Why Mad God Took 30 Years To Make (It's A Wild Story)
Why Star Wars' visual effects creator Phil Tippett's new stop motion animated horror movie Mad God has been in the works for almost 30 years.
Phil Tippett's new film Mad God took 30 years to make - and the tale of its creation is a wild story. Tippett's work is highly regarded in the movie industry, such as in the original Star Wars trilogy, where he helped develop the animation for tauntauns and AT-AT imperial walkers. He has assisted both Industrial Lights & Magic and Dreamworks and founded his own company Tippett Studio in 1984. Tippett also supervised the animation of Jurassic Park, which won him an academy award for Best Visual Effects in 1994.
Mad God is a stop-motion animation horror movie about a masked character called "The Assassin." The film chronicles The Assassin's journey through nightmarish landscapes, which in turn are populated by grotesque and monstrous creatures. Mad God is a something of a unique proposition in that it has almost no dialogue, and a defined story doesn't necessarily drive the film. Throughout Mad God, it is clear that the movie is less interested in presenting a narrative and more in immersing its viewer in a nightmarish world.
Mad God took 30 years to make primarily due to its status as Tippet's passion project that he worked on only intermittently over the last three decades. Tippet constructed Mad God's world painstakingly in between his efforts on other films, such as creating Starship Troopers' giant insect aliens, and he officially began filming Mad God while working on Robocop 2. The meticulous stop motion animation that is currently selling the film to contemporary audiences was something that Tippet believed he could not market to studios back in the 90s - a time when cutting-edge CGI was on the rise. As such, the project was shelved by Tippett for the better part of 30 years until recently.
Tippett learned about the significant advancements in computer animation while working on the set of Jurassic Park which informed his decision to hold Mad God back. While initially being brought onto Jurassic Park to utilize his "go motion" VFX technique he had pioneered on the movie Dragonslayer to create dinosaur effects, director Steven Spielberg opted to go with animated footage of a CGI Jurassic Park dinosaur created at ILM instead. This heavily contributed to Tippett believing that computer animation had completely replaced stop motion, and Mad God was shelved as a result.
After props from Tippett's initial work on Mad God from the 90s resurfaced in 2010, Tippett's team encouraged him to finish the movie, and work resumed on the film using crews of volunteers working weekends. A Kickstarter campaign was launched to pay for production, exceeding the initial fundraising amount of $40,000 and going on to raise $124,156 for the film in 2012. Tippett's attention to detail through his stop motion animation has ensured Mad God was definitely worth the wait - and acts as a shining example of Tippett's singular animation talents.
Next: Netflix's 2022 Animated Movies Prove CGI Will Never Kill Stop Motion
