The Los Angeles Times reported on 31 August that Tippett Studio is exiting its long-used Berkeley facility, with stages, models, equipment and other assets involved in liquidation. The same report quotes the company saying that visual-effects and animation work continues, the Toronto team remains active and stop motion has not disappeared from the service mix. On 2 September, the official site still listed Berkeley and Toronto offices and displayed 2026 work. The defensible finding is that the base is undergoing a major change while the company continues—not that the studio has ceased operating.
One address contains three different kinds of asset
A VFX company leaving an office can often move compute, licenses and files into a new network. Tippett's Berkeley base carried another layer: physical models, motion-control systems, stages, tools and artisans familiar with all of them. Equipment can be inventoried, insured and transported; tacit coordination lives in working rhythm. Animation and short-drama clients therefore need to ask more than whether a team still exists. They need to know which shots require a stage, which equipment remains owned, which facilities will be hired externally, and whether the same physical setup can be reconstructed for revisions.
A workshop's value lies in both its inventory and the people who know how to make it work together again.
The procurement mistake is to treat brand history as current capacity. Tippett's credits establish deep creature, stop-motion and hybrid-craft experience, but they do not replace a current resource sheet. A producer should request named leads, execution locations, equipment ownership, backup for critical roles, asset-transport plans, data-security boundaries and milestone acceptance. If some shots move to outside stages, responsibility, insurance and revision windows belong in the contract. The purpose is not to dismiss craft; it is to align a historic reputation with present delivery conditions.
A network of outside facilities could also create flexibility, letting the company call stages and specialist capacity per project rather than carrying every fixed space. Whether the model works depends on delivery, retention of core artisans, access to physical assets and client tolerance for a more distributed chain of responsibility. The next evidence is not a single assurance of continuing business but changes in credits, hiring, suppliers and production locations across upcoming work.