One interesting point that came up in this weeks symposium discussions, is that some people may have expert skills that are no longer needed because their field of work is obsolete. Mediums are always developing and shifting into something better and that got me thinking what in my time will be obsolete? Where would we need to move our focus? I know the latter question is one I can’t get the answer to now, because no new technologies have made current skills obsolete, so I guess something’s are down the line. However I did think of what have other people done when their skills have become redundant. Do they just give up on everything? Or do they shift their focus on another area in their medium? The latter would be a very tough transition.

I started to think about the certain technologies that were popular ten or twenty years ago, but is hardly used nowadays, and one of method that came into mind was stop motion animation. For people who may not know stop motion is where animators build three-dimensional models of characters and physically manipulate them, to create the illusion of their movement. In Hollywood the most well known figure that provided stop motion for films would Phil Tippet. To give a brief overview of his career, in 1975 he worked on Star Wars to create a miniature moving chess set and as the films progressed he was brought in to create various puppets and stop motion creatures, and over the years he worked on many other motion pictures such as Robocop.

In the 1991 Tippet was hired to by Steven Spielberg, to work on Jurassic Park, his task was to use traditional stop motion to find away of brining the dinosaurs, that were featured in the film, to life. However they results of the technique were not bringing the depth and texture that would have been required to make the dinosaurs believable to a modern audience of that time, and the decision was made to use CGI to animate the animals. The stop-motion technique was abandoned for the project, but Tippets background in animal movement, motivated Spielberg to keep him on board to supervise the animation of the dinosaur shots. The technology developed by this film-helped open the floodgates for CG creatures in films, and stop motion ended up being obsolete or extinct I should say.

Tippet later on found him self, moving from stop motion to handling a fully CG facility. Now I don’t know the whole story of what the transition was like for him, one can only imagine what’s like when you find everything you know, trained for, and love is no longer needed, more importantly that makes you as a person not needed. The transition wouldn’t have been easy and Tippet would have taken time to develop a set of skills fit to work in digital effects, but his journey shows that its possible to gain a new set of skills in the medium of film. I suppose an individual just needs the passion to continue on and find something new in the field you love, without allowing yourself to completely fade away.