PHIL TIPPETT / VISUAL EFFECTS ARTIST

Do bugs make your skin crawl? It might crawl right off your bones with director Paul Verhoeven’s “Starship Troopers�-- thanks to Phil Tippett’s Berkeley-based visual effects studio. The film’s giant battlin’ bugs are the latest from Tippett, 46, whose resume includes the “Star Wars� trilogy, “RoboCop� and the raptors of “Jurassic Park.� Next up: horror in “Virus� --and the huggable “My Favorite Martian.�

JOB SECURITY: “Of the 20 biggest-grossing movies of all time, 18 are visual effects pictures, so what do you think the studios are looking at in deciding what kind of films to do?�

FIRST EFFECTS: “It was in my parents’ garage, with clay and strings and fire and whatever. I always set things on fire and then splashed fake blood on the walls. I got in really big trouble consistently.�

MUST-SEE: “The new ‘Star Wars’ thing--that’s certainly going to be the benchmark, and it will be fun to see what George [Lucas] had in mind for the prequels.�

AND STILL THE KING: “The creature classic has to be the 1933 ‘King Kong.’ In terms of sheer gall, that has still been unsurpassed. And all those great Ray Harryhausen films, ‘Sinbad’ and all that. They were done on a shoestring budget, but were primers on how to put together visual effects shots.�

BAD IDEAS: “Studios are now saying they’re going to start their own visual effects departments. If [the studio heads] had been around before when the old effects departments were disbanded because of high overhead and in favor of more outside competition, they wouldn’t be doing that.�

BIGGER OR BETTER?: “I read an article with John Sayles and Martin Scorsese talking, and Sayles characterized the hunger of the audience as a drug thing, the kicks have to be more crazed each year and we have to top ourselves each time out and it reaches the point of diminishing returns.�

BOX-OFFICE GROSS: “There was no way Paul Verhoeven was going to make a war movie with giant insects that wasn’t horrifying in some way. And I’m sure the new ‘Alien’ will be pretty extreme. I’m a sucker for all that stuff, the cheesy gags that make you jump. I get grossed out pretty easily by horrible violence.�

BEHIND THE CURTAIN: “The last thing I want is people to say, ‘Great special effects, but the movie stank.’ If the movie is great and they don’t even talk about the special effects, then we’ve won.�