hey everyone norm from tested here and i am on location at the prop store
facilities where they have their upcoming
entertainment memorabilia annual auction this is the one that we get to preview
every year at san diego comic con what's happening
again virtually this year i've invited to come down and get a
close look at some of these costumes and props the rare chance to see these
up close before they go into collector's hands
you can be chatting with brandon about the history and the provenance of these
props let's be very exciting let's go take a
look
so i'm thrilled now to be joined by brandon of course
prop store you guys have brought out a selection a few of the almost a thousand
items you guys have ready for this upcoming auction and it looks like on
this table here are all from tippett studio from phil
tippett uh kind of this this nice chapter in his
stop-motion and creature design um these are new
items new pieces they are yeah no that's that's right we
did an auction with phil a couple of years ago where he sold some things
at that time there was still a batch of material that he wanted to hold on to
some of those pieces that he held on to a few years ago have now come out for
this auction the uh the 2020 entertainment
memorabilia live auction so these pieces are actually some that were
very special to fill um do you want to just talk through them
yeah absolutely i mean anyone who's had the privilege of visiting tippett studio
may recognize some of these kind of like hallowed pieces again
a perfect slice in the era like some of these very clearly
just the armatures of iconic creatures this from star wars yes yeah i mean phil
obviously is very much known for being an animator and a stop-motion animator
and so like you say i mean you've been to tippet studios he had these these
pieces on display there for many years i'm sure to inspire young animators and
other visual effects artists and and the one that you're looking at
up there that is actually an armature that
phil created himself as a personal project
in i guess the earlier mid 70s george lucas then saw it when they were doing
star wars and said boy wouldn't this be great for
the chess sequence and and that's sort of the the genesis
of what those characters were and then phil and john berg went designed a
number of other characters to match the style
of that one and i think you said you knew the name to that yeah yeah yeah it
has an official star wars the jericho name
alien name right right but i think internally they call this mr big mr big
that one we can remember and this one i know they brought back
got it back from lucas to use as a reference to recreate the armature
for force awakens so it has this whole history his whole life
beyond the first film right and i know part of the reason phil had this
armature is that after they finished star wars he and
john berg actually gifted to george personally some of the
puppets including this one which was phil's
personal character but of course before giving them to george they removed the
armature as animators typically do because they could use the armature
again on another project you know once the
puppet the skin and such became a display piece it really didn't need an
armature anymore so like when i look at that it reminds me
of something like the king kong armature that
burns um and that's you have exposed like proportions of the limbs right this
all with phil is a creature designer and
also the the way you know these are all machined
in together different armature techniques different joint techniques
uh that you see kind of inherited in other pieces
like from starship troopers that he also worked on yes yeah so so this piece here
phil told me is a model that he would use to
both test and train animators on starship troopers so
you know the the animation on that film was not going to be stop motion it was
going to be digital but he said by reviewing an animator's
work with a stop-motion armature like this
you could really learn about whether they understood movement and how these
bugs should move and things like that so you know this is a fully practical
stop-motion model it has all the ball and socket joints everything's very
precise very tightly machined and fit together and you know
an animator can come in and just just play with this and really bring it to
life obviously i'm not an animator so i'm not
doing a good job of it right now but if it was someone who knew what they
were doing you know you can manipulate the legs and you can
you can make the character uh really breathe and it has
a very recognizable silhouette of those bugs from star trek troopers
so often the the armatures created the silhouettes much like in kane here
yeah you know this was the puppet one of the puppets used in some of the
animation sequences but it's blending all the aesthetics of
the character with the armature underneath that's
right i mean that i think is what's so clever about kane is
you know the the traditional stop-motion puppet is a very fancy armature
underneath a foam rubber skin with this one they said hey why don't we
sort of play to the fact that we have this really intricate mechanical
armature and build it into the design of the character so
a lot of what you're seeing like on the arms and legs and such the joints
they're dressed they have little bits of models on them but they're also just the
raw machined aluminum parts the armature itself and so it's a
real hybrid of as you're saying aesthetic
and practicality the armature that did what they needed to do
and it's a testament to also the materials used that they could actually
disassemble this if they wanted to do individual components and reassemble
and it's a prop that holds up over time because it is machine metal
that's right yeah and i think they did a few canes for the movie maybe they were
five or six i know he gets battle damaged at some point in the film
and so there are there are some versions
with different distressing on them but this is an incredibly intricate
thing i mean i don't know what the part count is but
i think it's in the hundreds you know a huge amount of pieces that go into
creating that yeah and scaled like they have the full size version this is
a skilled version so all the hardware has to match
not only the scale for this but also work as hinges
as joints yes no that's right and and i thought kane was a great follow-up to
the original at 209 from the first film yeah absolutely um and then of course
jurassic park yeah um the kind of the end of the
stop-motion era now people may know that there was some
stop-motion used in terms of the test footage
yes and you can see that on youtube but that is
what was used in the test of the the uh the
jeep attack scene the previews that's right and i think at one point when they
were developing this puppet in this armature
the thought process at that time was actually that it was going to be
a stop-motion or go-motion dinosaur in the final shot so this
phil told me is an incredibly intricate complex armature one of the best
armatures that had ever been designed and built i
think by tom santamon because they wanted the motion or the go
motion to be so good in jurassic park and then
part way through production they realized that they could pivot to
digital dinosaurs and that's really where this piece comes
in this is the dyno input device and this is something that phil has a
lot of reverence for because he says it represents such a moment in
time in the history of visual effects from the
transition to practical from practical work
to digital work and you know this is another real armature
it's all machined aluminum everything works and moves
and what this has is various digital encoders that are built into every
little joint that track the motions and send them out
to a computer and then they can take those motions and apply them to their
digital model of the dinosaur so a lot of how those dinosaurs actually
moved in jurassic park even though they were digital models
it started as physical movements with this device that could then be
transferred to the digital space that's incredible and like you said a
moment in time that's what these all represent
that slice of the 70s and 80s and 90s where
technology and design were coming together in a way
to really create some memorable characters
yeah it's a real walk through visual effects history and of course it also
happens to be some real fan favorite genre titles you know those two tend to
go hand in hand the landmark visual effects
films are also the ones that really resonate with the uh
the fans of genre film like you and i so oh my gosh
it all holds up so well and it's so great to see them all together one of
the last times they'll be together before they go into collector's hands uh
it's so amazing this is just a selection of
almost a thousand items you guys have yes yeah i mean there's a huge variety
in this time there's there's hundreds of titles represented you know all the big
fan favorites star wars indiana jones back to the future jurassic park
starship troopers i mean the stuff that people sort of know prop
store for and hopefully love prop store for that's what we brought out this time
we think we've got a great spread and we're looking forward to the auction and
that spread is what we'll be diving into over the next week leading up to the
auction and so stay tuned for more videos
from here at prof store thank you so much brandon yeah thanks for coming out
we'll see you folks next time
thanks for watching that video if you'd like to support us further you could do
it by purchasing a poster from us in the merch store
there's some brand new ones this one is my sketch of the nasa aces suit
i decided to replicate the classic orange
nasa shuttle pumpkin suit a few years ago for new york comic con
and in doing so i did tons and tons of sketches but this was kind of my
main library sketch it's the taxonomy of all the major
details each piece of this i then did further sketches and drawings of
but this was sort of my main map it's printed on beautiful heavy cardstock you
can use it to maybe make your own suit or
just frame it and put it on your wall you can buy one by following the links
below