studio

Phil Tippett, the visual effects artist who crafted aliens in “Star Wars” and dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park,” is shutting down his Berkeley-based studios after more than 40 years of business.

The closing was marked by a weekend liquidation sale, where fans purchased memorabilia from movies like “Star Wars,” “Jurassic Park,” “RoboCop” and “Starship Troopers.” The sale included models of Imperial Walkers from “The Empire Strikes Back,” “Starship Troopers” miniatures, signed posters and equipment like computers and 3D printers.

“We have recently decided to evolve our physical footprint and production approach, and to exit our longtime Berkeley facility,” said the company in a statement on social media. “As we make this transition, Tippett Studio continues its visual effects and animation work across film, television and entertainment.”

The closure follows Tippett‘s sale of a majority stake in the company to PhantomFX, an India-based VFX studio, in 2024 and the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing that followed. PhantomFX has completed the acquisition of Tippett Studio and will operate the studios under the same name.

Tippett and his wife, Jules Roman, founded the studio in 1984, by which point he’d already made his name in the world of visual effects through his work on the original “Star Wars” trilogy. He was instrumental in doing the stop-motion miniature chess scene in “Star Wars: A New Hope,” bringing the Imperial Walkers to life and creating aliens like Jabba the Hutt and tauntauns.

Under his own studio, he became best known for the dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park,” using computer generation to animate the prehistoric creatures. He also worked on effects for “The Matrix” films, “Hellboy” and the “Twilight” franchise.

Tippett had occupied the 6,200-square-foot Berkeley facility for 35 years, but as technology evolves, the studio no longer needs the large space.

“Stop-motion remains an important part of our creative capabilities, but maintaining a large permanent physical footprint is no longer necessary for our current requirements,” wrote Tippett Studios. “When projects require dedicated stages, fabrication, motion-control photography or other specialised physical infrastructure, we will work with appropriate external facilities to meet the needs of each production.”

The company‘s Toronto studio will keep running and is “currently in active production on a large feature film,” per the same statement.

The downsizing comes amid a particularly challenging stretch for film and TV productions in California. Following Covid-19, labor strikes and the flight of major Hollywood productions to other states and countries, many specialty businesses such as prop houses and VFX studios are struggling to stay afloat.

Despite the sale, Tippett told CBS News he isn’t giving up or planning to retire. He does not have plans to retire. “I will die with my sword in my hand,” he said. “We had almost a 40-year run. It was a good run.”

Hollywood A-listers are more comfortable than ever with cloning their voice and likeness to create a new stream of income, despite the threat of viewer backlash to artificial intelligence.

Sunny Hostin of the popular daily talk show “The View” has licensed her image and likeness to AI production studio Fountain 0, which will make film adaptations of her novels.

“To be able to bring my novels to life in movie and TV form, and actually have my image inserted in the productions, so that audiences can relate to me through my stories beyond my role as an author, is incredibly exciting to me,” Hostin said in a statement.

“AI can give me a way to both more fully develop, and more fully immerse myself in, IP I have developed,” she said.

The Overton window for acceptable AI use in Hollywood continues to widen as Hollywood actors, television hosts, and influencers embrace cloning with protections and compensation. As high-quality synthetic re-creations become cheap and accessible, cloning has become a more desirable option for studios struggling with runaway production costs.

Audiences will be subject to more AI content on the big screen that’s indistinguishable from real human performances.

Fountain 0 is the producer behind “Dreams of Violets,” a fully AI-generated film inspired by anti-government protests in Tehran. The 75-minute drama was made with a budget of $2,000 without a cast or a crew, and was the first fully AI-generated film accepted at the Tribeca Film Festival.

“We are incredibly gratified that Sunny is willing to be the talent pioneer willing to step out and take advantage of this new form of creative expression,” said Ash Koosha, co-founder and CEO of Fountain 0, in a release.

The production company will be releasing its second fully AI-generated film, “Odysseus: The Fall,” later this year. The film uses the likeness of many people, including the film’s creator Koosha, who stars as Odysseus.

Fountain 0’s executive chariman told CNBC that the film is designed to ride the buzz around Christopher Nolan’s ‘’The Odyssey” and give people the opportunity to compare the height of human filmmaking with AI filmmaking.

Proponents of AI argue that it allows writers and creators to take on blockbuster-scale films without financial constraints. Many creators oppose AI because it could replace humans and was built using the unauthorized scraping of creative works used to train generative AI video and image models.

Online reactions to news of Hostin’s cloning were fierce.

“Basically, no film studio wants to give her the budget to turn her books into a movie with real actors, so she’s resorting to AI studios,” wrote one person on Reddit.

Hollywood has fought hard for protections from AI in the prolonged writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023. SAG-AFTRA, the union representing about 160,000 actors and other performers, has been demanding informed consent, fair compensation, more control and transparency over the use of digital replicas.

The latest agreement, signed in June, introduced limits on studios’ use of digital replicas. The contract requires studios to notify actors before using their voices to create a replica. After a project is complete, actors must sign off and be paid the equivalent of an in-person performance if their replica is used.

Additionally, studios need to pay residuals to digital replicas used in reruns, and replicas cannot be used during a strike.

Hiring fully AI-generated characters such as Tilly Norwood, created without hiring a human performer, is not impossible but comes with a very high threshold for use under the 2026 union contract. Producers must notify the union in advance and prove the AI character brings “significant additional value” to the role.

Still, a fissure remains between those actors who stay morally opposed to cloning, and those who embrace this new reality.

ElevenLabs’ voice marketplace features clones of dozens of personalities — including actress Judy Garland, physicist Richard Feynman and popular characters such as Mr. Potato Head for creators to legally license and get compensated for their use.

This has created a contentious ecosystem in which A-listers are gaining millions from cloning with safeguards and building a new stream of passive income from their intellectual property, while early-career actors complain that their likenesses are being misappropriated and opportunities are being driven away. A massive lobbying effort is underway to institute a uniform standard for protecting an individual’s voice and likeness as property rights.

Production services vendor Quixote stunned Hollywood in April when it said it was winding down most of its Los Angeles soundstage business, delivering another blow to an industry already buffeted by steep losses in film and TV production.

Now, one of those facilities is attempting to stage a comeback.

Film and TV producer Manny Halley said he has taken over a 125,000-square-foot former Quixote North Valley complex on Montague Street in Pacoima under a 25-year lease with an option to buy, and plans to reopen it this fall under the name Imani Studio. The land is owned by Rexford Industrial Realty, which is not a party to the production business.

Halley’s credits include the “True to the Game” film trilogy that featured Vivica A. Fox, and the BET reality TV series “Keyshia Cole: The Way It Is,” which ran on BET from 2006 to 2008.

In an interview, Halley declined to disclose the price he paid, but said the lease is worth more than $25 million and that the cost to build the facility three years ago was about $19 million. The deal was financed with capital from his Imani Media Group.

“Right now is a unique time for independent producers because we don’t have to sit back and wait for a studio,” he said. “And in order for us to build a library and keep going, we have to keep costs down. So having your own stage is going to keep costs down.”

Producer Manny Halley has taken over ownership of one of the former Quixote North Valley studio facilities in Pacoima.

(Dae Howerton and Dallas J. Logan)

Halley said he was also motivated by the ongoing production crisis in L.A. and the continued loss of industry jobs. His company has shot 18 productions in California, 14 of which received a state production incentive.

“Somebody’s got to believe in Hollywood,” Halley said. “It’s a sad industry right now, and I want to change it.”

He is making a long bet on a market a much larger company has struggled with. Former owner Hudson Pacific announced it was shutting down most of its L.A. soundstages as well as operations in Atlanta as part of a cost-reduction move.

The Los Angeles-based real estate company bought Quixote in 2022 for $360 million, saying at the time that the acquisition would address the growing demand for soundstage space. Quixote was originally founded in 1995.

Though L.A. area soundstages had average occupancy rates of about 90% from 2016 to 2022, their business plunged in 2023 amid the work stoppages of the writers’ and actors’ strikes, according to data from the nonprofit FilmLA, which tracks on-location shoot days in the Greater L.A. area. In 2024, the average occupancy rate was 63%.

“Keeping production infrastructure active and investing in California’s capacity to support film and television is essential to our long-term competitiveness,” California Film Commission Executive Director Colleen Bell said in a statement. “Facilities like this help keep productions here, sustain good-paying jobs, and support the thousands of businesses and workers that make up our entertainment economy.”

Halley said he plans to invest $2 million to $6 million into the facility, including additional staff and LED volume walls. He retained three employees to help run operations and hopes to hire others who previously worked there.

He said he plans to use the facility, which has four soundstages, to shoot his own shows and movies, but also intends to rent out space to other productions, including student projects.

“I just want to give everybody their opportunity to shine,” he said. “I want to give them their own playing field to create and make their visions come to life with affordable stages.”

But even if outside productions don’t rent the space, he said the facility could sustain itself on his company’s projects. Imani Media Group has a distribution arm that has worked with Amazon, Tubi and the major theater chains.

By late September, Halley said he intends to start shooting a “True to the Game” TV series at the Pacoima facility, as well as the BET comedy “Lot Patrol,” which the network recently picked up for an additional five episodes.

“Supporting Black ownership and entrepreneurship across the entertainment industry remains deeply important to BET,” Brian Rikuda, BET’s executive vice president of enterprise growth strategy, business operations, and programming strategy, said in a statement. “As Manny Halley expands Imani Studios into a 125,000-square-foot production home, we’re proud to continue our partnership rooted in a shared vision to create culturally impactful entertainment and expand opportunity in our industry.”

The Motion Picture Assn. has struck its first agreement with an artificial intelligence company, saying Monday that ByteDance has strengthened copyright guardrails into its AI video and image tools that drew legal threats from every major Hollywood studio in February.

ByteDance, a Chinese company, is the former majority owner of TikTok’s U.S. operations.

The MPA, the trade association that lobbies for major studios such as Disney, Netflix and Sony Pictures Entertainment, said it has had constructive engagement with ByteDance over the last several months to rein in Seedance, a text-to-video generation tool, and Seedream, which produces images using text commands.

“Today’s agreement illustrates our belief that copyright is a cornerstone of the film and television industry – and reinforces our commitment to protect creative content,” said MPA Chairman and Chief Executive Charles Rivkin.

MPA declined to share the specific guardrails in the agreement.

The agreement comes as some studios have expressed concerns about AI models training on their copyrighted material without permission or compensation. In February, MPA issued a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, alleging Seedance 2.0 was trained on copyrighted material and generating unauthorized videos featuring characters such as “SpongeBob SquarePants” and visuals replicating a scene from sci-fi series “Stranger Things” without studios’ permission. It was the first time the MPA had filed a cease-and-desist letter to a major AI firm.

“ByteDance is engaged in pervasive and widespread infringement of our members’ valuable intellectual property that it must stop immediately,” MPA’s global general counsel Karyn Temple wrote in a Feb. 20 letter to ByteDance’s global general counsel John Rogovin.

ByteDance in response said it was taking steps to strengthen its safeguards to prevent unauthorized use of IP or likeness.

Since then, ByteDance has released Seedream 5.0 Pro and Seedance 2.5, which reflect “ByteDance’s continued advances in IP protections,” the tech company and MPA said in a news release.

“ByteDance respects the intellectual property rights that underpin creative industries around the world, and we believe responsible innovation in AI goes hand in hand with meaningful protections for rightsholders,” ByteDance’s Rogovin said in the statement.

Seedance has emerged as a leader in AI tools among some indie filmmakers, who say it is more cost-effective than other options. AI tech companies are eager to find ways to partner with studios to make their tools better, but are also facing competition from rivals to gain more customers as quickly as possible. That has caused some companies to quickly launch their AI products without first putting in more mechanisms to prevent images from appearing without copyright holders’ permission.