Film Conversation & “Starship Troopers” @ EMPAC [Berkshire on Stage]

On Thursday (July 20) at 7pm, Hollywood special-effects legend Phil Tippett (“Star Wars,” “Indiana Jones,” “RoboCop”) will join artist Lucy Raven at EMPAC at RPI in Troy for an evening of conversation and film screenings, including the sci-fi classic “Starship Troopers,” for which Tippett designed the early digital monster effects.

Before the event, at 6pm, Raven will celebrate the release of her new EMPAC-produced book, “Low Relief,” charting the strange history of 3D cinema and her experiments with the form.

The founder of Tippett Studios, Phil Tippett has worked over 30 years on visual effects for the film industry. In 1996, he accompanied director Paul Verhoeven to the Badlands of Wyoming to scout locations for the film “Starship Troopers,” which imagines warfare in the 23rd century between planet-colonizing humans and alien bugs called Arachnids. Under a staircase in his Berkley studio, Tippett recently rediscovered 12 hours of VHS tapes documenting the visualization strategy he undertook in transforming the barren landscape into a battlefield covered in digital monsters.

Click to read the rest at Berkshire on Stage.