Vodopivec first began working with film and photography in high school and during World War II he worked at Hrvatski slikopis, the state-sponsored film company which produced propaganda shorts for the short-lived fascist regime of the Independent State of Croatia.
[1] After the war he worked on newsreels, before joining Jadran Film production company, for whom he shot his first short feature in 1947 and his first feature film in 1952 (U oluji, directed by Vatroslav Mimica).
[2] Vodopivec went on to work with a number of renowned Croatian directors in the following decades, including Fadil Hadžić and Antun Vrdoljak, and he won his second Golden Arena in 1969, for Hadžić's An Event and Vrdoljak's When You Hear the Bells.
[3] Along with Oktavijan Miletić, he is considered the first cinematographer in Croatian cinema whose work highlighted the importance of cinematography in the overall aesthetic quality of film.
[1] His last feature film was Fliers of the Open Skies (Letači velikog neba, 1977) and he retired from filmmaking in the early 1980s.