Douglas Trumbull, the pioneering special effects genius who helped create the worlds of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner and Star Trek: The Motion Picture has died, according to a Facebook post from his daughter, Amy Trumbull. He was 79.
Trumbull developed the slit-scan photography process that was used in the “Star Gate” sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi classic. “I just happened to be in the right place at the right time,” he would go on to say.
“We were struggling with the Star Gate. Nobody knew what a Star Gate was, but I came up with some ideas that I didn’t even know at the time were based on some things I was learning as a young guy about street photography and weird photographic techniques.”
Based on his heavily-lauded work for Kubrick, Trumbull was George Lucas’ first choice to lead Industrial Light & Magic, but he already was committed to Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters.
He recommended his assistant John Dykstra, who went on to be an integral part of the team that would win the VFX Oscar for the revolutionary Star Wars.
Trumbull was much more than just an VFX genius, having also directed Bruce Dern in Silent Running and Christopher Walken in Brainstorm.
Douglas Trumbull (1942 — 2022) pic.twitter.com/Du4t5gisjx
— MUBI (@mubi) February 9, 2022
Trumbull also created Universal Studios’ “Back to the Future: The Ride” simulator and helped bring Imax into the entertainment marketplace.
In addition to doing effects work on the classic sci-fi films for which he’s known, Trumbull also invented and patenting dozens of film tools and techniques, from motion-control photography to miniature compositing.
Trumbull was Oscar nominated for Close Encounters, Star Trek and Blade Runner. He was also given two honorary awards by the Academy.
The first was a shared Scientific and Engineering Oscar for his work on the CP-65 Showscan Camera System. That came in 1993. The second was the Gordon E. Sawyer Award in 2012 which recognises “an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry.”
Amy Trumbull said her father “died last night after a major two year battle with cancer, a brain tumour and a stroke.”
