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On Expedition Tippett has assumed Kubrick's challenge of "taking audiences to places they've never been before." Although he won't divulge any details, he's got a fix on his goals. He refuses to make his animated figures merely mimic humans. His background is in fine art, not computers; he thinks that any attempt "to get a photographically representational human being that looks and acts like a real live person" would end up "boring" or "grotesque." He wants his computer-graphics dramatis personae to be stylized and of a piece, and to contain potent emotion. Tippett feels that special-effects films risk crippling live actors, who can't interact with their environment when they're emoting in front of a blue screen. But a computer actor in a computer set, in Tippett's view, "doesn't miss anything; he's just reacting to a different kind of vision." Tippett's dream CG feature would have the texture of a painting: not an "action painting," he quips, "but an action-picture painting."
The attempt is full of paradoxes, but paradox is Tippett's brain's default mode. Despite a project that sums up the state of intelligence (artificial and otherwise) in the world of movie arts and crafts, he contends that he's "no visionary." While saying he's "technologically indifferent," Tippett is driving his studio to a serrated cutting edge. He still adores Harryhausen's home-grown surrealism, and believes that it's crucial for filmmakers to connect with what thrilled them as children. But, with computers, he pushes his own monsters and robots past the jitteriness and funkiness that are part of the old artifacts' charm.
Tippett is wide open to radical developments, including nano-technology (building products, even living things, from the atom up): "In my wildest dreams, if it didn't have these worse-than-nuclear implications, it'd be great. I was reading a book about how, in the nano-future, making things would be more like cooking. That's what I would like -- to pour things in bowls and mix them up and put them in the oven and turn on the temperature and wait." And when he got the goop out of the oven, would he still put his hand in it? "Maybe you could talk to it; that would be fine too."
Tippett abhors any novelty, digital or otherwise, for its own sake. When he's viscerally engaged, he feels he taps into his (and perhaps the collective) unconscious -- images and feelings that exist in millennial man's psyche but could also be seen at the dawn of art: "You want something possibly magical or deeply mythological to emerge, and the skills and level of imagination you're using go back to the Lascaux Caves.
