close his storied studio after 35 years — and the treasures inside are about to go under the hammer.
It's an end of an era for Phil Tippett, a bloke whose fingerprints are all over pretty much every major creature feature of the last four decades, though his name rarely turns up at the front of the credits. If you've ever marvelled at the tauntauns in The Empire Strikes Back or got properly terrified by the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, odds are you've seen his work—sometimes literally, frame by painstaking frame.
After thirty-five years in business, Tippett is shuttering his eponymous studio. And when I say everything must go, I mean it—seriously, nearly the entire shop is headed to auction, and not just the commemorative mugs and battered desks.
How You Lose a Studio
The dissolution of Tippett Studio isn't just a random door closing. After years of financial strain (hearing about that a lot lately in VFX, aren't we?), the company agreed in 2024 to sell the majority of itself to Indian effects outfit PhantomFX. Then came Chapter 11 bankruptcy the same year—a last ditch to keep the doors open long enough for a court-managed reorganisation plan. By July 2025, PhantomFX officially completed the takeover, essentially marking the end for Tippett's original operation. The business survived, technically, but the spirit and the San Francisco Bay Area base did not.
Tippett Studio closed after 35 years, with thousands of items from its Berkeley headquarters heading to auction.
Auction or Museum Piece?
This isn't your average prop sale. We're talking artefacts that would, in a fairer universe, be straight into the Science Museum or the V&A. The list includes:
- Screen-used models and sketches from Tippett's own stop-motion fever dream, Mad God (2021)
- An AT-AT walker artist's proof from The Empire Strikes Back
- Miniatures out of Starship Troopers
- Storyboards and prototypes, including three models from the original Star Wars Dejarik chess game sequence
- As well as 3D printers, lights, silicone moulds, welding gear—the actual tools that kept the magic running for decades
Most of this kit is likely to disappear from public view, snapped up by collectors with more money than sense. Tough luck if you hoped to bump into that original Dejarik piece at your local museum—it'll probably be sitting (untouched, naturally) in someone's private cinema room.
The Man Stays at Work
Phil Tippett himself is hardly retiring to potter about in the allotment any time soon. When pressed about winding down, he had something rather perfect to say in an interview with CBS—here you hear a bit of that stubborn craftsman spirit that defined his career:
"I will die with my sword in my hand."
That's Tippett for you: pioneering to the end, whether anyone is still looking or not.