The Man Who Made the AT-AT Walk Just Closed His Studio

5 hours ago by Kael Voss 5 min read

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Phil Tippett — the stop-motion legend who brought the AT-AT walkers to life in The Empire Strikes Back and animated the Holochess game aboard the Millennium Falcon — just closed the Berkeley studio that bore his name for 35 years. A three-day liquidation auction wrapped August 30, selling off decades of props and models to the highest bidder.

Somewhere in a private collector's garage right now sits a stop-motion AT-AT Imperial Walker model — the actual armature used to animate the Battle of Hoth — because Phil Tippett Studio just held a liquidation sale, and nobody stopped it from going to auction.

If that sentence doesn't land for you, here's the context: Phil Tippett isn't a name most casual fans know. He should be. Before he was directing dinosaurs for Steven Spielberg, before Starship Troopers, before RoboCop, Tippett was the guy Industrial Light & Magic put in charge of making a Star Destroyer full of alien creatures and a walking Imperial death machine feel like they belonged in the same universe as Luke Skywalker.

The Man Behind the Walkers

Go back to A New Hope and there's a scene most people remember for the wrong reasons — Chewbacca losing a board game to R2-D2 aboard the Falcon. That's Dejarik, the Holochess sequence, and every flickering hologram monster in it was Tippett's stop-motion animation, brought to life frame by agonizing frame. It's a two-minute scene that exists purely to make the galaxy feel lived-in, and it's one of the earliest pieces of evidence that Star Wars would sweat details nobody was strictly required to sweat.

Then came The Empire Strikes Back, and Tippett — now head of ILM's newly formed "Go Motion" animation unit — took on the AT-AT walkers. Watch the Battle of Hoth today, forty-six years and a hundred CGI blockbusters later, and those four-legged Imperial Walkers still read as weight. That's not an accident. Tippett's team built armatures, shot them frame-by-frame with deliberate motion blur, and gave machines that shouldn't logically be able to walk a sense of genuine mass. It remains one of the most imitated effects sequences in blockbuster history, and it's the reason the AT-AT is still, to this day, one of the most instantly recognizable silhouettes in the entire franchise.

Thirty-Five Years, One Auction

Tippett Studio itself — the Berkeley operation, not the ILM years — opened in the early 1990s and built a four-decade reputation on dinosaurs (Jurassic Park, which won Tippett his second Oscar after Return of the Jedi), bugs (Starship Troopers), and a body of practical-meets-digital effects work that quietly shaped how a generation of VFX artists think about physicality on screen.

The end, when it came, wasn't dramatic — it was the slow kind. The studio sold a majority stake to the Indian VFX company PhantomFX in 2024, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection that same May, and this August finally closed its Berkeley doors for good after a three-day liquidation sale that wrapped August 30. Props, memorabilia, and yes, the AT-AT and Holochess materials, went up for grabs to whoever showed up with a checkbook. The Toronto office survives and keeps working — this isn't a studio erased from existence — but the building where the AT-AT walked for the first time is done.

Why This Matters Beyond Nostalgia

It's tempting to file this under "sad but irrelevant" — Tippett Studio hadn't done Star Wars work in decades, and the franchise moved on to ILM's StageCraft volumes and digital creature work a long time ago. But that's exactly why it's worth pausing on. The Mandalorian built its entire visual identity on the idea that practical texture — real puppets for Grogu, real sets lit by LED walls instead of green screen — makes a galaxy far, far away feel tactile in a way pure CGI struggles to match. That philosophy has a direct lineage back to people like Tippett, who spent the late '70s and early '80s proving frame-by-frame that an audience can feel the weight of something that was never really there.

Every time Filoni's Lucasfilm leans on animatronics over pure digital creation — and they still do, more than you'd think — that's Tippett's fingerprints showing up two generations later. The AT-AT armature going home with a private collector doesn't erase that influence. If anything, it's a reminder that the "how'd they do that" era of Star Wars wasn't magic. It was a room full of people building things by hand and shooting them one frame at a time, and a lot of those people are now in their seventies, closing up shop.

The Takeaway

Phil Tippett isn't gone — he's retired, not dead, and by all accounts still creatively active. Tippett Studio's Toronto arm still exists. Nothing here is a tragedy on the scale of losing an artist. But the Berkeley studio closing, and pieces of Empire Strikes Back history scattering into private collections instead of a museum somewhere, is the kind of quiet ending that deserves more than a shrug. The AT-AT walking across Hoth is still one of the best special effects sequences Star Wars has ever produced — practical, digital, or otherwise. The man who animated it just closed the shop where it happened. May the Force be with him, wherever that armature ends up next.