Starship Troopers sequel returns to Tippett Studio: a library of CG characters and an efficient pipeline allowed Tippett Studios to produce this feature for $7M

Post, April, 2004 by Daniel Restuccio

BERKLEY, CA -- In 1983, Phil Tippett finished his last shot on Star Wars: Return of the Jedi and then ventured east to his Berkley garage to start his own visual effects company called Tippett Studio. He had gone from a 25-year-old stop-motion animator on George Lucas' Star Wars IV: A New Hope to Industrial Light & Magic's creature shop supervisor when he decided it was time to run his own boutique visual effects enterprise. Twenty-seven years, 36 feature films, two Oscars (for Jedi and Jurassic Park) and thousands of effects shots later, Tippett finds himself celebrating his studio's 20th anniversary by making his directorial debut on the feature film Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation.

Tippett says the reason it has taken him so long to direct a feature is because the kind of things he likes to do are a little off the Hollywood radar. "Basically, Starship Troopers was the first thing anyone let me direct and that came down to the fact that we'd make the movie for the budget."

VISUAL EFFECTS

Troopers 2 visual effects supervisor Eric Leven says that this movie offers the classic challenge of producing champagne effects on a beer budget. "When we worked on the first Starship Troopers movie it had a big effects budget to produce 220 effects shots over 14 months with a crew of 100."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"Everything was a challenge," he recalls. "We had done some small jobs but we had to set up a whole new pipeline and a batch rendering system to handle a crew of 110 people."

At that time, Tippett Studio used Softimage 3D to build the models and Pixar RenderMan for rendering. Leven's crew taught themselves Alias Dynamation, a particle systems application to do the bug swarming behavior. "This was stuff that nobody had ever done before," Leven says proudly. They also had to build tools to convert Softimage files into a format that RenderMan could understand.

The software guys, he says, wrote shaders from scratch to get specific looks for the different classes of bugs. "The warrior bug had a sort of dusty high gloss sheen," describes Leven. "Hopper bugs have this iridescent quality. Plasma bugs had slimy, transparent sacks that can shoot glowing plasma out of their butt. You had to be able to blow holes in all the bugs and have blood come out. All of these things had to be figured out."

Eight years ago, Leven recalls, there was virtually no interaction between the CG characters and the live action plates. "A live person became a CG person when impaled," he explains casually. "No one picked up a bug."

On Starship Troopers 2 it's the total opposite. "There's a lot more interaction between the bugs and humans," Leven says, crediting the in-house match-move team. "More than half the camera shots were hand held. We would have been scared to match-move CG and live action shots like that before."

They were able to recycle the original models, Leven notes, importing and updating them in Alias Maya. He adds that they weren't able to import the animation, but they knew how the bugs moved and redid all the animation by hand.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"One of my favorite shots," Leven says excitedly," was added in post production. It was never budgeted. At the end of the movie the heroine is taking off in a space ship leaving the planet. The hero is at the top of this building comped into a motion control shot of the outpost built as a miniature and fighting off hundreds of warrior bugs. What's fun is even when visual effect people see that shot, they get that the bugs are fake, but nobody notices the guy is a CG digital double.

"The speed we had to move in post production was the main challenge with Troopers 2. It doesn't sound sexy but we did 120 effects shots in five months with 16 people, many of them right out of college. That's the big deal."

To really appreciate the production accomplishment, consider the first Starship Troopers, released in 1997, was budgeted at a cool 100 million. It earned around 55 million domestically and grossed 120 million worldwide. Starship Troopers 2 has at least half as many effects, many more complex than the original, with a total budget of around seven million.

One of the big pluses for Leven was the intense collaboration with Tippett as director. "Supplying all the effects means there's consistency throughout the picture. Also on this picture Phil would be editing and discover he needed another shot to make a scene work, he'd would come over and we would build the shot, output it and edit it right in."

Most of Troopers 2 principal photography was lensed with the Sony CineAlta 24p HDW-F900 first-generation HDCAM with a 1920 X 1080 resolution. Since the Panasonic AJ-HDC27 VariCam can shoot as high as 60fps and as low as 4fps it was used for over- and under-cranked effects shots. There was also some miniDV footage used in some scenes.

Leven says working in HD does have advantages. The slightly lower resolution 1920 X 1080 compared to 2K for film takes less time to render. It works well for green-screen shots, you've escaped the vagaries of lab chemistry affecting how the film looks, and you've knocked out the extra task of transferring all that footage via telecine.