Douglas Trumbull, the visible results mastermind behind Blade Runner, Close Encounter of the Third Kind, 2001: A Space Odyssey and quite a few others, died on Monday at age 79. His daughter Amy Trumbull introduced the information on Facebook, writing that her father’s dying adopted a “two-year battle” with most cancers, a mind tumor and stroke.
Trumbull was born on April 8, 1942 in Los Angeles, the son of a mechanical engineer and artist. His father labored on the particular results for movies together with The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars: A New Hope. The youthful Trumbull labored as an illustrator and airbrush artist in Hollywood for a few years. His profession actually took off after he cold-called Stanley Kubrick, a dialog which led to a job engaged on 2001: A Space Odyssey.
One of his most vital contributions to 2001 was creating the movie’s Star Gate, a ground-breaking scene the place astronaut Dave Bowman hurtles via an illuminated tunnel transcending area and time. In order to fulfill Kubrick’s excessive aesthetic requirements for the shot, Trumbull primarily designed a method to flip the movie digicam inside-out. Trumbull’s advert hoc method “was completely breaking the concept of what a camera is supposed to do,” he mentioned throughout a lecture at TIFF.
Trumbull earned visible results Oscar nominations for his work on Close Encounters, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Blade Runner. He additionally obtained the President’s Award from the American Society of Cinematographers in 1996.
Later in his profession, Trumbull voiced distaste over the impression of computer systems on visible results, decrying the cheapening and flattening impression of the brand new period of CGI. “Today, the motion picture visual effects industry has almost entirely given way to computer graphics. We’re able to do things that were absolutely inconceivable in the old days like water effects, fire, explosions, smoke. But, almost everything in the visual effects industry today is created on computers. There’s a certain commoditization that has resulted that I’m not comfortable with myself. I like miniatures and physical effects and what I call organic effects,” mentioned Trumbull in a 2018 interview for The Hollywood Reporter.
He spent the final years of his life engaged on a brand new super-immersive movie format he dubbed MAGI, which he believed would enhance the expertise of watching a movie in theaters. But Trumbull struggled to attract the curiosity of immediately’s movie business. “What interests me is being able to create profound personal experiences for audiences,” Trumbull advised MIT Technology Review in 2016. “Whatever it is, I want you to feel like what’s happening on the screen is actually happening in real-time, to you, in this theater.”