Renowned special effect artist, Phil Tippett is, after 30 years of production, finally releasing his stop-motion feature film MAD GOD and it looks to be an absolute visual feast for the eyes. The trailer reveals some truly terrifying and surreal scenes, however, the beauty of the art of stop-motion and visual effects really shine through.
Phil Tippett describes the film as an ” idea of a dream within a dream” and while the film does have a narrative structure, Phil wanted to break with the traditional Hollywood plot structure and create a piece that has more of the structure of dreams.
Over the years, what I was looking for was the structure of the dreams. What I learned from that was that all of them have a beginning, middle and an end. The beginning part of the dream will be resolved by the end. It doesn’t mean everything will be answered, but it goes all the way around. That was my guide for thinking forward for the film.”
The plot follows a lone character navigating a bizarre world filled with nightmarish creatures and madmen, a dystopian world of monsters, mad scientists, and war pigs.
Phil Tippett began the work on the film after completing ROBOCOP 2, but had to put it on hold to create the dinosaurs for JURASSIC PARK. After nearly 20 years, the project was revived through a Kickstarter campaign that had more than 2500 backers.
The crew was made up of volunteers and industry veterans who reminiscenced the “good ol’days when visual effects were made by people on sets photographing puppets one frame at a time”.
MAD GOD will premiere at Locarno Film Festival in August, 2021
Author: Allan Torp Jensen
Allan has worked on visual effects for feature films and television for 20 years. He has experience of the full VFX pipeline but has focused on compositing for the past 15 years and has been a Lead Compositor and Compositing Supervisor on various shows. He has worked with the talented people at Cinesite, Bluebolt VFX, Automatik VFX in London, and Weta Digital in New Zealand. For the past five years, he has worked remotely at his own Torper Studio on various high-end TV and feature film projects.